Is culture/fashion in a permanent holding pattern?

I was born in 1986, so I grew up through the 90's. A decade which had a distinct look and feel to it, through fashion and interior decor and a certain ethos in the music. Of course I also grew up watching stuff from the past, obviously you kinda just watched what was on TV back then, and you could tell pretty quickly approximately what era something was from just by how people were dressed, not to mention the music. 50s/60s/70s/80s period pieces were everywhere and quickly identifiable as such.

I think the 00's had its own vibe too - Malcolm in the Middle feels very authentic in how people actually dressed back then and what their houses looked like (at least, if you were lower-middle class). Alt-rock, emo, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, dance punk, Adult Swim-type humor, South Park and Family Guy...all that stuff was very pervasive. Obviously the internet was around but it was its own certain zone of humor. Things that went viral were spoken of as being "from the internet", for instance.

What I struggle with, however, is the "look" of the 10s or the 20s so far. Certainly there are folks born in 2006 who may one day attend a "10s night" at a bar, but what exactly are the signifiers of that decade? Black Eyed Peas and LMFAO? "Blurred Lines"? It feels like we've entered an era where pop culture has truly started to eat itself, everything is a reference to something else, not that the 90's were innocent of this sort of thing but at least there was this sense that things were getting combined or recontextualized in new ways, now (as a big ILX thread says) it feels like so much of pop culture is just empty fan service, where "80's" isn't an influence but rather the entire exercise. It's been discussed many times over here but there seems to be so little new these days. What will people remember from this decade? Is there an actual "fashion" of the 20's that I'm not seeing? To me people dress the same as they did 20 years ago. Is there some graphic design trend I'm missing that's showing up on album covers that people will look back on and say, "that's so 20's"?

Is there an explanation for this? Did the limitations of technology dictate the look and style of things to a far larger degree than we may think? Did the internet kill the monoculture from which things like this would spring forth? Am I just getting old and not noticing the things happening right under my nose?

I read a book within the past few months that spent many pages making the same point...think it might have been Kurt Andersen's Evil Geniuses; that it's hard to look at a photo from the '90s forward and ID the decade, whereas that's pretty easy from the '20s through the '80s.

idk photo filters are a pretty specific 2020s aesthetic?

The album covers trend would probably be 'wordless'/just a striking image.

W. David Marx's Status and Culture gets into this.

(xxpost) He meant more the content of the photos--hair, the way people dressed, etc.

see I would argue that filters are in fact fashion, and part of the "way people dress"!

see also: the duck lip look

Cursed AI images are probably the mark of the '20s. Like there will be people in 2050 putting pictures of people with extra fingers on their album covers.

Not at home right now, but later tonight will try to find a quote from the book relevant to this thread.

https://snkrdunk.com/en/magazine/2024/06/21/why-so-many-people-are-wearing-crocs-now/

xxp like Eno says, the failings of today's technology becomes the aesthetic of the future

As far as general culture goes, young people in the 2020s seem waaaaaaaaaaay more politically aware than they were in the 90s. That may just be the ones I see though.

Yeah but this is all online stuff, "aesthetics" are a big thing (cottagecore etc)- but if you were to look at a photo or tv show from 20 years ago, there'd be very little you coild point to and say "Yes that is definitely 2005" unless they were wearing, I dunno, shutter shades and emo hair which only a handful of people did. It's not the same as even when I was at school in the eighties and nineties and my friends and I would giggle at 70s fashion with the bellbottoms and big hairstyles from only about 10 years before

Filters etc aren't that different from the quality of photos, like that saturated look you got from Polaroids back in the day. It's definitely an indicator of the time, but it's more an indicator of tech than a conscious aesthetic choice

xpost I dunno, the broccoli hairdos are probably not going to age well.

We must have had a thread or two to this effect ten or fifteen years ago, so maybe the answer is yes. Not to attack the thread.

I stand by my Crocs link ;)

specifically I'm thinking about The Office which is about as old now as Cheers was when I was watching re-runs of that - Cheers very much felt "of another era" in a way The Office doesn't - people still look and dress like that

I've been working at colleges for 20 years and I don't see much difference in the way the students dress over that time. If anything it's just more casual, or people dress like they're on the way to gym.

didn't help that all of the 32 year olds on Cheers looked 60

Just pulled the W. David Marx book off the shelf. He says that cultural stasis has to do with the reduced status value of contemporary cultural output, as the internet and global supply chains have reduced barriers to information and acquisition.

A few excerpts:

The inherent high speed of the internet ... disrupts traditional fashion cycles. Elite groups need time to be the sole adopters of an innovation for it to gain cachet. For most of the twentieth century, slow fashion cycles meant high-status innovations could elude media discovery for at least a few months, if not years. Early adopters took a while to figure out how to emulate, and manufacturers needed time to make copies for mass consumption. Fashion relied on social friction to slow down the diffusion process, which allowed elites to look sincere and authentic in adoption -- a gradual lifestyle upgrade rather than a flashy attempt at status distinction. This entire system is upturned by light-speed information flows on the internet.

In the twentieth century the use of culture in status struggles resulted in a constant stream of new artifacts, styles, and sensibilities -- all injected with cachet, which allowed them to influence mass culture. On the internet, there are more things, but fewer arrive with clear and stable status value. At an unconscious level, this affects our judgments of intrinsic quality: films, songs, and books without status value just aren't as rewarding as their predecessors. As part of our desire for status, we chase status value. And so if niche culture lacks status value, many have fled the long tail to return to the head.

To be very clear, this doom and gloom is not about the artistic quality of internet-era content. We live in a paradise of options, and the diminished power of gatekeepers has allowed more voices to flourish. The question is simply whether internet content can fulfill our basic human needs for status distinction. Many will be jubilant at this development, but reduced status value has negative downstream effects. Elites are less likely to adopt as many cultural innovations, which means fewer fashion trends to be diffused. When a trend evaporates as a cultural fad, there may not be enough collective memory for it take on historical value, either.

In hindsight, retromania appears to have been a response to the plummeting cachet of contemporary culture. Between virality, a destruction of barriers to information and access, the celebration of simple nouveau riche aesthetics, and a rejection of taste, inventions haven't taken on as much status value as in the past. Meanwhile, we feel more pressure to be 'authentic,' which raises the bar for switching to new things. Before we consider adoption, new styles must prove they aren't fads -- and they're mostly fads. With contemporary status value on the wane, historical value rises to the fore. The reliable past is more useful for crafting personas than an ephemeral present.

I think it takes time to see what is outdated and emblematic about a past decade. I don't think anyone in the 1990s would have used La Croix packaging as a prime design example from that decade.

I've noted before that it's kinda weird that so many pop stars have been around for so long-- Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Drake--all on the charts now--debuted in the 00s. Plus so many 2010s artists like Kendrick, the Weeknd, Post Malone, Selena Gomez. Feels like there's not a lot of room for new breakthroughs.

Yeah, stuff crystallizes and is then considered to represent the era from a distance, with neither the view from the present nor from far away entirely accurate, probably. Also seems that the far away view of the past has some inherent societal need for everyone to agree on a few things. I guess cos easier than everyone actually forming an individual memory which would prevent collective discussion.

xpost

Cursed AI images are probably the mark of the '20s. Like there will be people in 2050 putting pictures of people with extra fingers on their album covers.

― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Tuesday, 1 April 2025 bookmarkflaglink

By 2050 we'll have an extra finger.

Many will be jubilant at this development, but reduced status value has negative downstream effects. Elites are less likely to adopt as many cultural innovations, which means fewer fashion trends to be diffused.

It's hard for me to see this as a very negative effect in that it's hard to imagine actual harm to anyone arising from there being fewer fashion trends.

I'm not quite sure about those W. David Marx extracts: he seems to see all culture through the lens of "basic human needs for status distinction" and "status value". That feels a bit reductive and too simplistic.

Thanks for the reminder to read Status and Culture. Since it's an ebook on my laptop I kinda forgot about it.

It does seem like AI is only going to continue reinforcing the dominance of big legacy monoculture IP, everything being regurgitated endlessly.

the thing is AI can only barf out things from the past, if it's going to continue to produce an increasingly higher and higher percentage of content then culture can't really "evolve" beyond past trends

what about k-pop?

Many will be jubilant at this development, but reduced status value has negative downstream effects. Elites are less likely to adopt as many cultural innovations, which means fewer fashion trends to be diffused.

This line does seem particularly ridiculous... It's like a mainstream economist, who is used to taking about benefits of the diffusion of innovation in the economy from new technologies and new products, suddenly moving onto covering fashion without thinking about what he is saying.

