FWIW my wife read my post above and agrees with you, in theory.
But I can’t agree about OJ. Depending on how old you are, he was famous in five different areas:
Football, outstanding at USC and the NFL
Hertz commercials (this is where I first saw him, since he never played for the Packers)
Acting (Naked Gun films. Roots. Capricorn One; I was surprised to see he was an actor while he played at USC!)
Football analyst/broadcaster including Monday Night Football
and, double homicide and subsequent slow speed chase and the “trial of the century”, acquittal, “If I Did it”, and the related Law and Order ripped from the headlines episode.
I don’t know how an adult at the times could miss all of those
Once I was riding with my husband in the car when Billy Joel’s Keeping the Faith came on the radio. At the end, my husband said, “That was a pretty good song, wasn’t it?” He had never heard it before, despite his having been alive and sentient during the 80s.
That reminds me of something. Just over twenty years ago, the actor/writer/etc. Spalding Gray went missing. He’d been having some health problems and showing signs of depression, so his people assumed the worst, and a few weeks later, it did turn out to be the worst. A lot of people IRL and online were discussing this, and when his body was found, IIRC someone on this board came into a thread and said, “Who?” I mean, c’mon; I understand not connecting him with Swimming to Cambodia or whatever; not knowing who he was before he disappeared. But his disappearance was a Whole Thing, and it amazed a lot of people in that thread that this poster somehow missed all that and didn’t say, “Oh, the writer guy who went missing.” It wasn’t highfalutin’ New York Intellectual news, it was news news.
thorny_locust: Yeah, but I bet your going silent would be a different kind of silence. With her, it felt like, “What is this – school?”
When I was in college, I recall talking to a dormmate about one of my history classes and mentioned something about the American Revolution. He said he didn’t know much about that period, and asked “who won?”
ETA: I suppose I should mention he was from Canada. But still….
I’m not disagreeing with you overall premise, but it seems if you didn’t know him from the other areas you mentioned, this alone wasn’t going to either.
Who? Never heard of him. (And now I’ve heard of him, I only remember two of the movies on that list, and I’ve never seen either of them.)
To me, those are “groups”, not “bands”. Bands play music in parades, parks and halftime shows. So I would probably say the ultimate American band is the Marine Corps Band.
Were those the ones with the guy flying through the airport terminal? (I know him from the NFL and the murders.)
When the law firm where I worked redecorated the office, they hung photos of Californian historical interest in the hallways. I’d pause to check them out occasionally, and once I was looking at an old black and white photo of peach pickers in the central valley, dated 1939. All the pickers were fair-skinned, dusty, starved-looking people.
I said to another person who was also looking at it, “I bet every one of those people were dust bowl refugees from Oklahoma.” She looked puzzled and said “Why do you say that?” I said “You know, the big dust bowl drought in the midwest that drove refugees from Oklahoma west to California. As described in The Grapes Of Wrath? How they tended to find work in the central valley picking fruit?” I got a blank, uncomprehending look.
This is a big part of history for us Californians, and The Grapes Of Wrath is a major work of literature, widely read in school. The person I was talking to was my age, and a native to the city of San Jose.
Actual conversation with a classmate some years back:
HIM: …so they wanted to call their music festival “Land-a-palooza”! But some guy sued them and said they owed him money because his last name was “Palooza.”
ME: Don’t you think it’s more likely they got the name from Lollapalooza?
HIM: What the fuck is “Lollapalooza”?
To this day, I have no idea if he genuinely didn’t know or was just messing with me.
I’m a GenXer and have a few friends who were/are also into 90s alternative music, but all my other rather mainstream friends wouldn’t have a clue if I asked them what Lollapalooza was.
I was alive and sentient during the ’80s - and as far as I remember, music already sort of divided people into groups. There was a few years ago a thread about New Yorkers, and someone was talking about some song that was ubiquitous in 1982 or 83. She said it was played at parties , on the radio and I specifically remember her saying it was played on the Music Express at Coney Island. A bunch of people (including me) never heard of the song - although we were approximately her age and all New Yorkers. As it turned out , the song she was talking about was some genre I didn’t listen to - but just like I never heard of that song, she most likely never heard of “Keeping the Faith”
That reminds me of something similar - a few weeks ago, for some reason it came up in conversation that my husband didn’t know any Kinks songs, I played a few and he had heard all of them, just didn’t know it was the Kinks. It’s possible someone knows the “football player running through the airport” but not his name.
Yeah - it was more that this guy had never heard of Lollapalooza while apparently knowing enough about whatever “Land-a-palooza” was to go on about it at length.
My oldest nephew was 20 in 2019, and I’m 100% sure he doesn’t know any of those bands. Why should he? He’s a member of the first native digital generation and has very different channels for information, including music, than the generation of his parents.
While I am certainly aware of this and all the events pertaining to it, I don’t think I have ever seen a reference to “Hiroshima Day”. A newsperson would typically say, “on this day in 1945…”. It does fit in with D Day and VJ Day, though.
I obviously know about Hiroshima but I don’t remember the exact date. I will always remember the month because of the lyrics to the song “Manhattan Project” by Rush.
I mentioned this in another thread I don’t remember where. We had a mission to drive a convoy of Army trucks from North Jersey to Lakehurst Naval Airstation to turn them in. I mentioned to a couple of the guys that we would be very close to the Hindenburg crash site. They had no idea what I was talking about. These guys were not significantly younger than me. Probably born in the mid 70s or so. Growing up it was still one of the most famous videos ever shot. Never heard of it despite growing up not far from where it happened.
My first day at work at the company I was at for the rest of my working career was Bastille Day*. I’m not French, and I’m not sure why I was so aware of this date, maybe it stuck on my flypaper brain because it is 10 days after Independence Day (the holiday, not the movie). I’m never surprised when no-one else around me knows that date, if I happen to mention it. My last day of work, on the other hand, was Halloween. I don’t have to explain that.
*Ironic that, when I finally retired, it felt like being let out of prison.
(this is where I first saw him, since he never played for the Packers)