Nadir?

Ever watch those Back in x year programs that MuchMoreMusic airs?

James and I talked about this last year over Golden Mango. I contended that there’s really nothing to define this period – no overarching sociopolitical or cultural theme. I think this trend began circa 1996, coinciding with the “release” of the Internet and the cable TV explosion.

Think about it - in relation to prior eras, from the mid 90s onward there's a remarkable lack of stuff to define this period. Most people had a clean-cut look in the 50s, though the beatnik look was also in. The hippie look was becoming increasingly mainstream in the late 60s. I could tell you bell-bottoms were popular in the 70s, and bright neon and big hair in the 80s. Mullets and frayed jeans and Starter hats and pumps were coming on strong in the early 90s. Then everything stopped. What was popular in 1998? 2002? I lived through these periods and I couldn’t tell you.

Watch any movie say pre-1996 and you could usually tell a movie within reasonable accuracy what year the movie was made. Watch The Breakfast Club or Sixteen Candles or any John Hughes flick and you just know this is a movie from the mid-80s. The garish fashion, the big hair, the New Wave synthesizer soundtrack and the ridiculous stereotyping are all dead giveaways. You could also usually tell a movie made pre-WWII and the 50s and 60s and 70s the same way. But I couldn’t, say, tell apart an episode of Frasier or Friends from 1997 from one from 2003.

Look at the contrast between a movie from 1976 and 1986, or between 1986 and 1996 - there’s a huge, huge difference in fashion, trends, social themes and politics, not to mention technical aspects like production values and SFX quality. But any movie released say post-1996 looks remarkably similar to a production today. You’ve Got Mail (1998) could easily be a film released last week, only Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan would be using Rogers Hi-Speed instead of AOL dial-up. So could, say, Jerry Maguire (1996). Things really haven’t really changed much – they dress, act, talk, do the same things and have pretty much the same values we do today.

I think this lack of an overarching unifying cultural meme is a symptom of the fragmentation of our culture. We live in the era of the giga-channel universe. The internet has probably been the greatest catalyst in accelerating the fragmentation of our society into little heterogeneous subcultures – at least when you’re watching CSI, there’s 20 million other people watching with you; on the Internet you’re doing your own thing in your own world. We’re not all waking up to Jerry Lewis and watching Ed Sullivan and Walter Cronkite and going to bed by Johnny Carson as we used to.

I think we’ve reached a cultural nadir, in so far as there’s nothing really there anymore to unite us, no moon landing, no shared bond or collective cultural experience. Will we be able to look back at this period in 20 years and define what was in, what was out, what was popular?