It was the Kurt Andersen book--came to mind as soon as I read the thread's original post. Was able to find a preview page online. "A fixed backward gaze"...

https://i.postimg.cc/K8Kb5J7p/kurt-1.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/8zqSXMtp/kurt-2.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/hj0RGwgv/kurt-3.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/brCXxtZj/kurt-4.jpg

Sorry if that's too large, but it won't be readable otherwise.

maybe Philip K. Dick was right and we are still living in the Roman Empire

k-pop feels like if the US had sent a Voyager-type probe to another continent in 1998 and filled it with the current hit records and then 20 years later we received an answer probe back filled with BTS and BLACKPINK songs

there's some great new pop music like that, stuff heavily influenced by say Seal and "Steal My Sunshine" and the brief era when Big Beat was cool, it doesn't feel nostalgic so much as it feels like a glimpse into an alternate present where a different set of trends carried on and were built upon

I think the 00's had its own vibe too...What I struggle with, however, is the "look" of the 10s or the 20s so far.

No surprise--clearly related to age. Kurt Andersen is 70, I'm 63; frogs turns 49 sometime this year. I'm good through the '90s at differentiating; the '00s are indistinguishable for me from the '10s or '20s.

I'm exactly the same with music and film; everything this century blurs together, everything before I have a strong sense of each decade.

In search of a calculator...frogs turns 39 this year.

00s for me are freak folk, CDr releases, New Weird America, etc, but I can't really think of specific fashion, just a mishmash of the Arthur magazine/Eclipse Records catalog/Aquarius aesthetic I guess

Fashion def doesn't look like the '10s or '00s to me, but it feels more like anything goes now, there are trends but it's also like 'pick your era' and it works.

(I'm not super fashionable but I work with a lot of younger people)

xp

It's really had to see how much this is a real problem, because people have been complaining about it for so long. I take it the passage from W. David Marx (thanks for that! must investigate) is responding to Simon Reynolds. In an interesting roundtable about Retromania, Carl Wilson says,

But even just to deal with the music listener’s experience, it’s always been the case that if you look closely enough at any “new” music you can identify the constituent parts. And the older you are, the more prone you are to do so. Simon underestimates how all the skill and knowledge he’s built up (and possibly the aging brain’s decreasing circuits for novelty) might cause him to pick music apart almost involuntarily, and how that makes less and less sound new. No doubt there were people in the early 1970s who heard the Stooges and said, “Well, that’s just the Velvet Underground plus a little Doors and Eddie Cochran,” or what have you? But for punk that band was foundational.

As far as general culture goes, young people in the 2020s seem waaaaaaaaaaay more politically aware than they were in the 90s. That may just be the ones I see though.

i definitely see a 'look' among younger people fwiw. gap ad neutral colors, baggy fits (skinny jeans are way way out), crew socks, broccoli hair, mom jeans. i hate it and that's ok.

Thrifting has reached a pinnacle I haven’t seen in my lifetime - I work w a lot of young ppl too (as coworkers and students) and the cache of secondhand clothing surpasses almost anything new afaict. It helps that baggy fit is in bc nothing is going to fit perfectly from the thrift anyway (at least rarely)
DIY clothing too — this has always been cool imo but it’s more widely recognized as such currently afaict.

The popularity of sustainable clothing choices also ensures that old things will be put together in new ways.

Incidentally I’ve also seen two male students get perms! You thought that dies in the 80s and you were wrong!

Oops *died

!!

mullets are hip again too, I have observed this at egg punk shows

also?
one word: mustaches

i have never in my life -- not even in the actual 70s/80s -- seen so many mustaches on young people

that too! agreed

the hippest barista dude at one of our local fancy coffee/pastry places rocks a bowl cut and a 'stache convincingly, looks like he stepped out of early 1967

in a review of the program Adolescence, a young UK viewer said that Andrew Tate was kind of a forgotten loser from forever ago, also the word 'incel' was unfamiliar because it's like from 2021, like a million years ago

The demographics of this forum basically ensure we won't get a credible answer to this. There's the potential stagnation and then there's the possible decline of "decades" as markers of popcultural time and then there's us all being old, which can manifest in feelings of decline or jadedness or conversly in a reluctance to buy into the premise because doing so will make us feel old, far too much to disentangle imo

I think part of the difficulty of pinpointing a 21st century "style" or cultural ethos or whatever is ever-increasing atomization. I mean, look at this post from sleeve:

00s for me are freak folk, CDr releases, New Weird America, etc, but I can't really think of specific fashion, just a mishmash of the Arthur magazine/Eclipse Records catalog/Aquarius aesthetic I guess

That was a very minor cult scene in one or two cities each in one or two countries. I could just as easily say that the 00s for me were Lamb Of God, Mastodon, Arch Enemy, Amon Amarth, and other metal bands who broke out at the turn of the century. Or that the 00s were about the free jazz/avant-garde/noise scene(s) in New York's East Village and Lower East Side. But I couldn't offer any educated thoughts about what was going on in hip-hop, which along with black and white R&B, were absolutely the dominant forms of US pop music, at that time. Or country. Or dance music and all of its thousands of microsubgenres. Or Latin pop. The absence of a monoculture makes it impossible to say "This decade was like this."

I've been noticing this a lot recently that it feels like men, from the ages of about 30 to maybe as old as 70, all dress pretty much the same these days.

I used to be a bit of a dandy but during covid and post-covid I'm kinda like 'ah what's the point'

The NYC girlies have a VERY definite look right now. It's comfy and casual but not athletic or athleisure, heavy on wide-legged or barrel legged jeans that are shortened to show socks, comfy sneakers, oversized menswear shirts and suit jackets. Make up is none/minimal or extremely artsy as opposed to "flattering" in a traditional way.

Is it a bit homogenous seen 100x from Soho to Bushwick and everywhere in between? Sure, of course. I like it though. It's more for the girls than the gaze.

And it's new. It's maybe a few years old, as a cohesive aesthetic? I'm definitely no expert but ime this isn't a previously available flavor of "casual" for women although obv it has influences.

feel like this guy is a key influence on the fashion of a subculture of younger london men

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/a/ab/Cooder.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20200112000320

xp You can pry my skinny jeans out of my cold dead hands obviously.

oops: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Cooder

xpost

it feels like men, from the ages of about 30 to maybe as old as 70, all dress pretty much the same these days.

Idk but from an American perspective a lot of men have been dressing like 5 year olds for so long that it's refreshing to see a 70yo aesthetic that at least a tradition of adulthood to recommend it.

The older years is a tough one to navigate though...Should old men switch to a more formal William S Burroughs anonymous banker gone slightly to seed look? Or keep going with the same fashion from their 30s and 40s - with a contingent risk of slightly ridiculous Paul Weller/Ronnie Wood-ism?

Idk but from an American perspective a lot of men have been dressing like 5 year olds for so long that it's refreshing to see a 70yo aesthetic that at least a tradition of adulthood to recommend it.

Oh I don't think he's saying the 30somethings are dressing like 70 year olds! I fear it's rather the other way around.

2000s - tight jeans, straightened hair, side-partings, rock'n'roll / moddish waifishness a la The Horrors/Noel Fielding, electroclash, wearing a skinny tie and a deconstructed blazer to the pub, that week when everyone bought shutter shades, rise-of-the-idiots-era hipsterdom, neon, trucker hats, straw hats, emo, what is now known as "indie sleaze"

2010s - that haircut / big beard combo pretty much everyone had, the tail end of hipsterdom, general turn towards monochromes, "health goth" etc (I don't remember anyone wearing patterns or especially bright colours - in fact I remember feeling a little out of place out in London wearing an orange cardigan once). Jeans and chinos got even skinnier and men would wear boat shoes and loafers without socks

2020s - much looser fits, a general tip towards 90s revivalist fashion with the return of the JNCO-style baggy jean and combats, in fact EVERYTHING looks like the 90s, much like the 90s looked like the 70s. Normcore becomes the norm due in part to lockdown. A studied slovenliness (this might just be where I live) in a same-but-different take on slackerdom. Baseball caps prevalent. Ed Hardy biking jackets.

That's how I generally remember it insofar as what teenagers and trendy people wore, but overall everyday people dressed basically the same through all three decades, possibly the 90s too.

Some of the quotes from books above are interesting.

There's an amusing anecdote about Ringo Starr in 1967 changing out of his hippyish clothes back into his black suit and boots before getting on a train to Leeds: "Flower Power hasn't hit the North yet".

But I guess nowadays affluent young people wear tracksuit bottoms that looks more or less the same as ones their working class peers would also wear - the only distinction might be the brand. Rich people don't aspire to look rich so much any more. And trackie bottoms are comfortable and fashionable, so why not?

in a review of the program Adolescence, a young UK viewer said that Andrew Tate was kind of a forgotten loser from forever ago, also the word 'incel' was unfamiliar because it's like from 2021, like a million years ago

― Andy the Grasshopper, Tuesday, 1 April 2025 22:24 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This doesn't surprise me at all. I was listening to a podcast earlier from 10 years ago and they dropped a casual joke about incel/red pill culture.

I remember watching Nathan Barley when it came out in 2005 and thinking they'd missed the bus and that
hipster culture had been down to death by then. I was wrong though: People carried on complaining about hipsters for years after that.

