That is correct. Due to Sam’s unfortunate…condition…I have empowered myself to speak for him in any and all capacities.
You got a problem wit dat?
As I said before, the period from roughly 1990 to today (plus five or ten years) will likely be remembered as an era of terrible, terrible clothing, and good design. I’m guessing today’s fashion will likely be remembered as the worst ever - especially the 90’s grunge clothing, or today’s shower room styles - and will be the iconic example of dated and terrible clothing for generations to come in much the same way we regard the 70’s as being the iconic example of bad furniture and interior design. We are absolutely at a nadir of dressing ourselves, but interior design is pretty fresh and functional right now. I don’t think it will be remembered as great stuff, it’s pretty dull, but it’s functional and nonoffensive.
An interesting thing will be how we regard automobile design; there’s such a vast array of car designs out there, some good, some incredibly bad. I’m not sure there’s ever been such a variety.
Music, on the other hand, will surprise people. The music that will be remembered will be, disproportionately, hip-hop; that’s the most innovative and groundbreaking music around. Not necessarily the gangsta crap like 50 Cent, but 30 years from now people will remember OutKast the way we now think of CCR or Zeppelin - as early masters of a new wave of music. The guys who came along in the late 80s and early 90s, like Public Enemy, will be the granddaddies of great music. Today’s pop princesses, boy bands, singer-songwriters and mass marketed mumblers will be largely forgotten, just the same way nobody today remembers, or if they do remember, cares about, Christopher Cross or Tommie James and the Shondells or the Human League.
I swear to you this is true. I said the same thing in 1955 and wondered why my mother laughed so hard.
Yeah. That condition is called ‘work’. It’s damned near terminal.
Anyway, you’re right about what I meant. In the 70’s, we were all sure that we were heading into ‘the future’, and it was going to be radically different. If you asked anyone on the street what the year 2000 would look like, you would have gotten lots of different answers - but most of them would have predicted radical changes. Who would have guessed that in the 2000’s we’d be building retro muscle cars and making Brady Bunch movies? That we wouldn’t even be capable of going back to the moon, and we would still drive basically the same cars, watch the same televisions, and wear the same jeans and T-shirts they wore in 1940?
The internet is about the only real paradigm-shifting technology to come along in all that time.
But that sense of an impending strange future also pretty much true of the the 50’s and 60’s, too. It was a time of massive change - pre-WWII, the U.S. was still mostly agrarian, cars were still fairly new, and biplanes ruled the skies. Lots of people were old enough to remember a time when there were no airplanes or even cars.
But the 50’s saw the construction of the interstate highway system, launching the first men into space, supersonic jets, the rise of television, the birth of the ‘teenager’ class. It was a tremendous amount of change in a very short period of time, and it culminated in 1969 with man landing on the moon. The 70’s were a reflection of that. That, plus the boomer kids who grew up in those years of incredible change were now moving out and setting up their own houses and making their mark in the world - a truly ugly mark, but a mark nonetheless.
Plus, there were a lot of drugs.
That’s right, because indie rock doesn’t exist. And the phenomenon that it created on college campuses in the past four years did not happen.
Judging by how often I hear music from those folks turn up on oldies stations, to include that new fangled satelite radio, there would appear to be a substantial number of people who remember them and still enjoy their music. I do believe that you are attempting to paint your personal tastes as indicative of national trends.
I love The Human League. Have them on the i-Pod. And don’t you dare desecrate my Hall & Oates!
I’m only Human, of flesh and blood I’m made…human, born to make mistakes…
When it comes to music, dude, always bet on black. I may be wrong, but I’ll bet you money I’m not.
Sorry, I misspoke.
I’m not saying I don’t like 80s pop and such. MOST people like that music - I have Men at Work and Level 42 in hard rotation myself - but the question is what music will be remembered as iconic of that time. If I asked you what music really defined the 80s, you’d cite acts like Michael Jackson, Prince, U2, etc - probably not Human League. If I asked you what sort of music is indicative of the best of the 60s you’d cite the Beatles, Beach Boys, the Stones, and a lot of Motown, like the Supremes. A lot of popular music of the time (like Tommy James) is not what you’d now consider the really groundbreaking, influential work of the time.
No, he’s right. It’s a real underground movement, unlike the mass-marketed “alternative” music of the late 80’s and 90’s. There are many bands that I absolutely love and there are legions of other fans that like them but they have little support from the big corporations as compared to their actual popularity.
