Decades

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in yr general impression of each decade's music. Genres, adjectives, personal appeal to you - treat it however you like!

[Poll #1386689]

Comments

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

dude, this is rly rly hard...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I know! I haven't done it yet. Great answers from Cis, Kat and Jeff tho!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yeah I am not sure how to do this! every time I think of a way to sum up a decade, I think of something else which was its opposite and which wad equally representative...

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Oh god I am so fucking sick of my fat-fingered typos today. WAS.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I ended up staying away from specifics and just talking about very broad consumer/tech/biz trends.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I have been trying on and off to do this all day and it frustrates me that I still can't do it - have looked at the answers and still no idea! It's been that kind of day though. I mean, all I'm coming up with is "no idea" for the 40s and 50s, then...too much for the rest. Like, 60s = hippies, but also Motown girl groups. 70s is prog but also disco. 80s is irredeemable naffness but also great superstars, and Sade. And none of those are adequate answers b/c as the 90s and 00s prove, just covering the clichés isn't good enough.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

In any way inspired by the Sandbrook piece in the Observer yesterday?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

or rather the whole decade thing.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Nope, didn't see a paper yesterday - got a link?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/19/decaditis-cultural-history

And then some other punters have a go at decades:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/19/1980s-cultural-history
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/19/1970s-cultural-history
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/19/1960s-cultural-history

I couldn't honestly be bothered to read any of them when I looked at the paper so feel free not to yourself.

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

Found this quite easy!

[cis.livejournal.com]

I wonder-- we people immersed in the 2000s think of them as a mishmash of previous decades, but might we not have felt the same about our current time during the 90s, the 80s?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The 90s definitely felt that way at times, and there was lots of hmming and hahing about it.

[cis.livejournal.com]

yeah I thought of it cos I remember thinking of the nineties as just the recursion of previous genres over and over again: only hindsight allows me to say "it was a fite between neon and beige".

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure this is how it's been since the 60's

[koganbot]

Like Greg said: '50s and '60s were such anomalies, new stuff (or old stuff reimagined, e.g. blues) overwhelming the old, that every decade afterwards feels like retrenchment or refashioning in comparison (even though there was plenty aggressive futurism and actual innovation, esp. but not only in genres like hip-hop and techno). Thing is, the decades before the '50s also had loads of refashioning - this is how art usually works - but without the feeling that this was odd, hence a lot less self-consciousness in the refashioning.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

part of the reason is that records themselves were new, whatever was on them -- a sousa march on a cylinder really sounds very unlike a sousa march on a bandstand, so the "doing something new" took care of itself even when you were doing something old

there must have been SOME element of "look at us doing something new" for the first two decades of jazz -- but again i suspect the locus of novelty was on-stage more than it was on-record (also the promo industry hadn't yet got its music stars to talk about what they were doing)

there's no way someone like armstrong didn't know he was doing stuff no one had ever done before -- there were even sell-out wars about, ppl saying that king oliver was were it was really at and jazz went downhill after that -- but off-cornet armstrong was a shy and not especially verbal man, and would never have, well, blown his own trumpet about his own ground-breakingness

[koganbot]

Yes, jazz and blues, while not exactly new (they'd been going for a while before the recording industry discovered 'em), were definitely ever experimenting and innovating, and when Astaire and Crosby came along they had the snap of the new, and Ellington and Basie of course, and when Sinatra came along he had a darker more brooding snap of the new. But the difference is that none of this newness had a rejection of the old about it. Or if it did, the rejection seems to have been lost in history. Sinatra could sing songs that Jolsen and Astaire had sung. Bop had a rejection of the old in it, but it played to too small an audience, so it was a modernist enclave. Whereas with Elvis, Chuck et al. in the '50s, and the Beatles, Stones et al. in the '60s, there was the sense Now Music Begins With Us. I'm not sure how much Elvis, Chuck, Beatles, Stones would endorse this, actually, knowing how much of the past their own music drew on. But they didn't determine it; the audience did. Incredibly, 1967 could get away with saying that nothing before 1964 mattered - which was ignorant and destructive, of course, but it was very 1967.

Soul didn't have this sense of before and after nearly to the extent that rock did, which is ironic in that James Brown's reorganization of sound was much more drastic than the Beatles' or Stones' or Yardbirds' was.

[koganbot]

Blues was the token "before 1964" music that was allowed to matter, as a source. And Elvis and Chuck could be precursors. The thing I try to emphasize when I explain how the The Sixties Were Different was that Elvis had almost no presence from 1964 on. (Except obviously for the people who still cared. But these were people who still cared about The Five Satins, too, and it was believed, even by themselves, that time had passed them by.)

[koganbot]

And then Elvis reasserts himself into the culture in the early '70s, but representing something different, on behalf of older and now squarer people who are coming to terms with the new (except I think that the Doobie Brothers and Uriah Heep and Three Dog Night might be more crucial than Elvis here).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

It was fun to read everyone's descriptions after I wrote mine! I don't think I missed anything too too huge...

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

(I have put in some blah whatever answers just so I can see everyone else's more easily! I still can't do this and in fact am increasingly of the opinion that it can't and shouldn't be done: there is NO WAY I could even try to adequately sum up the decades that I actually lived through, they just can't be reduced to narratives - unless you're taking the industry perspective like Tom - and I'm reluctant to buy into any of the previous decades' narratives b/c, well, it all depends where you're looking at the time, doesn't it? I'm always suspicious of how history is created, who gets to do the creating, and how stuff gets written out of history, or never written down in the first place.)

(Also, music doesn't work conveniently in decades! In my mind, 2001 was far more like 1999 than 1999 was like 1995...)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

(And for a lot of older music, I literally have no idea of the time frame. I love Joni Mitchell but don't have a clue whether she's considered a 60s or 70s artist. I don't think I even know when Leonard Cohen's albums were released - 60s? 70s? 80s? And you could tell me that Sinatra's peak years were anywhere between the 50s and 80s and I'd believe you.)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

It is with some sadness that I have realised that know nothing about music pre-McFly. Which is odd because I did used to listen to music pre-McFly so you'd think I'd have at least some conception.

(I think it's probably just the case that I know a lot more about music now so it feels like I didn't before; also I was about 4 innit)