But the fact I'm seeing so many people say they had absolutely no prior clue about Tate, red-pills etc before watching Adolescence is telling of the fact you are either very aware about the online world, or blissfully ignorant.

Every lad under 25 in Bristol looks like Tears For Fears c1986

I have to agree that this thing only really works in retrospect, I no longer pretend to know what the fuck is going on anymore

I gave up on knowing what's going on in contemporary culture and fashion in the mid-1970s, when I was about 20, because I could never keep up. It always ran away faster than I could follow and it left no room for my deeper interests in ancient history and literature.

That photo of the four lads on a day out in skin tight chinos and loafers made an entire generation start wearing big white sports socks 24/7

There’s still a bunch of incel stuff banging around youth culture, but it’s totally out of context. Every boy does that mewing thing in photos.

1) incel fashion??
2) that what?

Mewing is this thing incels started doing where they rub their jaw line to try to get it to Chad ratio or whatever, but my son and his friends do it because they think it’s what cool YouTube guys do.

Incidentally I’ve also seen two male students get perms! You thought that dies in the 80s and you were wrong!

ha my soon to be 17yo nephew just got a perm for Eid, he wanted “some volume up top” he said

I haven’t seen it, but I watched the trailer for the 00s-set Netflix movie Time Cut and you can definitely tell that it was made later judging by the fact that all the teen actors are holding their discmans and flip phones like smartphones/tablets lol

early 2010s feels different from late 2010s to me- I barely listened to any western pop from the earlier part of the decade cause I hated all the cheap EDM/dubstep/shouty choruses or conversely, the adele/duffy retromania of the era. Radio became much more tolerable when gen z stars (eg Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish) began appearing on the scene. I think of Katy Perry-esque pop as a definite marker of the 2010s and the fact that her recent album flopped is a sign of how much things have changed… no one’s in the mood for girl boss feminism anymore

where have all the she ee ohs gone - the dustbin of herstory

no idea if true but I have this friend who was telling me about how the Beastie Boys had such a rarefied upbringing, their parents were artists, they had liberties and permissions to defy... basically whatever, they were encouraged to! expected to, even. so like, the only thing they could really do to piss off their parents was to act like out of control frat boys.

the BB's are a helpful case to talk about, maybe. they always appeared "stylish" in the sense that they adhered very strictly to the fashion rules and norms of the moment. that "mullet hunters" bit from their grand royal mag is a good example of this- not bending the rules to their will, but doubling down and pledging allegiance.

so to me, like, when we talk about "decades" in terms of visual style I think it's very unhelpful because a lot of stuff gets lost in the shuffle, and the most obvious one is continuity. we're mostly tracking the abrupt reversals of those kinds of rules, taboos being broken and becoming new norms. white socks with sandals. I'm looking in your direction, DL

there's a couple of things I think are sort of interesting. one is how "cool" style influences mainstream style in subtle ways that are not as imitable as "cool fashion", because they are so subtle. like we could probably catalog the varieties of "fake vintage" graphic tees of the early 00's, following on the garage rock revival and that 70's show and "make 7 up yours". of course, there's like the badly "distressed" graphics, which isn't even what I'm talking about... but if you look at xtreme sports graphics from 2003 as opposed to 1998, they seem to be informed by a vaguely "vintage" sensibility which is hilarious. and *that* is the thing that I can look at a photo and say, ok it's 2003.

another is how signifiers that had indicated disparate or opposing cultural allegiances in their "native" era become flattened out by the reviving generation and kind of neutered under the umbrella of '(decade) style' , that there's a loss of meaning, or literacy, or legibility of the more complex coded languages in play. and if you were there at the time, it's like listening to someone try to speak a language at a very advanced, kinda university professor level that they're not really conversant in. it's "funny"

to froggy's OP, the thing that's changed, to my eye- is that in the last... < 5 years, I wanna say... the kids seem to have almost cracked the code. all of a sudden, they're deploying the right vocab? nearly? or not quite, but suddenly it's uncanny instead of clumsy. the hyper-literacy of those symbols in a "revivalist" style is new, I think.

and also, even the apparent reversals I'm talking about are part of a continuity... i mean the biggest one in my lifetime in youth fashion was probably the "extra on portlandia hipster" style of skinny jeans and trucker hats and ironic facial hair... but it's easy to read it as an evolution of the 90's MTV-dominated "no" subculture, where the most dangerous thing was to say that you like something, or express your approval, because the thing could turn out to be deeply uncool, or the status could change very suddenly in any case. and so the only acceptable stance, in a way, was to send mixed signals about whether you liked something or not.

The Beasties were kind of ahead of the curve going full on 70s revival in 1989. I think a lot of what became hipster fashion/culture in the 90s was spawned by the Beasties, rather than them adhering to trends.

xp

Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cool.
Are you being sarcastic, dude?
I don't even know anymore.

xp not the point. if and when they predicted the 'distancing effect retro' thing of Spike Jonze and FreshJive and Spumco, what fashion laws were they breaking? following the rules doesn't preclude being ahread of the curve, it might actually help quite a bit to understand the rules way better than most ppl.

i was 5 years old and "fresh off the boat" in 1989; maybe it *was* 'unacceptable' then?

the kids seem to have almost cracked the code. all of a sudden, they're deploying the right vocab? nearly?

Not just an increased vocabulary- but speaking about yourself has changed, with greater self-awareness.Perhaps somewhat bizarrely, I’m wondering if this reflects a similar evolution of more sophistical and self-aware comedy in culture, and whether people are much ‘cooler’ in personal style now as a result.

* sophisticated

I saw someone in a Red Hot Chilli Peppers T shirt the other day. It doesn't matter where you are in the world or what you are doing, sooner or later you will see someone in a Red Hot Chilli Peppers T shirt. The person wearing this t shirt could be any age and any type of person.

This has been the case for many hundreds of years

The demographics of this forum basically ensure we won't get a credible answer to this. There's the potential stagnation and then there's the possible decline of "decades" as markers of popcultural time and then there's us all being old, which can manifest in feelings of decline or jadedness or conversly in a reluctance to buy into the premise because doing so will make us feel old, far too much to disentangle imo

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Tuesday, 1 April 2025 21:37 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This is the polite version of what I was going to post lol

The Beasties were kind of ahead of the curve going full on 70s revival in 1989. I think a lot of what became hipster fashion/culture in the 90s was spawned by the Beasties, rather than them adhering to trends.

― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Wednesday, 2 April 2025 03:39 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is otm. They were also talking-up eighties revivalist in 1998, which is one of the first times I'd heard anyone really being serious about that (before then it was considered "the decade fashion forgot")

From what I remember of the (excellent) Beastie Boys audiobook, the band had access to this big disused old house in the late-80s/early-90s with a closet full of incredible clothes from the 70s left there by the previous owner. They started dressing in those mens and womens clothes for a joke at first, and then wearing them to parties etc, and that's what led to things like the Sabotage video.

But it's precisely the fact you could make a video like Sabotage in 1994, which so keenly parodies the fashion of less-than 20 years before, which I think the OP is talking about.

There have been attempts to do this more recently. I'm thinking stuff like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt about someone who was stuck in a bunker for 15 years only to emerge into the present day. But beyond not knowing certain Katy Perry songs and being baffled by the amount of water people drink, it didn't seem to get a handle of the kind of culture shock one would get if the show had been set in 1990 and Kimmy had been stuck underground since 1975

Like, if you were to be invites to a Back-to-2005 fancy dress party, or do a stylised music video set 20 years ago, what would you wear? What sort of things would you show that would make people say "Ah yes that's the mid-2000s, what cool, strange, wistful, funny times..."

you need to watch Girls 5Eva, although that was more about 2000 than slightly after.
(mainly because it's really funny, not because it will show you the ways of 2005!)

Perhaps cultural trends linger longer, since people are younger for a longer part of life? Because of uncertainty and precarity and neoliberalism, basically. Like, I read Ulysses last year, and was stunned to discover Leopold Bloom is only 38! And his life is basically over, his daughter has moved out, his marriage has disintegrated, his career has found its holding pattern. I'm also 38, I got married last year, my son is 2, I finally got financially secure during the pandemic. The coolest album last year was made by someone who is 32, and honestly speaks a lot more about what my life is like now than what is was like fifteen years ago. Brat is probably the most 2024 album, but its sound is also incredibly 2017, and the PC Music aesthetic is so old, the label already folded. And only now is it becoming the monoculture!

So things might linger longer, because it takes longer to mature and find your spot?

Kinder, I shall - you were the one who introduced me to Kimmy Schmidt and I enjoyed the show a lot, so it's no shade to the show. I just struggled to really see what that show was telling us about the contrasts between the early-00s and the mid-2010s

Oh I don't think he's saying the 30somethings are dressing like 70 year olds! I fear it's rather the other way around.

Not so much that 30somethings are dressing like 70 year olds as they're not much variation going on over that age range - for me.

