Pop cultural history
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...
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i can't remember the specifics but i'm sure i remember 'the eighties' and 'the nineties' being used as punchlines
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
(The other Jane)