Pop cultural history

Anonus

Is it me or has it been decided that for those of us under 30, nothing prior to the 1980s is interesting?

Maybe I'm being selective in my perception though...

Anonus

(no this is not me bitching about 1950s-60s cartoons again)

Salix Babylonika

Well, most young people only care about recent pop culture, and that's not a new trend.

People who have a vested interest in some kind of pop culture specifically, like me and music or you and cartoons, tend to care more about older stuff.

Anonus

right...

also I forgot about one thing indicating that we don't want to chuck the '60s down the memory hole: Mad Men

Salix Babylonika

also like

The Beatles

Anonus

That too

MetaFour

80s nostalgia runs rampant just because the gatekeepers of culture right now are people who grew up in the 80s.

Tachyon

When i was a kid i thought the default position was that everything up until the end of the 70s was glorious and it all went downhill from there

i can't remember the specifics but i'm sure i remember 'the eighties' and 'the nineties' being used as punchlines

Odradek

Tachyon said:

When i was a kid i thought the default position was that everything up until the end of the 70s was glorious and it all went downhill from there

i can't remember the specifics but i'm sure i remember 'the eighties' and 'the nineties' being used as punchlines

glennmagusharvey

marketing efforts try to exploit the biggest common attribute(s) among their target population, so this naturally tends to mask smaller groups

maybe 20% of the customer base demographic is into beethoven, and a different (though possibly overlapping) 30% of it is into the beatles, but if you know that (again, a different but possibly overlapping) 35% of it into Taylor Swift, you pick Taylor Swift

this actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because in doing so you make Taylor Swift more noticeable, and attention is a precious and limited commodity

glennmagusharvey

also marketing loves hype

Calica

Tachyon said:

When i was a kid i thought the default position was that everything up until the end of the 70s was glorious and it all went downhill from there

i can't remember the specifics but i'm sure i remember 'the eighties' and 'the nineties' being used as punchlines

Obā-san

Anonus said:

Is it me or has it been decided that for those of us under 30, nothing prior to the 1980s is interesting?

Maybe I'm being selective in my perception though...

the return of the 70s is nigh

Imipolex G

The 80s were a punchline until the 80s kids became The Hot Demographic or whatever. Now the 80s are cool, and I'm ok with that personally.

Every decade has its good and not so good stuff, I suppose.

Anybody who wants to chuck the 60s in the memory hole should be thrown into a bottomless pit where they will die of starvation.

Odradek

Fuck the Simpsons

Anonus

also I can get behind 1950s stylistic nostalgia (as it melts into that of the next decade) but really I just find myself so annoyed by the "everything from the end of World War II to the Kennedy assassination was A Simpler Time" narrative

glennmagusharvey

it was a simpler time with lots of economic expansion and industrialization and infrastructure building and also lots of social problems such as racism as well as exploitation of natural resources and environmental damage that led to things like the cuyahoga river catching fire

Anonus

don't forget a Red Scare

Tachyon

i feel like certain decades always seem to be hovering around historical fiction and fringe subcultures (particularly the 1880s, 1890s, 1920s and 1930s) without having much of an impact on mainstream pop culture

this might be nonsense, though

but how it feels is like, you'll get things like Downton Abbey or the Great Gatsby achieving mainstream popularity, and you'll have subcultures adopting aspects of the fashion and music from these periods, but mostly they don't make much of a dent on mainstream pop culture

Tachyon

also i guess to a lesser extent the 1900s

the 1910s (and 1940s) have the wartime stuff which i guess might account for Downton's success

but basically that whole period from the late 19th century through to the start of the 1950s, but minus the two world wars, is what i'm talking about here

glennmagusharvey

Tachyon said:

i feel like certain decades always seem to be hovering around historical fiction and fringe subcultures (particularly the 1880s, 1890s, 1920s and 1930s) without having much of an impact on mainstream pop culture

this might be nonsense, though

but how it feels is like, you'll get things like Downton Abbey or the Great Gatsby achieving mainstream popularity, and you'll have subcultures adopting aspects of the fashion and music from these periods, but mostly they don't make much of a dent on mainstream pop culture

wait, what was the 1880s and 1890s?

i know the 1920s were the roaring twenties (with the great gatsby style bullshit stuff)* and the 1930s is the depression

but this is me in the states

the late 1800s are sort of a forgettable period of american history whose most notable events are two presidents who won while losing the popular vote, and the south continuing to resent the north during reconstruction

One-Winged Eagle

Time is a relative blur to one who is deathless and eternal as myself.

Imipolex G

the mind boggles

Tachyon

glennmagusharvey said:

Tachyon said:

i feel like certain decades always seem to be hovering around historical fiction and fringe subcultures (particularly the 1880s, 1890s, 1920s and 1930s) without having much of an impact on mainstream pop culture

this might be nonsense, though

but how it feels is like, you'll get things like Downton Abbey or the Great Gatsby achieving mainstream popularity, and you'll have subcultures adopting aspects of the fashion and music from these periods, but mostly they don't make much of a dent on mainstream pop culture

wait, what was the 1880s and 1890s?

i know the 1920s were the roaring twenties (with the great gatsby style bullshit stuff)* and the 1930s is the depression

but this is me in the states

the late 1800s are sort of a forgettable period of american history whose most notable events are two presidents who won while losing the popular vote, and the south continuing to resent the north during reconstruction

Well in America it's the so-called Gilded Age, i.e. host of social problems covered under a thin veneer of glitz

but anyway, 1880s iconic fashions, infamous corsets, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edison and electric lighting, commercial recorded music, The Mikado, Jack the Ripper panic, last 'Frontier' decade complete with glamorization of the West, penny farthings and the rise of the modern bicycle, Huckleberry Finn

1890s Oscar Wilde, HG Wells and early SF, Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Gay Nineties, early automobiles, radio, New World Symphony, rise of the suffragette movement, ragtime, major economic depression in the US

obviously the entire 19th century is glamorized though

glennmagusharvey

I don't know much about the 19th century, I admit.

Well, I know the basic political history of the United States during that time, and I also know western European music history during that period.  Other history, not so much.

Corvina

Honestly, I can't stand steampunk or 1950s nostalgia