Another thing that's happened in my lifetime is that different nationalities have started dressing the same. Years ago you could tell a Germans from a mile away - no jokes please! I noticed people in Paris don't look very different from people in the UK these days - with the possible exception of middle aged men who still seem a bit more style conscious in Paris.

I meant to say "for men" there, not "for me".

The podcaster Blindboy did a very good episode using Cliff and Norm from Cheers as a key example. Two washed-up drunken divorcees who were only in their early 30s when the show first started.

He also uses the Tom Hanks 1988 film Big as an example and bellwether of changing times - "a grown man turning up to work in his trainers and - get this - enjoying ICE CREAM like a KID! Ridiculous!"

He posits that around the grunge era - possibly for socio-economic reasons and possibly as a response to the previous generations' selling-out of hippie ideology for yuppie lucre - gen xers started opting out of the adult world of suits and ties and rebelling against the idea of what it meant to be a grown up.

With house-buying age going up and up, younger adults were increasingly thrown into a form of arrested development, of eternal adolescence: One where a grown man having a pinball machine in his apartment wasn't seen as ridiculous and childish but the epitome of cool.

This was bought-into and encouraged by corporations like Starbucks and Google, who would infantilise workers with things "perks" such as pizza parties and casual Fridays instead of the salary increases thst might have afforded them a more traditional adult life: mortgage, car, marriage, kids

Many things already mentioned upthread scream « the 20s » to me : broccoli hairdo, baggy/short trousers, short white socks, big sneakers/running shoes… oh and I haven’t been in touch with what the kids are into for a while (almost 50yo) !

Is men between 35-70 dressing roughly the same a new thing? Have we just thrown out the old uniform and replaced it with Rab jackets and Superdry?

Oh and the kind of fluffy flannelette hoodie/jackets

What I struggle with, however, is the "look" of the 10s or the 20s so far.

idk this was a no-brainer for me: skinny jeans, tight(er) shirts and t-shirts, boat shoes; a general return to preppiness after about 15 years of gross cargo shorts and huge jeans and flip-flops.

Is men between 35-70 dressing roughly the same a new thing? Have we just thrown out the old uniform and replaced it with Rab jackets and Superdry?

Possibly? I'm sure old men did used to dress more like old men in the past though.

Yeah, my parents and their generation look and dress way better than my grandparents.

When I was a kid my grandfathers would always wear suits/ties whenever they went out even to casual/family gatherings. My parents (boomers) were much more casual and by the time my father retired he was basically wearing tracksuits only…

I gave up on knowing what's going on in contemporary culture and fashion in the mid-1970s, when I was about 20, because I could never keep up. It always ran away faster than I could follow and it left no room for my deeper interests in ancient history and literature.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

"No, thanks, no new t-shirt for me -- gotta read Theocritus."

“album covers” okay gramps lol

Leopold Bloom is only 38! And his life is basically over

You gotta read Finnegan's Wake, where he and Stephen form a musical duo called Ded-Bloom, and release the coolest album of 1903

where a grown man having a pinball machine in his apartment wasn't seen as ridiculous and childish but the epitome of cool.

UK version: Adrian Chiles - I have a urinal in my flat and it has changed my life.

there’s a certain subset of the larger group of middle-aged online autodidacts that we might call “sourdough dads” - a category i’m not entirely unfamiliar with - that has (re)discovered the tailored clothing of their fathers’ and grandfathers’ times. wools, tweeds, trousers that fit really well, suit jackets that “drape”, certain british and preppy styles that japanese men revived in the early 2000s as a niche and frankly obsessive pursuit akin to classic car restoration. for those men with the inclination for it and willingness to save for a “forever wardrobe” i think it’s probably quite a lot of fun. anyway as far as i can tell this has intersected with the hordes of “fedora guy” online weirdos at one end as well as genuinely thoughtful style writers like derek guy at the other end so it feels to me like there are going to be quite a lot of 70yos in the next couple of decades who look exactly like a 1950s grandfather would have

men with time and money?

aiui this menswear hobby doesn't require the kind of money that say classic car restoration would because these conservative mid-century styles are so anonymous that you can just wear the same thing most of the time. the goal often seems to be to be to find those two essential jackets, those two trousers that fit you great, etc and then you just, idk comment a lot on mens' style blogs for the rest of your life. there are the outlines of a kind of.... sustainableness to it? like, against fast fashion, cheap shit you throw or give away after a couple of years and towards a respect for materials, craft etc which seems like kind of a good direction to go in? idk.

One of my fashion/style colleagues has made drapey postwar British suiting a major part of his personal branding (yes, this is a thing in that industry) and he is maybe 35 tops. I approve, until some witless VC twigs what he’s wearing and buys up the brand to ruin through corner-cutting a la Dr. Marten’s.

from my club photos there were a lot of polka dot dresses, emo hair, moustache necklaces, badly fitting polyester dresses with leggings etc in 2005 ish.

I don't know if/how the death of the high st and pivot to online retail has changed things. certainly all the shops I used to reliably be able to find stuff in that suited me are dead and gone. everything online is a hodgepodge of uncertainty ime.

at my workplace it's loose trousers and trainers but I find it impossible to find loose trousers that don't make me look like a toddler. so i look like an outdated millennial in one of those insta videos instead.

i was literally thinking yesterday as I walked through the uni campus that students largely look/ dress exactly the same as they did in the early 2000s when I was one. This makes me happy!

but yes I agree that today is way different from when we were nostalgic about 70s in the 90s.
but I think everything has sort of been absorbed from then on rather than totally moving on? so, as others have said, you take a bit of whatever you like and it doesn't look that weird.

also between the 70s and the 90s you had the rise of new genres/subcultures-- punk, goth, indie, hip hop, rave/electronica, Metal. Since then it's just been refinements and combinations.

deflator thanks for the interesting posts itt!

I've seen discussions of the quickness of trends now, with the internet making things instantly visible and fast fashion offering quick adoption, things don't have time to sink in and spread out and be innovated or customized in different contexts etc. All things are hitting and subsequently burning out at the same time. Because everything is in fashion, nothing is in fashion, particularly.

punk, goth, indie, hip hop, rave/electronica, Metal

Totally. And the cultural contexts that spawned these subcultures by reaction aren't accessible anymore so adopting these style vocabularies now is all signifier and no...substance?

i was literally thinking yesterday as I walked through the uni campus that students largely look/ dress exactly the same as they did in the early 2000s when I was one. This makes me happy!

This is a weird thing because around 5-10 years ago I spotted a bunch of teenagers all wearing skate jeans, hoodies, wallet chains and Nirvana t-shirts, and remarked to myself that teenage fashion hadn't moved on at all. Then realised it had - it had just gone full circle back to the exact style my friends and I wore in the 90s.

I thought it was hilarious when literally every middle schooler started wearing Thrasher tshirts with no idea what it was. At first I was like holy shit is that kid very very cool? and then lol no

Yeah, that one really caught me by surprise. I kept thinking, are Vision Street Wear shirts gonna come back?

Think of the adolescents in Kids (1995).

feel like teens prob never stopped wearing nirvana tees or wallet chains or whatever. defo was still seeing this well into the 00s, see it less now but london teens kinda different to dublin.

yeah. i couldn't work out if those kids were either far behind the curve or well in front of it. they didn't seem especially "cool", it was just a little early for full-on 90s revivalism, but also they seemed much too young to be wearing Nirvana and Marilyn Manson t-shirts (Not that young people can't listen to older music, but all their Ts were of nineties alt/grunge/rock bands)

Not even sure what current rock bands kids would wear t-shirts of.

Feel like androgyny and the fact that every male-identifying person from any race under the age of 21 has a huge ‘fro are very solid markers of now, not so much the clothes.

and they let their hair grow past their collars or else go poofy back there

Has there been any kind of significant material technology change in apparel in the past few decades? The only thing I can point to is jeans got way more comfortable because some genius figured out how to add 1% spandex to it...

I've also noticed the odd gang of students roaming around the record shops dressed in extremely stylised 70s-type clothes; it's a very strong and striking look as though they've just walked off the set for Licorice Pizza or something; and very different to how other younger people dress, but they always seem very tight-knit like a gang or tribe of these very particular people

Yeah, there was a ton of those at the screening of Paper Moon I went to. Appropriate I guess, but really didn't expect a late afternoon showing of a Bodganovitch film to be such a fashion event.

yeah, I just went to a warehouse show in Oakland recently and there were a group of young women all dressed like Cherie Currie

beasties in 1998 were on top of the curve *at best*
https://i.discogs.com/zpRrLPlxDJWwqs5oA0kZ61eN6mFODcQRGi9j8jUVP8Q/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:595/w:595/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTE5NDYw/LTExNDgyNDU4ODAu/anBlZw.jpeg

You mean 12 years after their debut album? Can't stay cutting edge forever.

this Atari shit was ‘candy raver’ style. they took the “right” visual cues from rave/electro and blanded it down a little a lot, de-queered it substantially.

the "right" cues = if you flatten out 20-30 years of disparate 80’s revivals into a monolith (could we not do that plz), there’s stuff that fits and does not fit under the ‘futurist’ fashion umbrella of 1998. it’s more like a deck of cards, where at any given time certain cards are in play, and certain cards are not - and I think Jordan S was closest to the mark if he said that it feels like basically all of it is in play rn.

