it's like the last decade never happened

  On 5/21/2011 at 2:50 AM, Rambo said:

I actually know what he's talking about for some reason. Another thing i feel like, maybe it's just me, but it feels like the 60's, 70's, 80's and even most of the 90's seemed to have a much stronger identity. In those other decades it feels like they each have their own clear look and sound.

 

It seems to me that at some point during the mid to late 90's (funnily coinciding with the web taking off) virtually everything in music and fashion became a mish mash of the previous few decades. "new" stuff seemed to come out of doing that but not unique to the extent that things felt unique in the previous decades. It almost feels like we're saturating the possibilities or something, until science and technology explodes into a whole new sphere of possibility that just wont make sense to regular humans. It's like getting came on when your straight.

My friend and me made a spoof of this very fact on New Year's Eve 2009.

[youtubehd]PszbP0UFY60[/youtubehd]

I met someone recently that said the synths I use in my music sound like the 90s.

In my head I was thinking "weird, that was only a decade ag....oh, wait a minute."

I'm fairly sure we all think this because we all hang around here. And lets face facts, we're living in the past.

My most listened to record is Bytes, and that was made at the start of the 90's.

the 90s were a very differnt time for people who finished high school vs people who were getting into their teens and younger. perspective can really never be fully understood by any opposite parties in these types of discussions.

I don't think the rise of pearl jam and nirvana was all that different than the rise of Metallica and slayer in the early 80s or zep and sabbath in the late 60s/early 70s.

in this day and age, everyone has access to all kinds of music. things won't bubble to the surface in such dramatic fashion as in the past and create wide sweeping movements that things get lumped into. you would have never heard of post-grunge-garage-hair pop in 1995 because there was less interest in categorizing shit with x.x ratings and comparing it to everything that has ever existed with some horseshit backstory.

  On 5/21/2011 at 7:33 PM, Rambo said:

  On 5/21/2011 at 4:40 PM, chassis said:

I never get when people say something sounds dated. I mean you are aware of when the album was made so you are listening with that in mind, or maybe I'm the only one that does that?

 

You're right not to get it. It always has an inherent negative connotation. You're supposed to make that mental leap. It's a shit expression. Lots of great music sounds dated.

Yeah, i think it means in this context, 'of it's place and time'. So he was praising the fact that only now (after all these years), does that album sound somewhat dislocated from the now.

Well to him at least. As i live outside of time, this reasoning does not apply to my sense of the world. */puts on more disco

The sad thing about how decades are defined, especially musically, but also for culture in general. Is that it is always seen through the lens of the lowest common denominator brain states that infest mainstream media.

So their collective consciousness acknowledges nothing of the underground. This is why we have an 80's that is seen as having given a marginal contribution to world culture. These people have never heard of dead kennedys or sonic youth, let alone italo disco or whatever. Their experience was informed by hairspray fumes, shoulderpads and fluoro bubblegum pop.

There is some kind of force that influenced the 00's in ways that I'm not fully sure of yet. I can't exactly define it but it is a mixture of widespread media giving rise to "pop-culture detritus", surrealism, nostalgia, and 'the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction'. The force existed in the mid 90's and by the early 00's there were a bunch of new media art collectives like Fort Thunder and Paper Rad which cultivated a certain aesthetic from lazily throwing together the collected 'trash' media still around. To quote from a dude associated with this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-uStwNGKSE

"im inspired by all media collapsing into itself while on its way to the void as the gravity of our mass media culture increases."

And of course, because the diffusion of innovations always applies to underground art movements, so lots of L8 '00s pop culture trends like nu-rave and shit probably can be linked back to similar things bubbling in the early 00s.

Fort Thunder, Circa 2001: http://fortthunder.02909.com/gallery-00.html

Take a look through the pictures. To me they characterize a lot of the last decade.

and these are just cuz they look kool:

That last picture could have been from the 60's or the 70's art scenes.