Just because something appears to achieve more market saturation than something else does not necessarily mean it has a better grasp on public consciousness.
I can name 3 bands that would cause people to burst into hysterics at the very thought of me comparing them to “indie”, as they are very popular and famous. BUT, despite the fact I hear them all the time on college radio, car stereos, and sold-out concerts, I’ve never heard them on commercial radio.
Which is not to say that rap won’t be played more on “oldies” stations in 40 years, because chances are that they still look at industry numbers to play it safe.
I just want to thank Shagnasty for starting this thread; it’s been really fun to read. I was born in 1970, and naturally thought it was a great decade.
If any of you get your time machines running before I do, please swing by my house and pick me up.
Absolutely. Plop me down in the summer of 1974, and let me stay through 1978. I’d relive every moment in rapture.
–Beck
I’m with you, Sam.
Except, I never really hated Disco. And compared to the crap that came after it–Punk, New Wave, and Techno–Disco doesn’t seem bad at all.
I can’t see any reason to create something like the all-yellow room from the Interior Desecrations site, unless it’s the Silver Age and you’re Sinestro creating a death trap for Green Lantern.
Frankly, I’d have to start in 1969 – in Haight-Ashbury, of course.
I’ve been bemused by some of the hairstyles I’ve seen on teen-aged boys recently. They look an awful lot like the boys I mooned over back in the 70’s.
You know you’re getting old when you start seeing fashions and hairstyles coming back around. Jeezopete.
Archergal, what amuses me is the poeple who are wearing these things seem to think they are so daring and innovative. :dubious:
1970s Levi’s commercial. ‘Blues with Dacron polyester. Bush jeans, blue jeans, bells!’
Whenever the question is “Why did people buy those things back then?” the answer is usually “Because they didn’t have much choice.”
People bought those clothes, and the home decor, because that’s what was being sold in the stores. You want a new refrigerator? Great! It comes in the attractive Dark Avocado or the lovely Dark Bronze. Which do you want? (Harvest Gold came a little later, and basically replaced the Bronze.) There simply weren’t many choices in decorative fridge colors, or other appliance styles. Same with clothing. Unless you want to make your own clothes, you buy what’s being sold. So in 1972 it was nearly impossible to wear any pants that weren’t bellbottoms, unless you had a vintage pair of drainees you saved from the '50s. By '75, shirts all had wide collars, belts were wide, ties were like bibs, and people bought them and wore them because that’s what the stores were selling. It wasn’t a matter of “self-expression”; it was a matter of “this was all they had at the store.”
Look at home decor in the '50s. What the hell was up with all the boomerang shapes? Everything from coffee tables to serving dishes to clocks to ashtrays. (Note for the under-thirty crowd: “Ashtrays” were receptacles people used to put ashes and cigarette butts into, back before cigarettes became immoral and felonious. Every home had them, in virtually every room, and they were often worked into the home decor. But the '50s were primitive times, of course, before people realized they were supposed to focus all their attention on “causes” and become neurotically fixated on telling other people what was good and bad for them.) And by the late '50s anything that wasn’t shaped like a boomerang was shaped like a satellite (or at least a cartoon version of what a satellite was supposed to look like).
Someday (soon, one can but hope), people are going to look back and ask “What was up with those people who punched pins, nails, bolts, screws and all kinds of other ghastly metal objects through their eyebrows, lips, tongues, noses, cheeks and every other part of their bodies? Were they all insane? Why would people intentionally make themselves look like they’d taken a faceful of shrapnel at the Battle of Verdun? And why did they all wear their caps twisted crooked, so they looked like escapees from an Arkansas mental institution? And what the hell was up with the facial hair! Little tufts and puffs in weird places and shapes. Was there some reason they couldn’t quite finish shaving, or just grow an actual beard? Were they all diseased?”
The '70s were pretty grisly in terms of fashion, to a large degree, but certainly not uniquely so. Check out the Zoot Suit era, fer gossakes. Or some of the hats women were wearing in the 1940s. Or the hairstyles and collars of pre-revolutionary France. Styles and fashions have no reason or rationale, and they are almost invariably “weird” when viewed from another era.
(However, although men’s clothing fashions in the '70s were universally hideous and without merit, there were a lot of very nice things being worn by women.)