Hello Nasty also tied in with an old skool/b-boy revival that was going on then, which it fueled considerably (i def wouldn’t accuse them of riding that wave, since their album was *by far* the biggest thing associated with it). i remember a review in NME or another UK mag of a b-boy club night that summer, saying how lame (self-consciously “cool”) it was, so many tracksuits but not a naff headband in sight.

but Stuart Price in his JLC persona was willfully naff! he had that video which was a kind of heavy handed mission statement, about how 80’s dance pop music and style was the bright and fun antidote to the drabness of the moment. here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69CCsfaZlA

this is like the anti-Spike Jonze video, where like instead of doing a send up of a recognizably out of date style, he’s deploying it as a weapon to point out the shortcomings of a current fashion. to say that something like this was “ahead of the curve”, or “behind the curve” would be wrong missing the point that it’s deliberately out of step in its choice of some of the reference material. the thing that’s interesting to me i guess is how in other ways, he’s following enough of a fashion, and strictly enough, to get away with that…

I've been working at colleges for 20 years and I don't see much difference in the way the students dress over that time. If anything it's just more casual, or people dress like they're on the way to gym.

complete opposite where i live (adjacent to Columbia U campus). 10 years ago all the CU students dressed like fucking dorks J Crew catalog staples and Columbia/Patagonia fleeces and New Balance sneakers, and they all wore their pajamas to the supermarket. And now it's like a fashion show, they all look really "cool", they are all dressed up wherever they go.

might have something to do with economic inequality

Also makes sense that those Columbia kids would've had their mid-adolescence during the pandemic and can dress up and go out now.

Related to all of this, I re-watched Something Wild a year or two ago and was struck by how much of that movie has young 1980s adults in a world of 1950s/60s kitsch. They even go thrifting, and that's where Jeff Daniels gets his bright-blue early-60s suit.

This is a weird thing because around 5-10 years ago I spotted a bunch of teenagers all wearing skate jeans, hoodies, wallet chains and Nirvana t-shirts, and remarked to myself that teenage fashion hadn't moved on at all. Then realised it had - it had just gone full circle back to the exact style my friends and I wore in the 90s.

Yeah, it was that as well as the more bland stuff, I guess baggier/flared jeans make it more similar after we've had so many years of skinnies. But like some 60s ish Belle & Sebastian types, nu-metal types.

When I was at college in the late 90s there was a sudden fashion (with the girls) for dark brown, smart/tailored ish (but synthetic) kind of clothes, like brown slacks or those skirt-trousers, all in dark brown. Haven't particularly seen that revived. Probably lots of brown shades of makeup.
Actually I wonder if this was a Posh Spice thing? Or a bit Rachel from Friends. Definitely late 90s rather than 2005 though.

Apparently The Gap is back in a big way, and the stock has revalued... I walk by a Gap in Oakland all the time and I'm not sure I've ever seen a single shopper in there, it's always stunning that they haven't shuttered it yet

Am I just getting old and not noticing the things happening right under my nose?

there have more microcultures now, but generally: yes

there are, rather. my brain's cooked

yeah the idea there are no subcultures left or whatever is kinda amusing

Most of them are neo-fascist tho

Or organized around clown rappers

We probably all need this:

https://lifehacker.com/entertainment/what-is-the-80-20-rule-the-out-of-touch-adults-guide-to-kid-culture?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

Unfortunately I'm more than online enough to know about incels, mewing, and more.

Do current subcultural aesthetics have names? What are some contemporary recognizable ones, in the opinion of this thread? I feel like there's a lot of homogeneity although probably it's no worse than when everyone wore Columbia ski jackets in the 90s but at least they had colors. The current reign of neutrals is notable.

That’s the point the article is from 2002

The last named one that I can recall is VSCO girl and I know that's at least a few years out of date now.

lol

Dark academia is a literary aesthetic[1] [2] and subculture[3] concerned with higher education, the arts, and literature, or an idealised version thereof. The aesthetic centres on traditional educational clothing, interior design, activities such as writing and poetry, ancient art, and classic literature, as well as classical Greek and Collegiate Gothic architecture.[4] The trend emerged on social media site Tumblr in 2015, before being popularised by adolescents and young adults in the late 2010s and early 2020s, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

First time my wife told me about dark academia I thought she was talking about those Dark Enlightenment dorks and I was so confused.

there's also "that girl"
one of my students did a whole research project about it
i had no idea what she was talking about initially (though i did not go so far as to think it had anything to do with marlo thomas)

!!!!!! What's the style vocabulary of "that girl"??

there's this https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/That_Girl

and a whole list of different aesthetics at that same site https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Aesthetics

aiui it comes from "i want to be like *that girl*" and is primarily aspirational

(see also: "clean girl")

that list of aesthetics is hilarious. i clicked on C to find clean girl and found coastal grandmother
lol

is this like the young woman on instagram that eats raw cow livers and hamburger?

thoughts:

- there's a bunch of 90s nostalgia/rethinking now, but it took much longer than the previous 20 year cycles to articulate itself
- Brexit/Trump abdication of soft power is going to make pop culture even more decentralized and less anglo than all the changes social media wrought. Whatever centers of gravity ran from post WWII to Covid are totally gone.
- of course 20 somethings are rethinking the culture of their childhood/edge of memory. I see a recontextualizing of Riot Grrl with Kim Possible/Britney Spears midriff + baggy around.
- some subcultures remain the same in spirit, but the looks have totally changed. Like crusty local punk shows have mullets and mustaches now, but the politics and guitars have continuity. No one is gonna sport a 2005 emo haircut right now after the geometry got associated with the Karen haircut, though teased out Banshees/Cure bangs still hide the soul. I did a bill where one frontman had a beard, gelatined up spikes, leather hotpants. It certainly read as old punk, but also now.
- with rock, having a Beatles phase, or a Pink Floyd or Joy Division phase seems to imply the same introverted deep diving they meant 30 years ago, only more so. No more Doors phases though, right?

That list is amazing. Tag yourself I'm Tomato Girl Summer.

I have assumed that my current perception of all historical subcultures currently having existing current presence as micro to mid subcultural realities is partly due to my age. But yeah, also due greatly to the current hyper-communicative and hyper-referential nature of our technical capacities. All of cultural history of from the say the 50s to now has been made verrry easily accessible and exploitable. There is no cost or difficulty to being a hipster or cool or street or trend finding at all. Even the manufacturing of relict and distressed reproductions is needed because cool old shit never gets to the thrift shops, ppl buy them to corner any market.

i think i am cottagegore

i want there to be an aesthetic called bloodthirsty grandmother and it's just older women angrily eating meat with their hands

Cottagecore is HUGE afaict.

i said cottageGORE

there's blood on my pinafore halp

If you can dream it you can be it

Ha i typed out that whole load of crap of mine before LL placed those links but that is amazing now i see it.

We have urban gorpcore in London (if you own Salomons, you’re one foot in).

there's also a youthful latino 50s rockabilly neo-lowrider thing going on SOCAL and probably elsewhere

I was scrolling down and saw “Chicago Landowner” and I was whatthefuckisthat. I scrolled back up and it was gone, I think I misread Chicano Lowrider, but maybe I should yknow, create chicago landowner

Style vocabulary of Chicago Landowner:
* Grills in shorts year round
* ...

Lol

Now that i know about the frutigerian nature of the 00s early 10s the world feels different

Is there an ebike or scooter aesthetic (that isn't mallcop)?

I'm sure there's a cute name for the combination of clothes + eyeglasses + short beard that I tend to wear as my daily garb. I have no idea what that name is, but I must have a slot I fit into, since it seems like everything is a slot and has a name now.

Oh you mean Non-Nude Four Eyes Beardo?

bingo!

there's a bunch of 90s nostalgia/rethinking now, but it took much longer than the previous 20 year cycles to articulate itself

I watched The Player recently and thought of how completely gone now is the Armani suit + tortoise-shell glasses + optional suspenders. Maybe today's thrifters will bring it back.

lol @ "Chicago Landowner"

What I struggle with, however, is the "look" of the 10s or the 20s so far. Certainly there are folks born in 2006 who may one day attend a "10s night" at a bar, but what exactly are the signifiers of that decade?

so i'm hopelessly out of touch of course but one of the rules i thought got reversed for the 2010's was- when I was growing up it was slightly awkward or embarrassing to wear, like, a bright shiny white new pair of sneakers, or to go out with fresh new haircut with very clean edges, you might even wear a hat because it needed a couple of weeks' growth to look softer and more "lived in"

and for a while the trend, which has reversed or is reversing again, was for everything to look blindingly, impossibly fresh and new.

there are also certain cuts which feel 'of the moment' - some version of those aggressively tapered joggers which are almost like hammer pants on top, skinny jeans on the bottom that looked slightly edgy 5-10 years ago have become "normal sweatpants"

never forget

tight black leggings and big foofy boots

there's a bunch of 90s nostalgia/rethinking now, but it took much longer than the previous 20 year cycles to articulate itself

I watched The Player recently and thought of how completely gone now is the Armani suit + tortoise-shell glasses + optional suspenders. Maybe today's thrifters will bring it back.

