It happens this is also the answer to the problem posed in this article on the stagnation of culture:
Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it...The 1980s were the era when the Baby Boomers grew up, reached their late 30s and crossed into their 40s. They stopped wanting anything new about that time, and settled into middle age. The culture locked down with them, because the size of their cohort means that advertising, the movies, all the cultural industries look to them first and last.
Look at people on the street and in malls—jeans and sneakers remain the standard uniform for all ages, as they were in 2002, 1992, and 1982. Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10 random new pop songs; if you didn’t already know they were all things from the 2010s, I guarantee you couldn’t tell me with certainty they weren’t from the 2000s or 1990s or 1980s or even earlier. (The first time I heard a Josh Ritter song a few years ago, I actually thought it was Bob Dylan.)
If you were born in the 1980s, then, the world you know has never changed in any serious way. The political parties have always occupied the same basic positions: Reagan was the last sea change. You don't remember JFK, so Democrats have always been anti-war.
If this demographic trend is as suggestive as it seems to be, American culture will not change much for another twenty years or so. There are a lot of interesting things going on, but they're going on in corners: they'll not have a chance to influence the big show.
12 comments:
He's wrong, and so are you--there's no "big show" anymore, because there are no cultural gatekeepers with the ability to make anything stick anymore.
This statement:
"If you were born in the 1980s, then, the world you know has never changed in any serious way. The political parties have always occupied the same basic positions: Reagan was the last sea change. You don't remember JFK, so Democrats have always been anti-war." is so wrong I don't even know where to begin with it. The world isn't just political parties. Do you really mean that?
The article was written by a navel-gazing baby-boomer who lives in NYC, and has all the usual attitudes about culture, history etc to be found in that milieu.
Look at this ridiculous statement:
We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle—economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation.
Again, so wrong I don't even know where to begin--who says that cultures *need* to "conjure genuinely new ideas and forms"? when the hell has that ever happened? What new ideas didn't ever build on what already existed?
Economic progress has stagnated? What the fuck world is that guy living in? I can order goods and services from across the planet and have it delivered to my front door. I can have things custom-made, handmade, crafts-made in ways that somebody living in the 1980's or even the 1990's couldn't even imagine.
Here again is another baby-boomer whose idea of industry is stuck in whatever film they watched on assembly lines in elementary school or high school. Just completely clueless.
No wonder they are being increasingly tuned out.
I'm often wrong about things, especially when -- as in this case -- what I have is a sentiment and a sense that is leading my opinion.
Still, if you were born in the 1980s by the time you were old enough to be conscious of the world the Cold War was over. The world we've lived in since then has been one small war after another -- Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq again, Afghanistan, Yemen -- such that (a) less than 1% of the country has been directly dealing with it, and (b) from the perspective of the 99%, it's therefore just been a constant drumbeat in the background.
9/11 was a serious change, in one sense -- the first severe attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor -- but within a few weeks, GWB was telling people to go back to the mall. Which they did, in sneakers and t-shirts; and the culture absorbed the shock with surprising speed.
I don't know. I mean, the internet is in one sense a major change; in another sense the much-smaller NYT and Washington Post and Vanity Fair and the New Yorker are still leading the discussion, even though they have a smaller total audience. I can't help but notice that everywhere I go I hear the same 300 or so songs playing on every radio, so that year round I end up hearing the same songs I hate every single day whether I like it or not, and year after year it never changes. Then you have xkcd's point about Christmas music. Why not Bach? Why these songs?
There does seem to be a point to be made about the way the core of the culture has been held stagnant. What annoys me most about the Occupy movements isn't the occupation, but the way they see themselves as playing out a kind of pre-approved Woodstock mythology; they didn't even seem to ask themselves what they wanted, they just knew they were supposed to go protest stuff.
Now, I appreciate your points about my capacity to order hand-made goods from around the world with increasing ease. I also agree that 'new ideas' aren't necessarily desirable: I wouldn't mind a culture that had a stable core if it were a better core. It's just a shame to have stagnated here, of all places.
Well, if you were born in the UK in the 1880's, it was one 'small' war after another too, until 1914.
Stagnation implies no movement, and honestly, that is not what is happening, even with all the recycling of media going on.
It's certainly true that there's some movement; of course, that's true even when you try to maintain continuity on purpose.
You may be right in your larger point, though. 1914 was an interesting year; we may have another.
And culture-wise, I seem to remember complaints about culture being 'stagnant' in the late 19th century--that the author wants 'radical change' is, frankly, just an echo of where and when he grew up--like lots of people, he assumes that where and when he grew is somehow "normal" to measure everything else against.
If radio stations you are listening to aren't playing Beethoven, pick another station--remember, Beethoven wasn't written for 'the masses' (to use a phrase), he was writing for the upper middle classes of Vienna in the early 19th century.
Base, common and popular--Pistol you ain't!
They say you know you're middle-aged when you listen to the supermarket Muzak and think, "Hey, that rocks."
I'm always startled to hear dance music from my early adulthood in the grocery aisles.
Of course, the culture could be changing radically in all kinds of ways, and I'd barely notice. Not as much reaches me these days without my deliberately choosing it.
I enjoy the way movies from the 70s or even 80s look like period pieces now. It's true that I have a harder time guessing the period from the styles in more recent works. One trick is to focus on the gadgets. Remember when movie plots turned on the unavailability of telephones in a crisis? When people couldn't access the internet all the time on the move -- or at least, if they could, they were secret agents with advanced equipment? I just watched the pilot episode for CSI the other day; the equipment they were using seemed like something out of the dark ages.
And T99 hits one something else here: Deliberately choosing what to listen to. In a way we all make our own culture based on what's out there or even what we do ourselves.
There is a plurality culture that springs from 1972, but Eric is also right - much of the rest is fragmented, niche cultures. Time and Newsweek were something everyone read - Top 40 was something that many stations played, even if people had side interests and sub-interests. There was a national public culture. That isn't true anymore, but the closest thing we have is the last one we had, going on and on, as per the cartoon. It's just not a majority, dominant culture anymore, but the largest of the niche cultures.
Looking at the XKCD cartoon, I think that is more about the rise of recorded music and radio, coinciding with the population and economic boom that accompanied the baby boomers, and since the 80's or so, there's been enough Christmas music out there that we don't need lots more new music for Christmas.
About the only Christmas music that has seemed to enter the canon recently is 'Mary did You Know' Considering that, perhaps the writer of that column was correct about one thing- Maybe we are seeking authenticity instead of fad or fashion. I think many still haven't found ways to engage that pursuit other than through the channels of fashion, but perhaps we are in the midst of a great awakening- at least when I'm feeling in an optimistic mood, I'd like to think so.
Actually, it isn't just the Baby Boomers that are choosing Baby Boomers' music. As a Scouter I do a lot of travelling long distances to campouts, etc. with 11 - 18 year old kids. Invariably they choose music from the '70's and '80's and '90's to listen to as much as they do contemporary stuff. When I ask them why they tell me that a lot of contemporary music stinks. They don't listen to rap or hip-hop or the whiny stuff. Present-day teenagers seem to be keeping the older stuff alive as much as the aging boomers are.
It's true of my nieces and nephews. My 20-something nephew just posted a 1993 song (Jump Around) to his Facebook page. Good song, but, you know, it's 18 years old.
I love when my 20 year old niece posts about how she loves a piece of music from the 80's (born as she was in 1991). That's music from my youth, but she loves it. I think that's most likely her father's influence on her as my brother and I share tastes in music, but even so her friends reply with "Oh, I like that! Who did that song?"
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