School of the Americas was around far before the 1980s – it was established in 1946, and it wasn’t about training religious fanatics. It was, outwardly at least, created to fight communism in Latin America. But it ended up training extreme right wing government military groups to oppress the local population. It had nothing to do with religion, and often those who trained there were oppressing local churchs. (Those behind the assassination of Archbishop Romero, for example, were members of a death squad, whose leader, Roberto D’Aubuisson, had been trained by SOA.)
The church in Latin America was very much against what the U.S. government was doing there.
Me, being born in 1992, had the 2000s as the formative years of my childhood/adolescence. I’ve always thought that I had a horrible childhood compared with others a decade or so older.
That article reaffirmed that 2000s were a very, very crappy decade. Not much culture. Just excessive spending with McMansions and a War on Terror.
Oh, sorry, I didn’t segment my sentence correctly. I meant:
The Republicans alighted on exploiting religious sentiment. Government also trained people to kill religious fundamentalists in South America (in their case, the fundamentals they chose to focus on were not resisting evil and giving wealth to the poor, quite unlike the religious fundamentalism of the modern era).
I usually think of a certain type of triumphalism associated with the 90’s. We’d won the cold war, beaten inflation, people were confidently predicting the stock market would keep going up forever, the number of democracies in the World greatly expanded and various longstanding dictatorships fell, information tech was going to give us the future we saw in Star Trek, the New Democrats under Clinton found a sort of consensus position between the left and right, the Israeli’s and Palestinians looked like they were moving towards a peace agreement, the IRA stopped blowing people up and the EU made plans to expand, the federal budget was moving towards being balanced.
There was also a certain backlash reaction to this in Pop culture. Thus Grunge and Seinfeld and the X-Files, Heroin Chic and the like. And in the political scene you had people like Timothy McVeigh and Ralph Nader thinking the technocrats were up to no good behind all that prosperity and were working on various evil projects and running rough-shod over democracy.
But I think the latter things were more a reaction to the generally positive feeling of the decade rather then being the most prominent contributor to the decade.
The 30s: The Great Depression
The 40s: WWII
The 50s: The Man in the Grey Suit
The 60s: The hippies and Vietnam.
The 70s: The Me Decade and oil shocks.
The 80s: The Reagan Era.
The 90s: The Dot-com bubble and the rise of the internet.
The 2000s: ???
You had the internet, which makes complaints about culture irrelevant.
I’m not sure if these posts were made by people who were actually6 alive in these decades, but they don’t match reality.
Yes, there were popular sitcoms in the 80s, just as there had been for the preceding 30 years, but nothing on a scale that would match the success and social influence of “Friends”, “The Simpsons” or “Seinfeld”. All you have to do is flip through some issue sof “People” or the entertainment pages of the newspapers to see that the 90s was the decade that was *defined *by Sitcoms. In contrast, 80s sitcoms were just TV, they weren’t the defining social phenomena that the 90s shows became.
As far as music, almost nobody listened to metal of any sort until the late 80s. The likes of Motley Crue and* AC/DC* had small cult followings throughout most of the 80s, but 99% of the population had only ever heard one of their songs. The first “Metal” act of the 80s didn’t manage to chart until Bon Jovi in 1987. That was followed by a wave of hair metal acts like Warrant and *Guns 'n Roses *that steadily increased in popularity well into the 90s. So metal was in fact much more of a 90s musical style than it was an 80s style.
Actual 80s music was predominantly characterised by adult contemporary such as Billy Joel or Genesis, dance tracks such as 99% of Madonna’s output or straight rock such as Springsteen. There was some pop rock in their, but it was far *less *than in the 70s or 90s.
The idea that the 90s was *characterised *by grunge is just bizarre. I honestly have no idea where this idea gained traction.
If you look at the actual charts, the early 90s up to about 94, are dominated by three classes of music: “Veteran” acts such as Madonna, Michael Jackson, Guns 'n Roses Cher etc, Rap acts and a distinctive early 90s funk/folk/soul/rap style that I have never seen named. This latter style is typified by the Red Hot Chilli peppers at the “rock” end of the spectrum, Counting Crows or Arrested Development as the “typifiers”. The mid to late 90s were utterly dominated by rap, girl “soul” singers like Mariah Cary or Beyonce, and boy bands. There were a smattering of grunge acts in the late 90s lineup, but far fewer than the number of adult pop acts like Savage Garden or Shania Twain.
As someone who was at university in the 90s and at least moderately musically conversant, I have always been mystified by this notion that Grunge in the 90s was “huge”. It’s a notion that seems to have sprung up after the 90s were over and that doesn’t reflect sales, airplay or cultural influence. The real 90s that most people were living in were actually typified by rap, boy bands and girl soul singers. Grunge was about as “typical” of the 90s as reggae was of the 80s, ie a handful of breakout acts, a handful of chart hits but much less than 10% of actual sales or airplay.