― the way out of (Eazy), Wednesday, April 2, 2025 4:21 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I think cheaply done 90's repro already made up most of the stock at UO and those kind of mall stores 10 years ago, but the deck is constantly being reshuffled

what what does I.F. have to do with the beastie boys??

which strands of 80s style in particular they were interested in reviving as of the late 90's and whether these were already fashionable/in curculation

https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images1/1/0712/28/original-print-beastie-boys-vs-space_1_c62b30648fb4f1cdfc547fd9bbb868a4.jpg

I see

like another 2010's thing was logomania-derived "high fashion streetwear" plastered with Gucci and LV etc

and 90's repro clothing 10 years ago vs. now relied much more on logos and branding to evoke the time period, so Stussy and Kappa were especially prominent (in the US, Kappa much more so than it ever had been in the 90's)

also the original garments were more expensively made, it's much cheaper to copy an old graphic than to being back the contrast ribbing and piping and develop heavier fabrics.

Yeah those rugby shirts in the 80s and 90s were so real. I still have things TODAY from the 90s that aren't even threadbare.

the desirable streetwear thing feels pretty comprehensively de- or re-coopted by niche grassroots brands that do “drops” via social media and sell out instantly eg corteiz. the quality on these tends to be VERY high. my kids both have a couple of sweatpants from brands like this and they are so thick they take forever to dry lol

see, i'm so out if the loop (thank god(.

it's again continuity, where is that episode of Squirt TV where the kid went to 555 Soul and Supreme flagship store openings on Lafayette st and heckled the shoppers buying their $200 sweatshirts

yea, i still have clothes i wore in the 90's

The BIG LOGO thing started around the turn of the century as portrayed in a big cover story in the Face. I associate the noughties with BIG LOGOS, Burberry reboot, indie sleaze, Cyberdog, really expensive jeans/Levi’s twist, electroclash, the Rachel Zoe size zero women channeling Talitha Getty thing, trucker hat hipsters, men who aspired to look like Terry Richardson-style scumbags, skinny jeans ballet flats, Juicy Couture, yada yada

2010s so far I’ve identified Breton tops and the Comme des Garçons logo on Converse.

The kind of interesting thing about so many of the online ‘aesthetics’ (that girl, clean girl, hot girl, art ho, etc) is how little visual symbolism there is beyond vague terms like ‘fresh’ and ‘minimal’ - they’re much more focused on mindset, loose ideas of empowerment, etc.

There are lots of clear 2020s trends, though - sportswear-as-fashion (Wales Bonner, Martine Rose, American celebrities wearing Arsenal kits, etc), preppy (Sporty and Rich, tennis skirts, tabis to make it less boring, etc), luxury resort-casual (Casablanca, Jacquemus, Marine Serré, etc), long gorpcore / skiwear, Ssense Techno Viking (Rick Owens, Heliot Emil), thrifted Techno Viking (JNCO, etc), workwear (Carhartt, etc), the Vetements / recent Balenciaga aesthetic a lot of people buy into 100%, and so on. None of it is completely novel.

There are lots of really cool, innovative things happening with runway shows but so much of it exists in the same space as concept cars. Walk around the main luxury shopping areas in NY, London, Milan, etc and it’s pretty much ‘quiet luxury’, gorpcore and dull minimalism, in practice.

x-post

When was the men's drop crotch jeans era? The other massively unflattering popular look was low-hung jeans around the top of the thighs, held precariously in place with a belt, displaying designer underwear.

Started in the ‘90s (Calvin Klein) but big noughties energy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otCpCn0l4Wo

Oh wait, you meant jeans...

trousers sagging completely off your butt remains stubbornly popular among london kids

(boys, exclusively)

Think Bob means the very specifically belted to a certain height so at the back the boxer shorts are very visible, not like people wearing designer underwear slightly over the jean at the front.

Once again, the waistband of highly branded men’s underwear showing above the jeans started in the 1990s. That saggy-ass ‘nappy effect’ was 2000s but persists to this day.

Yes that's what I'm saying, I don't think the two are the same, one was like widespread in the nineties, the other was a lot more specific at a different time.

I agree with this thread's premise that IRL culture/fashion seems to be in a holding pattern relatively speaking, but online culture has been rapidly changing and is where aesthetics seem to have evolved more. The last couple decades people have been more online overall, and as such, devoting more thinking, communication, and expression there than in the real world. Cultural cache is going viral. Memes are the new clothing. The algorithm is the gatekeeper.

I dunno if I buy that - a lot of online culture is image based, streaming, YouTube, instagram influencers etc. Dressing up is as good a way as any to build your brand in those online spaces, it follows that the stuff they'd rock in those contexts would then filter through to irl no?

In this context the last 2.5 decades are actually quite distinct in their aesthetics and "vibe":

- 00's internet is new and now mainstream; a transition decade that births social media and smart phones, and commoditizes music through piracy and file sharing
- 10's social media is now mainstream; smart phones are now essential to daily life; streaming is now mainstream (both music and film) and most people are performing most social activities online, from dating to gaming. Politics are forever changed due to social media's ability to radicalize and be easily manipulated via algorithms.
- 20's pandemic, AI and neo-fascism, etc etc

Rather than look at photos of young people on college campuses, look at screen shots of web sites or mobile phone apps over the same decades. Huge differences with significant aesthetic changes!

xp yes and YouTube videos have aesthetic differences over the decades. Instagram wasn't even around in the 00's. Today you have AI slop to contend with. And the types of videos people make, how they make them and what the goals are have also evolved significantly I feel.

On the music front, I feel that while genres and styles may not have evolved as much as in past decades, production and mixing certainly has - and I feel a lot of music across nearly every genre - has evolved to a much more headphone/smartphone oriented production format, with an emphasis on V shaped EQ curves enhancing sub bass and highs. The 00's saw an era of terrible brick wall limiting. Streaming sites helped ease that trend with normalized volume leveling.

I'm kinda pulling from a grab bag here, but I feel there's been significant trends and cultural changes, but just not in the traditional aesthetic sense of "clothes", "interiors", "hairdos" and "songs" as much.

trousers sagging completely off your butt remains stubbornly popular among london kids

Absolutely!

yes and YouTube videos have aesthetic differences over the decades.

Yes but my question was, why wouldn't the presentation of the humans on camera be part of that?

For sure, but I would ask, the clothes are no longer as important a means of conveying cultural cache in a YouTube video.

Like the trend of ubiquitous online porn consumption, OnlyFans, etc, these have to factor in the mix too. This is all very 21st century culture.

No clothes involved there (well maybe at times!)

I think a thread overly focusing on fashion and cultural cache from a pre-00's perspective would be pretty amusing (and ironic) to a young person today. Would love to hear a take from someone about the age of 30 on how they view the 00's 10's and 20's so far and their aesthetic differences in all aspects of life (including online)

I guess at some point people flipped from more often talking about stuff they do in real life online to talking about stuff they do online in real life. Or something along those lines, obviously varying based on age and other factors.

Beauty trends are so starkly their own thing that hasn’t really been mentioned itt. Sure, you can look at the Kardashians and their aesthetic has been dominant in the rise and fall of Instagram face and all that. But surgery and fillers and interventions for increasingly younger people are so everyday now. Like I can go to a supermarket and come face to face with at least one woman with obvious lip fillers (and a function of work when you are not rich is that they want it to be obvious when they can afford it too). Even stuff like “clean girl”/supposed minimalism is very surface level because it’s built on a foundation of

…thumb slipped and I hit enter before I intended to. Even stuff like “clean girl/minimalism” aesthetic is very misleading because it’s built on so much money. The influencers pushing “clean girl” have lip fillers, buccal fat removed, veneers, highly expensive skincare regimes and there’s a real shift towards spending a TON of money on the facial interventions so you can always look a certain way at all times. You wake up and your eyes are wide open from your mini brow lift, your lips are always plump, your skin is perfectly tight because you paid someone to make it that way - it’s kind of inhuman. Never look tired, never look sad, never look anything except blank. It’s all so samey - all these women have huge pillowy lips and fox eye lifts and use the same filters. Jessica deFino covers this all on her substack, here’s a better way of explaining it from a recent post:

https://jessicadefino.substack.com/p/facial-harmonization-trend

From a separate post by the same author:

Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant Saran Wrap when she preached about preservation! — because exfoliating is easier than engaging in political action.

Reading this thread now and:

"It's been discussed many times over here but there seems to be so little new these days. What will people remember from this decade?"

