What is it about 70s culture that makes it the default style for people the snob in me thinks of as the culturally backward? Picture any low rent trailer park or biker picnic or drunk homeless person; picture, on the other hand, any non-urban, “red state” type beer drinkin wife beatin ball scratchin stereotypical loser: what music do they listen to? Frampton, REO, 38 Special–almost nothing post-1979.
Where are you more likely to come across a phoenix-hooded TransAm from the 70s? One of these guys’ yards, right? The way they dress–jeans, black concert Tshirt under a gray hoody, with maybe a denim Harley jacket over it–that’s a 70s look, right?
Basically what I’m asking, for that segment of the population that is aggressively anti-fashion–why did they choose the 70s as the time in which to freeze fashion forever?
Or am I just exposing my own specific prejudices . . . ?
The 70s and 80s were a tough time for America. The Vietnam War had just ended badly. You had Middle East terrorism, oil embargos, the hostage crisis in Iran, economic troubles, the Cold War with the Soviets, disco. So there was a desire to try and rekindle the American spirit of kicking ass.
Really it was the early 80s and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 that ushered in a resurgance of the macho American badass. Chuck Norris didn’t even start to hit it big until he starred in The Octagon in 1980.
The cool 1940’s guy was a film-noir private detective who lived more on his gambling winnings than his clients honoring their debts to him.
The cool 1950’s guy could pick up enough money to live on by sitting in on jam sessions or by drag racing, since his main priority was to stay free of square culture.
The cool 1960’s guy could live out of his backpack as he hitchked through Central Asia or made the rounds of communes and antiwar demonstrations.
The cool guy of the 1970’s…sold drugs. (I’ve relied on pop-culture sterotypes for the above three decades, and you can dismiss them as you wish, but I personally don’t remember anyone in the 1970’s who wasn’t “cool” by virtue of his ability to supply his friends and sex partners with drugs.)
Anyway, back to the pop-culture sterotypes: The 1980’s cool guy traded stocks and real estate, had a lot of clothes and a very nice car if not very nice cars plural, if not jet, if not jets plural, etc.
The 1990’s cool guy knew about information technology the same way his big brother knew how to pull the engine out of his Transam, and he bought his first house his first year out of college, with granite countertops and a fireplace in the master bedroom and a grill set-up big enough for a BBQ stand, etc.
After the 1970’s, the price of admission to cool was dramatically raised, so people opted for the older model. The tragedy of a contmeporary working-class cool guy isn’t that he cooks meth, it’s when he uses the profits for his own meth habit instead of using it to restore his classic muscle car.
Lets not discount the influx of thousands of legitimate badasses who just came back from fighting Charlie over in Vietnam. Slithy Tove, IT guys were never cool. In fact, cool wasn’t cool in the 90s. Not giving a shit Kurt Cobain style was cool.
Hmm. See, my theory was that 80s style was pretty gay–Flock of Seagulls, Michael Jackson–New Wave was pretty frikkin gay, right? And 90s style was pretty lame: emo, “alternative,” etc. The 70s was the last decade where mainstream style had any, well, balls. So guys whose self-image required balls kind of stalled there.
The person you’re describing seems a lot like this guy even though he’s from New Jersey–a non-red state.
Also, this is just a minor nitpick, but nobody like that would be caught dead listening to Peter Frampton. He was considered just barely more acceptable than Shaun Cassidy or Andy Gibb. Substitute instead Foghat, Aerosmith, early Foreigner, or David Lee Roth-era Van Halen.
Jeez, talk about dated. Sure, a proud blue collar type guy might listen to REO if he’s 40 and doesn’t mind his friends snickering at him. REO’s heyday was the early 80s, BTW, same with 38 Special.
Anyway, I thought there’d been a shift and the proles were all into rap metal and country now.
My stereotype of the 70s is polyester and disco, which aren’t very macho.
I’ve noticed this, too. The K-Mart next to the trailer park has junky old muscle cars in the parking lot and the owners who are inside buying bales of Pampers and quarts of motor oil do, indeed, look like they live in 1975.
I wish there was an answer to this mystery. Usually the blue-collars lag, fashionwise, about 10 years behind the current trends. Since the next-to-last factory here has closed, there are fewer blue collar workers. Maybe they’re so impoverished they can’t afford the ‘90s styles and are just wearing their fathers’ old wardrobes.
If you were “new wave” in the 80s you were probably “punk” in the 70s and “goth” in the 90s
If you were a macho mustache and KISS t shirt wearing rocker in the 70s you were probably a heavy metal rocker in the 80s and a grunge rocker in the 90s.
But yes, sometime around the 80s the macho jock went from hero to stock villain or foil to the nerdy but likeable protagonist. And by 1991, movies tended to not have macho characters at all. Just artsy intellectual types coming to terms with their role in society.
If you are Gen-X, pretty much yes. Although technically, there was pre-1991 alternative rock. They just called it “college rock”. So strictly speaking, Bono, Michael Stipes from REM, Sting and Elvis Costello were “hipsters” long before Cobain.
I wouldn’t call them “rednecks”. But, yeah, when I picture a “Nu-metal” fan, I picture a meathead with lots of peircings and tribal tatoos living on the fringes of the urban wasteland. Maybe more “white trash” than “redneck”. Just another example of how post 80s/early 90s, being big, tough and macho is considered “douchey” not “cool”.
During the 1970s Dodge even marketed a truck called the Macho Power Wagon. They featured bold graphics with lots of harvest-gold, tan, brown and other macho colors. There’s at least one of them that I see around town here; it’s well preserved and pretty badass looking.
On a tangent - I was just pondering today about my youth, and how there were several very popular and macho bands who happened to be gay such as THe Village People and Queen. Were they known as gay back then and people just didn’t care or was the general public just unaware? I had no clue but I was a kid, and it cracks me up today to think of how homophobic people were back then, but at the same time there were hoardes of people doing the YMCA dance at the roller rink, and playing “In The Navy” for new recruits…
Really? Your local hardcases wear Peter Frampton tee shirts? Are you sure you’re not mistaking students in ironic drag or this year’s local gay subculture fashion? There’s been a lot of gay adaptions of macho styles, like biker gear and (IIRC) a short-lived lumberjack fad back in the 70s. Not that Peter Frampton was ever considered macho to my knowledge.
Or maybe your local hardcases are just very twee. It could happen.
The gay subtext of the Village People was fairly obvious at the time – YMCA? – but much of the record buying public didn’t pay attention. The obsession over whether someone was gay or not is a much more recent phenomenon.
Queen, OTOH, really had nothing identifying them as gay from the music alone. The reaction I remember was that they were a pretty good rock group, though there were some complaints that they were just a cheap Led Zeppelin replacement (maybe in their early stuff, but I never saw that). Queen was more reviled in the UK; maybe there was some homophobia about Freddie Mercury over there. But in the US, you rarely saw the group, so it wasn’t an issue.
And again, people were not as obsessed about identifying gays as they are now.
All the cool people (Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison) died in the late 60’s.
The 70’s were warmed over leftovers.
And mullets.
Imagine if Jay-Z, Beyonce and Kanye West all died.
And urban audiences latched onto the Jonas Brothers.
And afros came back in style.
Welcome to the new version of the 70’s.
