Why are some decades harder to define than others?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The Cold War decades - the 1950s to '80s - are very easy to define, but the decades before (1920s-1940s) and after (1990s-2010s) all seem to bleed together. The Cold War decades each had a unique theme and felt different from any other decade but I feel like you can stereotype the 20s-40s broadly as the “Jazz Age” and the 90s-10s as the era of hip hop and grunge/emo.

It’s obvious when I’m watching a movie from the 80s for example that it was made between say 1978 and 1991 but I find many movies today could probably pass for being from the early 2000s or even the 90s and vice versa. Same with really old movies - I just think of anything from the 1920s to maybe 1955 or so as being “old times” or the “Jazz Age”. I don’t think there were radical stylistic or cultural differences between say 1935 and 1945 even though of course there were HUGE political changes then.

Do you think we reached a point for a while after WW2 when things were changing so fast you could pinpoint periods as close together as 10 years or less as being different eras, while before 1950 and after 1990 change has happened at a more “normal” rate?

2

Social and artistic change did come fast and furious after WWII. I don’t think change is coming more slowly now, so much as the culture doesn’t conform to the changes anymore. Maybe it has something to do with the internet as opposed to TV. The internet shows you a virtually unlimited number of things as far as fashion and music, whereas TV only showed you a smaller range. So you’d get a certain impression about how things were in the present and most people eventually conformed.

Like with the change from hair metal to grunge, I don’t remember people getting tired of the music. As of 1990 and 1991 those bands’ albums and tours were doing as well as ever. There was no sign that that particular musical trend was peaking, much less running out of gas. But MTV decided to change things up, and people got the impression that this was the “thing” now and lost interest in their Winger albums and picked up the latest Pearl Jam. And it’s not like there was an alternative way to get music if you still liked the 80s stuff. So you either dug grunge, or you found something else to listen to, like R&B, rap, country, or classic rock stations.

Nowadays, you never have to leave anything behind because the internet can accomodate all followings. I found power metal on the internet and that’s what I’ve been listening to more than anything else for the last 15 years. And that style will be viable for as long as there are people making quality power metal. MTV doesn’t play it, the radio doesn’t play it, yet the biggest bands can still sell 100,000 copies worldwide based just on the internet community that supports the genre. and virtually any other style of music that exists today can also stay viable that way. Whereas in the Dark Ages of the early to mid 90s, you had to accept whatever MTV and the radio stations fed you.

3

The 1920’s became known as The Roaring Twenties due to the economic growth and slightly decadent tastes in western Europe and North America. Not many decades get their own label, The Swinging Sixties and possibly The Naughty Nineties (1890’s in the UK) are the only other ones that come to mind.

4

The fact that you (or I or anybody else) can’t tell the difference between certain art forms of the past century or so doesn’t mean that someone else with more experience in distinguishing them can’t. You claim that you can’t distinguish a movie from 1925 from one from 1935 from one from 1945 from one from 1955. I think I could fairly easily distinguish them (even if I have never heard of them before), not because I lived through all those years but because I’ve watched a fair amount of them. On the other hand, I can’t as easily distinguish a movie from 1985 from one from 1995 from one from 2005. To me that’s all recent times.

So I think there’s an assumption in your question that’s incorrect. The ability to distinguish different decades is not constant for all people. The claim that things have changed faster in some decades seems to me to be highly personal. The examples I gave above are about movies, but the same is true for music or other art forms. I think that the same is true about technology and general culture. I’m not sure at all that it’s possible to define slower and faster change since any society consists of so many different aspects that some are changing slowly and some are changing faster at any point.

5

I think this is entirely in your mind, and will not be the same in other people’s minds. For instance, the 1920s, '30s, and '40s seem very distinct from one another to me: the '20s were the age of flappers, the Charleston, jazz, F. Scott Fitzgerald; the '30s were the very different age of the Great Depression; the '40s were the age of WWII and its aftermath (which in Britain, meant both continued austerity and rationing, but also the creation of the welfare state). If anything the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s, which I lived through, blend together in my mind more than those earlier “historical” decades do. I was around to see that 1960 was not very different from 1959, 1970 was not very different from 1969, etc.

Not only are “defining” images of decades largely subjective, however, but the whole notion of them is essentially bullshit, as decades do not mark natural historical transitions. There is no reason why any sort of “era”, however vaguely characterized, should last ten years, still less begin or end when the third numeral in the year date changes.

6

The 1970’s: The Me Decade
The 1930’s: The Turbulent Thirties

But the fact is that all of these names only usefully illuminate a few aspects of each decade.

7

That’s true, and decades are an arbitrary measure applied to an ever changing world. The Swinging Sixties didn’t really start until maybe 63-64? The Fifties started off with austerity and rationing and ended with Teddy Boys and Elvis.

8

Actually, I just thought of something that differentiates the 2000s and the current decade from the 90s: tattoos.

