Decades

[poser_nostalgia]

I watched a video on YouTube about how we don't use decades as a term any longer. We can speak about the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's but we don't call this year the 20's. How in 2025 we would call these years the 20's. Also, now we refer to things in fashion such as gen z fashion but, when we think of the 90's it doesn't matter what age you are you

Comments

[rock_dinosaur]

Non-mainstream culture has ceased to exist. (I would have said 'youth culture', but most of the 'rebels' I know are in their 50s and 60s.) I think it was already fading away, but Covid and the lockdowns seem to have erased it altogether. I never see punks or goths or even emos around town now. There's still plenty of live music and regular punk gigs here in Edinburgh, but the audiences mostly consist of fat, bald old guys (such as myself, only I'm not bald yet). Young people aren't getting into it, and why would they? There are no music shows on TV, and apart from a few niche magazines catering in seventies and eighties nostalgia, the music press has ceased to exist. And then there's the music itself. If you hear a few seconds of any contemporary punk, metal or goth/darkwave song, you've heard the whole thing. It's all totally predictable and one-dimensional and designed to appeal to a particular niche market. No wonder nobody's interested any more.

I think the rot set in sometime around the mid-'90s. Grunge and Britpop were the last big things that came from the streets. Real music, composed and performed by real musicians. Since then, everything has been bland, manufactured and generic; just an endless rehash of what made money for corporations last year and the year before and the year before that.

I'm not just sad about all this; it find it scary. As a lover of rock, punk and metal since I was ten, I feel bereft and out-of-place in the world. There's no opposition to all the evil that's going on. No challenge to authority and what we're told to believe. Nothing but bland uniformity. It seems like the powers-that-be have taken complete control.