Maybe we should try and group decades into eras. Maybe its because I am used to seeing it but decades by themselves are a fairly boring way of looking at things.

Beginning to consume culture as I did in the 90s I found there was very little that was new -- in terms of new forms -- in the worlds of music, film, novels, even back then. With even more accrued knowledge of the past that hasn't changed. Very little that would be truly notable.

But if you grouped things from say late 80s to now there might be some interesting patterns from other groupings of decades.

Sorry, I actually found the post I was referencing in much of the above:

Today’s five-minute face — as modeled by beauty influencers, editors, and entrepreneurs — is predicated on the behind-the-scenes beauty work of skin care products, cosmetic procedures, and plastic surgeries. A more fitting moniker, Nudson suggested, might be “the five thousand dollar face.”

As writer Jan Selby explained in a recent tweet, “The rich are raising the bar for people who will never be able to afford what’s fast becoming a new, much more oppressive and expensive, standard for beauty.”

The products have gotten more popular, the under-the-radar interventions have gotten more extreme, the jargon (“clean girl,” “looking expensive”) is more overtly classist. That the look is still trending with consumers now — in an era of protests for women’s rights and walkouts for LGBTQ+ rights; in the midst of a labor revolution, a union revival, and the anti-“girlboss;” in a culture seemingly confronting the systemic oppression of marginalized communities head-on (or at least on Twitter) — is odd, to say the least. Adopting an aesthetic of class performance and invisible labor feels behind the times. It begs the question: Why is “striving for beauty” the only issue dismissed as “a rational choice in a world that values it so highly”?

I feel like 90s revival culture has been going on for longer than the 1990s now – I remember going to a club night called “Yo! Remember the 90s?” – and that was in, er, 2008. It feels like teens have been wearing magic eye hippy clothes and 90s casual fashions since well before the pandemic.

At the same time, I remember Select magazine publishing a 1980s issue when I was a teenager, and me and a mate laughing at the fashions and the dodgy colours, and that was in maybe 1993? I remember watching Elton John‘s Passenger video and thinking, god this is so dated and idiotic and SO OLD, and it was probably only eight or nine years after the video came out. It’s like when the Stone Roses took six whole years between albums and we all thought they’ve gotten old and died. Life passes quickly, but it really starts to zoom by once you hit your 30s, so it feels like there’s less time to differentiate between eras because everything moves so quickly.

Also personally I am much broker than I was when I lived with my parents, or my parents were at my age, which is why I have two pairs of jeans from Marks & Spencer’s that I haven’t replaced in a perhaps embarrassingly long time.

Hell, I remember 1980s revivals in 1993.

Yeah, if we put the 80's revival as really reaching the mainstream around 2002, when GTA: Vice City came out (which can be argued with - I wasn't there for Alfred's 1993 80's revival due to being 8 years old but can def attest 80's parties were EVERYWHERE by 1998, electroclash started in 99) and end it with the first season of Stranger Things and synthwave in 2016 (likewise, I think the City Pop revival at least lasted a bit longer than that) that's almost a decade and a half. 90's revival always seemed strangely muted to me in comparison, enough so that I started a thread on it here some time ago, but I accept this is partially because following pop culture is a young man's game and I don't have children.

part of aging is your own aesthetic kind of becoming a blur of all the different things you owned/styled/stepped into over different eras combined with whatever you view as adult/professional/practical. if you go to a teen, they may or may not have a strong opinion on aesthetics but they’re more aware in general because the majority of their lives, they’ve had a whole new wardrobe every few years because they were actual children

the cyclical nature of fashion, and to an extent culture, means you’re less likely to see many things as shifts because once you hit your 40s, you’ve lived through similar fashions trends a couple times!

the entire bit where olds like myself get annoyed by kids wearing Nirvana t-shirts because it’s more of a fashion brand than a band keeps making me think (and post about) how in the early to mid 90s the Grateful Dead shirts with the dancing bears were very popular among my peers and absolutely none of those kids were listening to that band

It was pretty easy to be nostalgic about the early 80s in the early 90s because New Wave had basically been dead and buried for years at that point.

this probably says more about the changing demographics of radio listening but Kisstory (a retro pop station in the UK) is now a bigger station than the Kiss FM flagship (current pop)

heard an interesting talk today from the Swedish Radio youth station P3. they realised that young people don’t only like “young” music. they like oldies, classical, current affairs, news etc. AND from the other direction it’s not just young people who like current pop music. so they’re on a bit of a journey to become a station for “intelligent listening” for a wider range of ages and genres

I suppose there are Drill fans who think of 2015 Drill as a completely different thing though.

a producer at this talk says “today we’re competing against the greatest music ever made”

people don’t go away, they have interminable careers. they don’t make way for the new

xp to mh re band t-shirts, yeah this was absolutely a thing in the early 90s too, I remember friends at school wearing t-shirts by bands just because they liked the design on it

also yeah a club I went to at uni claimed to have the first 80s night in the UK which started in 1991, but played mostly all new wave and new romantic music so not a lot after about 1985

the entire bit where olds like myself get annoyed by kids wearing Nirvana t-shirts because it’s more of a fashion brand than a band keeps making me think (and post about) how in the early to mid 90s the Grateful Dead shirts with the dancing bears were very popular among my peers and absolutely none of those kids were listening to that band

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Thursday, April 3, 2025 8:27 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah it blew my mind to find out that bear was associated with a band that basically nobody in my class was listening to. I remember asking someone once I found out "so are you into the Grateful Dead?" and he was like "what?"

heard an interesting talk today from the Swedish Radio youth station P3. they realised that young people don’t only like “young” music. they like oldies, classical, current affairs, news etc. AND from the other direction it’s not just young people who like current pop music. so they’re on a bit of a journey to become a station for “intelligent listening” for a wider range of ages and genres

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, April 3, 2025 8:28 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

young people definitely seem way more informed than they were in my day. granted we live in much wilder times but I see young folks turning up at local protests and think...my generation never would've done this. and yes they have better music taste than we did, I mean of course they do, 99.9% of recorded music is available at their fingerprints, they don't have to read articles in Spin about Kraftwerk and think "gee, wonder what that sounds like"

I did have an interesting conversation with a young bartender at the bar I DJ at...I think he's barely 21, I asked him if he could name the members of the Beatles and he was like "uhh, is there a Paul?" but he did know about Camel and King Crimson and seemed to indicate that a lot of his friends were listening to stuff like that. he didn't know the members but he named a lot of songs they were into. one time when I was DJing a young woman who didn't even look old enough to drink requested I play something from Mint Jams. I can't even imagine the people I went to high school with in 2003 knowing that shit.

My mate who works at a charity shop overheard two kids talking while looking at a Nirvana t-shirt and one of them said "I'd really love to wear that but I can't, I don't know the band" so if anything today's kids are over conscientious!

pretty amazing how utterly irrelevant the beatles feel, musically, in 2025

i tend to think of a “short 80s” - the 70s lasted until thriller and 1999 came out in autumn of 1982, and the 90s started once house music landed in like 1987/8

pretty amazing how utterly irrelevant the beatles feel, musically, in 2025

There are some things to be grateful for in 2025 after all.

You say this now but I just saw someone on Reddit saying

the movie was my first time properly hearing Bob Dylan’s music and now I’ve made my quarter life crisis being obsessed with his life and art

https://www.reddit.com/r/bobdylan/s/D467GXAFyt

i can believe that of noted non-beatle bob dylan

Well but there's 4 Beatle biopics coming so RINGOMANIA is just around the corner for Gen Z.

can't be worse than how much they love Queen tbh

I'd rather they liked Queen tbh.

gyac I haven't replied to your posts because I know nothing about this/have nothing to add but they were v interesting and informative!

cosine

I see nerdy Zoomers in Beatles t-shirts all the time, nearly as much as Nirvana. But the sound is totally decoupled from the present for sure. This is more like wearing those 80s t-shrits with charactatures of Virginia Woolf or Samuel Beckett (now that I look it up they were by David Levine for NY Review of Books.) Or maybe just a Le Mis or Cats t-shirt.

I had a very stylish student worker who wore a leather jacket with patches of these bands: Motorhead, Ramones, Iron Maiden, Misfits. Not sure if she actually listened to any of them.

In 1988 a friend of mine bought a shoulder-width Iron Maiden patch and ironed it onto his jacket having never heard the band; he wound up becoming the most committed Iron Maiden fan I’ve ever known and started his own metal band where he sang in a screaming falsetto very similar to Bruce Dickenson’s

The advent of online "aesthetics", as they're known, taking over from traditional models of music and fashion subcultures is interesting.

Whereas once you might have sought identity through dressing goth or listening to hip-hop or getting into a particular designer's look etc, Aesthetics are more like an internal, theoretical version of that.

It's all about vibes - more about a kind of mental Pinterest board of images than an actual physical lifestyle one adheres to. So you might wake up one morning feeling a bit Cottagegore. But you don't get Cottagegore nightclubs, or even necessarily Cottagegore clothing. It doesn't even have to be a visual aesthetic.