Up until about 2005 or so, only “certain people” got tattoos: sailors, bikers, rock stars. There would be others, my boss had a dragon on his ankle in the 90s, but for the most part, people’s bodies consisted entirely of flesh, not ink. Watch a basketball game from the 90s, except for Dennis Rodman, who was considered strange because of all his tattoos, the players practically look naked compared to today. Now tattoos are everywhere and anyone in any walk of life can have serious body art. It’s almost a civil rights movement on Facebook, with a popular group called “Tattoo acceptance at work” having 1.9 million followers!

What’s particularly hilarious about this fad is what happens next decade. I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to be hearing from younger people, “2010 called, they want their tattoos back! (snicker).” Imagine if people had to be stuck with bell bottoms or 80s hairstyles their whole lives and you get the picture.

9

I would say it’s largely a media construction, rather than a characteristic of the decades themselves. Bearing in mind that when people talk about “the sixties” they’re really talking about the mid-late 1960s and probably only 1966, 1967, 1969. When people talk about “the eighties” they’re probably not thinking about 1987. Because our view of the past is shaped by the media, and the media latches on to certain periods, and this snowballs, and that is where we get our vision of the past. It so happens that there was an explosion of culture in the west in the 1960s, so that decade has had a lot of coverage. Boring old farts from that decade patted themselves on the back, metaphorically speaking, and seduced a new generation with their tales of easy drugs and lots of sex. I think of the 1960s as an overweight old man wearing leather trousers, boasting about how great things were back in the day; and some of it is true, but that was a long time ago, and there’s no need to do subsequent generations down.

Do people think about the 1250s? The 1510s? In my opinion, for most people, every single decade before the 1920s is an anonymous, interchangeable mass of things that happened, just isolated dates and events, and that the only decades people really have a defined view of are (in roughly descending order) the 1960s, the 1980s, the 1970s, the 1990s, and perhaps the 1920s and 1930s. But in the latter case the decade is just James Cagney in a gangster outfit, and the former is flappers. The 1940s as a decade is overshadowed by the war, which exists outside of time.

Yes, we’re all experts on the 1860s. But they - them - they aren’t. As time goes on a decade becomes a set of cultural icons and slogans and then it gradually fades away.

On a tangent, there was a nostalgia boom in the 1970s, and as a consequence I partly associate the 1970s with the 1930s (The Sting, Chinatown, the look of Vogue magazine during that decade) and the 1950s (American Graffiti, Happy Days, Grease), rather than itself. Perhaps by the 1970s the unconscious process of iconographising past decades became conscious, and since then attempts to pigeon-hole decades have been complicated by the fact everybody is trying to “own” the narrative, e.g. Time magazine with its top ten lists of the previous decades, as if by owning the past you could skew the future.

10

One thing we have to realize is until the internet took off, people’s views of the outside world were heavily dominated by TV/movies/advertising. These are all things that focus on urbanized area and middle/upper class life–the people whose lives changed most rapidly. You saw the Stone family on “Donna Reed”; you didn’t see the family in a run down small town with a 15 year old car and hand me down clothes barely getting by. Nowaday with stuff like Facebook and blogs, you’re more likely to see the average person and how little their life often changes.
Plus the whole decade stuff is fiction anyway. “The Roaring Twenties” weren’t very roaring if you picked cotton in Alabama or mined coal in Lancashire. For every teenager who protested and dropped acid in 1968, there were a dozen crew cutted teenagers who wanted us to be in Vietnam and didn’t care a whit about civil rights. Stuff like geography, social class, race, family structure, etc. are far more important than a few years on the timeline in most people’s lives.

11

True. Tattoos were already becoming more popular in the '90s, but someone like Dennis Rodman was seen as a “freak” for his tattoos. Nowadays even starlets like Rihanna are basically covered head to toe in them and are considered attractive. When women got tats in the 90s it was usually just like a small dolphin or something, maybe at most a “tramp stamp”. Nowadays it’s quite common for them to ink very large and visible areas of their body.

12

The 20s, 30s, and 40s are easily distinguishable to me. They were the age of prosperity, the Great Depression, and World War II, respectively.

I think the 90s, 00s, and 10s are harder to define because they are more recent decades. I can distinguish 90s culture, but I have more difficulty pinpointing something special about the 00s. I think we need to get to 2020 before we can figure out what the 00s were all about.

To really see the distinguishing features of a decade you’d need at least one decade before and one after it. You have to compare it to another decade to realize the differences.

13

Not necessarily. Perhaps due to musical and fashion changes occurring so suddenly, the 80s was considered left behind pretty clearly by 1993. VH1 started a show called “I Love the 80s” in 1994.

I do agree that by the 00s, the 90s didn’t look so distinct in the background and really, it still isn’t, at least not culturally. In terms of politics and world history, it does stand out as a rather naive, hopeful decade, where the media was mainly focused on tabloid-style stories like Monica, OJ, the Menendez Bros, Tonya and Nancy, and JonBenet Ramsey. I doubt you can name any decade with more memorable tabloid stars than the 90s, even though they exist in every decade.

14

I think it’s because so many decades overlap. For example, the 60’s we associate with the hippies and all didnt really get going until after 1965 and carried over into the early 70’s. The early 1960’s up until maybe 1964 were hardly distinguishable from the 50’s.