Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "What Happened to Decades?" video.

@Roxor128 I think that's the issue I have with this. During the '80s and the '90s and the '00s and the '10s, I don't really remember referring to the current decade as being whichever one of those it was at the time, but we did refer to previous decades as such. There was a little bit of awkwardness in terms of how to refer to the '00s as it was the turn of the millennium but also as I personally prefer the naughties. From time to time, I hear people use this is the '90s as a sort of short hand for it being the modern era, but I don't remember any period of the last 40 years where I thought about the current decade as much as previous decades just because until you hit the end of one decade, or at least somewhere towards the second half, it's hard to really say what the decade really is. And arguably, what we think of as being a decade is more likely to be offset by about 5 years. The bigger issue is that in a lot of ways the music that is the backdrop to all of this has stagnated. A lot of people don't even remember what music they were listening to and quite frankly, most of it sounds pretty samey as there was a prolonged period where Dr. Luke and Max Martin wrote most of the hits and the music industry consolidated to the point where you didn't have the sort of variety that we had even in the '90s.
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I think they are to a large extent. The concept depends on being able to draw some sort of a reasonable line, the numbers were usually a bit off as the things we think of as being "The '70s" for example started a few years into the decade and continued a few years into the '80s. Arguably it's more aligned to what people born early in the decade remember as their earliest memories than anything else.
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He uses bad examples. If we were talking about 1900 and that decade or the 1910s how many of us would be able to come up with a particular image for those the way we did. We're at a point in the century where we had 2 decades in a row that don't have catchy names. Lacking a catchy name does make it a bit harder to do that, but the '00s were a lot of 9/11 related bullshit, the war on terror, the beginnings of the great recession and so many brown people being murdered because the US needed to justify the defense spending. The 2010s are admittedly a bit harder to characterize, but mostly because it was kind of a bland period for the first half and then a bunch of political turmoil as Trump couldn't figure out what he wanted to do and a bunch of social unrest related to the fraying of the social contract to a near breaking point. And honestly, that's not that much different from the previous century. The real question is whether any sort of consistent popcultural zeitgeist returns.
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@thedeadliestname I think it's taken quite a while for people to really settle on anything because unlike most normal decades that was the turn of the century as well as the turn of the millennium and at the time, especially early on, that was kind of the focus. Personally I'll write '00s or if I'm feeling whimsical, the naughties. Which considering what the decade was like in many ways seems appropriate.
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I'm in the US and I tend to go with either Noughties or turn of the millenium. I think part of the problem is that we're just now in the '20s which is sort of the point in the 20th century that we started to refer to decades as being the whatever decade. The '00s were the turn of the century mostly and the '10s mostly weren't referred to much apart from when talking about WWI.
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@BalmBeach Yes, there's been a few, but by 2010 I don't think I've heard anything actually good or unique. A couple of my favorites post 2000 would be The Shins - New Slang and Outkast Miss Jackson. Those are just a couple that spring to mind. In the last 20 years, songs have just gotten so samey that if you like the sound, there's good stuff, but if you don't, it takes a pretty significant deep dive to find the indie stuff that doesn't suck.
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@ericseiz3472 Yep, and everything at that time was eXtreme.
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Keep in mind that that probably didn't start happening until quite a bit later. It's not like a period of time like the '80s where for a large number of people it was pretty good at the time or the '60s where it was quite turbulent and traumatic, but there was at the same time a massive amount of progress in most areas and a vibrant art scene to satisfy just about any taste.
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I do think there is something to the notion that we have more control over our exposure to pop culture and to things that reinforce the notion that it's a given year and the opportunities to experience older things being somewhat limited. In the '70s all of the media that people were being exposed to was primarily of the '70s and opportunities to expose yourself to older stuff was limited to what content providers thought would be popular enough to keep producing or what you could dig up at a book store. Now, it's roughly as easy to experience the culture of decades past as it is the new stuff and far less of our experience is centered around watching the same TV shows. These days, even a massive hit TV show's finale will garner a fraction of what viewership the got for the finale of MASH or Cheers which were at the time massive events across most of the US.
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@surferzapper20 In all fairness, how many people could identify when a given song was actually released by listening to it without knowing the answer or being a major music buff? I think that's part of the problem in terms of the generations. We have far more control of our personal experience of pop culture and what parts we want to experience. Sure, there's bits like when there were all those riots and lockdowns a few years back, but it's not like we turn on our TV and only get a choice of whatever is on the half dozen channels we can get and are largely restricted to the books on offer at a local book store or at the library.
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