Because grunge fashion was everywhere, at least at my school. Pretty much everyone listened to alternative music and flannels were practically a uniform.
Just about everybody in the 80’s was watching Growing Pains, The Cosby Show, Family ties, Benson, Mr. Belvedere, Golden Girls, Who’s the Boss, Designing Women, ALF, Gimme a Break!, The Facts of Life, and a ton more.
Maybe they weren’t “defining social phenomena” in the 80’s, but there was an endless supply of them.
When I listen to songs from the 70’s, and then listen to songs from the 80’s, one thing I notice is that a lot of artists that were only, or mostly rock added a lot of pop sensibility to their music.
Yes and Genesis 1970’s - Prog rock.
Yes and Genesis 1980’s - Pop rock.
Rod Stewart (solo and with Faces) 1970’s - “Hot Legs”, “Every Picture Tells a Story”, “Maggy May”
Rod Stewart 1980’s - “Infatuation”, “Young Turks”, “Crazy about Her”
Heart 1970’s - “Barracuda”, “Crazy on You”, “Magic Man”
Heart 1980’s - “Alone”, “These Dreams”, “Never”
And there are many more examples.
Now I’m not criticizing bands that became more pop in the 80’s, I love a lot of that music, but it clearly happened.
I’m having a hard time articulating my answer to the rest of what you said, so I’ll just say that I’m going by memory. I remember grunge being pretty big, but if the Billboard top 100 and record sales say differently, then that’s fine. I think a lot of us remember grunge more prominently because that’s what we were listening to, and not rap, boy bands, or girl bands.
Blake: With respect, WWII only occurred during half of the 1940s, the 1920s didn’t roar for a great many people, WWI didn’t encompass all of the 1910s, and the hippies and Vietnam only cranked up after 1966. My point is that all these characterization are inherently retrospective. So it may be better to emphasize the music that people remember rather than what topped the charts at the time.
Stated as a caveat though, methinks you make a decent point.
I take your points, I just dispute that *nobody *remembers Beyonce, Britney, the *Spice Girls *or N’Sync. I’m going to say that more people, in any age group, remember those acts than remember any Grunge act with the possible exception of Nirvana. God knows, I would like to forget these acts, but somehow I can’t.
I’m not saying that Grunge was totally irrelevant to the 90s, I just don’t see how it is a defining musical style. It really was to the 90s what reggae was to the 80s.
I can understand people saying that “alternative/indie” music defined the decade. For those of us under 25 it arguably did. But most of that alternative music we were listening to wasn’t grunge. It was REM and Presidents of the USA or Live or Hootie and the Blowfish. All “alternative” acts, but definitely not grunge.
I suspect that people say that grunge defined the 90s because they think that all alternative/indie music was grunge, when in reality only a tiny fraction was grunge.
There’s no doubt about that. I’m not sure there were more of them than in the 70s, when the “Happy Days” spin offs alone were legion. There were probably fewer sitcoms altogether in the 90s, but the ones that were big in the 90s were huge, not just in terms of ratings but as cultural phenomena. The stars of Friends or Seinfeld outshone the *Hollywood *glitterati. The social influences were everywhere, from Simpsons mousepads to Kramer portraits in people’s dens to the fricken’ Vice President berating “Murphy Brown” for being a single mother. Looking back on it now, the hype surrounding the big 90s sitcoms seems kinda bizarre. But one thing is certain: it was sitcoms that defined a large part of 90s culture.
That is true, but it’s probably just that well known effect called “getting older”. People made the exact same observations about the 90s vs 80 output of Metallica, Guns 'n Roses and Bruce Springsteen and The Goo Goo Dolls. As artists age, their tastes tend to mellow. The smart ones realise that they can’t go on pretending to be angry young men and they start producing honest music that is more mellow. Others, like the Stones, become parodies of themselves. Only a tiny number of rock acts manage to sustain the same output. YMMV.
If most people really were listening to grunge, then apparently they weren’t buying it. They were presumably swapping bootleg tapes and perhaps at the very end bootleg CDs. That’s possible, but my memory, which is consistent with sales, is that far more people were listening to non-grunge alt acts than were listening to grunge.
Bad haircuts pretty much sums up *any *decade, with the possible exception of the 1950s. With the benefit of 15+ years of perspective, the fashion trends of any era will look absolutely awful.
Do you really think the “spiky rat’s nest” men’s hairstyles of the past few years will look anything but utterly ridiculous in 15 years time? Or that time will be kind to the current emo mop top? Nah, any fashionable hair style will look stupid in retrospect.
The 50s were exceptional in being so conservative that the haircuts were either crewcut or short-back-and-sides for men and “shoulder length and wavy for women”. Kinda hard to find fault with styles that are so bland.