And the net is wide open to invent your own aesthetic, perhaps based on a specific scene from an old TV show, or a specific collection of old junk you found in a charity shop, or anything that's taking up space in your head.

I remember seeing something a while ago on the Aesthetics Wiki called Mommy-On-The-Phonecore which is all about harking back to the uncanny frustration one would might feel as an attention-starved kid when your mum was on the phone to a friend and doing that specifically aspirated "yyUUUUH yyUUUHH yyuUUUUhH" sound mums make when they're agreeing with someone.

And I'm kind of into it. I do it myself when I'm making "Mood" playlists. I have a whole playlist of drowsy music that makes me think of a dialtone in a hotel room late at night. I have a playlist of music that makes me think of a forest floor with mushrooms growing out of it. I have one that sounds like an astral blanket far out on the milky way. Another that is like a smoggy haunted jazz lounge at 3am. These are all ways for me to express fictional universes in my imagination that don't really exist.

I don't think you'd have been able to do this without the internet, and arguably (for better or worse), things like this will be easily abetted by AI in that it's very good at snapping-together various bits of imagery like Lego. If you wake up having dreamt of a superhero comic in the style of a Mughal artwork, you could recreate it in seconds and call it an aesthetic.

I still think about the funniest "young person wears cool-looking band t-shirt" incident among my peers. A friend of mine in college, who was a couple years younger and not ignorant of music at all, very tuned into going to local shows and her dad was a musician, showed up at my apartment wearing a Foreigner t-shirt

It would be very cool to find a trove of 80s concert t-shirts, but they were made of such shoddy material I'm they've all disintegrated by now.

I feel like 90s revival culture has been going on for longer than the 1990s now – I remember going to a club night called “Yo! Remember the 90s?” – and that was in, er, 2008. It feels like teens have been wearing magic eye hippy clothes and 90s casual fashions since well before the pandemic.

To me, the eighties revival was much more strongly felt and also went on longer than the decade itself. As Andrew Hickey might say, there's no such thing as "firsts", but I'd say the 80s revival started around 2001 with electroclash/DFA/2ManyDJs and continued well into the next decade with bands like Haim doing an updated take of 'Get Close'-era Pretenders. It was so pervasive that much of the 2000s/early-2010s could be defined by its disinterment of eighties sounds and tropes

And as we're now well into a time when people are looking back to the 2000s for inspiration, it's feasible that they'd be getting a kind-of third hand facsimile of 80s aestheticism. I'm trying to think of an analogue for 90s indie music being inspired by 60s pop music and in-turn 1930s music hall. Can't think of a 90s band inspired by stuff like Winchester Cathedral though

maybe Philip K. Dick was right and we are still living in the Roman Empire

― sleeve

in a sense i think he _was_ right! he just had a pretty distinct "science fiction" way of looking at things. there's a through-line of western patriarchal imperialism that saw its apotheosis in that empire... america foundationally copied the roman republic, but in functional terms, the "republic" was an oligarchial imperialist state prone to appointing "dictators" whenever they had a war to fight. his "black iron prison" is also pretty similar to the philosophical idea of the panopticon. idk, did he ever read foucault? he might've liked foucault.

i have never in my life -- not even in the actual 70s/80s -- seen so many mustaches on young people

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera)

moustaches are one of the best signifiers of gender i know these days!

mullets are hip again too, I have observed this at egg punk shows

― sleeve

hadn't heard the phrase "egg punk", turns out it's what used to be known as "jimmy punk". i was going to make a snarky comment like "what, are the "guys" gonna be on estrogen in five years?", and it turns out that actually probably yes for a lot of them.

no idea if true but I have this friend who was telling me about how the Beastie Boys had such a rarefied upbringing, their parents were artists, they had liberties and permissions to defy... basically whatever, they were encouraged to! expected to, even. so like, the only thing they could really do to piss off their parents was to act like out of control frat boys.

the BB's are a helpful case to talk about, maybe. they always appeared "stylish" in the sense that they adhered very strictly to the fashion rules and norms of the moment. that "mullet hunters" bit from their grand royal mag is a good example of this- not bending the rules to their will, but doubling down and pledging allegiance.

― doe on a hill (Deflatormouse)

see i don't read the beasties the same way at all! idk what brought on the "out of control frat boys" aspect of their work - it definitely was there - but to me, "conformity" wasn't really part of it. they were a hardcore punk band in new york whose name was inspired by Bad Brains... kate schellenbach was their drummer, they were being recorded by donna lee parsons, whose GRS they later paid for... i don't see them at all as pledging allegiance to social rules!

Has there been any kind of significant material technology change in apparel in the past few decades? The only thing I can point to is jeans got way more comfortable because some genius figured out how to add 1% spandex to it...

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, April 2, 2025 9:42 AM (yesterday)

oh my fucking god, yes, it's not just jeans, underwear is so much more comfortable than it used to be

there's this https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/That_Girl

and a whole list of different aesthetics at that same site https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Aesthetics

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera)

the aesthetics wiki is _so fascinating_, i found dead aesthetics i'd embodied while having no idea they existed, like dollangangercore

turns out half of my "aesthetics" are basically trauma responses, with is a little bit awkward

- with rock, having a Beatles phase, or a Pink Floyd or Joy Division phase seems to imply the same introverted deep diving they meant 30 years ago, only more so. No more Doors phases though, right?

― Theracane Gratifaction (bendy)

bad(?) news, the doors are 'in' again

Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant Saran Wrap when she preached about preservation! — because exfoliating is easier than engaging in political action.

ok, that quote just makes me think of the Fugs song about "Saran Wrap"

i saw an old person driving a car with a license plate that said "420 FUG" last week
pretty sure it was a custom plate

re: aesthetics:

Byrne was pretty prescient in this thinking about where society was headed. In 1979, he told NME,

There will be chronic food shortages and gas shortages and people will live in hovels. Paradoxically, they’ll be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches. Calculators will be cheap. It’ll be as easy to hook up your computer with a central television bank as it is to get the week’s groceries. I think we’ll be cushioned by amazing technological development and sitting on Salvation Army furniture. Everything else will be crumbling. Government surveillance becomes inevitable because there’s this dilemma when you have an increase in information storage. A lot of it is for your convenience – but as more information gets on file it’s bound to be misused."

https://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_nme-jul79.html

it's this idea of "salvation army furniture" that has me thinking about the apparent absence of the "novel" in aesthetics. i also think that the lack of "third spaces" plays into it. ok great i was never going to go to an arthur murray dance studio or a polka night, but on the internet? sure, why not? i tried to be a mainline protestant for a while, and one of the hardest things about it was how often i was one of the youngest people there, despite being 40. i don't have much in common with 20 year olds, and 20 year olds don't have much in common with me!

To me, the eighties revival was much more strongly felt and also went on longer than the decade itself. As Andrew Hickey might say, there's no such thing as "firsts", but I'd say the 80s revival started around 2001 with electroclash/DFA/2ManyDJs and continued well into the next decade with bands like Haim doing an updated take of 'Get Close'-era Pretenders. It was so pervasive that much of the 2000s/early-2010s could be defined by its disinterment of eighties sounds and tropes

― DLC Soundsystem (dog latin),

I don't disagree with any of what you wrote, but I have firm memories of the first '80s comps (Living in Oblivion -- remember?) coming out in 1992. My college station in summer '93 already had an '80s show playing A Flock of Seagulls, early Depeche Mode, Roxy Music, Billy Idol, XTC, Squeeze, etc.

Now, it took a while for exposure to these bands to percolate, hence the musical revival of the following decade. I still shake my head at the moment in 2002 when friends and lovers decided it was okay to love New Order as much or more than Joy Division.

There are many different types of revivals too. Like in the 90s for many it was all about disco thrift chic, ABBA and AM Gold, but at the same time hip hop heads were digging for 70s funk and soul albums, and weirdos were getting into Krautrock and Psych. In the 2000s there was more of a 70s Prog and Folk revival, with tons of unearthed gems showing up on blogs. Then people were discovering 70s African music and films, and on and on.

xpost Yeah, clubs around me had '80s nights in the early 90s.

Feeling kinda young now because as a millenial a person who's into and clued in on music rocking a Foreigner t-shirt wouldn't be funny at all, all those 80's aor bands were being reassessed in the 00's anyway.

To a young person, Foreigner and Fugazi are just two Guitar bands.

aren't they

i mean, yeah, you're going to get compilations etc, but bands and fashion people actively adopting the look and sound of decades past requires temporal distance, or else they just look old fashioned and out-of-touch.

So while you got tracks like I-F's 'Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass' and the Beastie Boys talking about old school hip hop in 1998, these were fairly early indicators that a wider eighties revival was on its way.

I guess another earlier one was the Romo scene that grew adjacent to Britpop, but it was very much a niche moment that few outside of Camden and the pages of Select magazine would have been aware of.

It's interesting that these twenty-year revival cycles seem to actually last longer these days than they might have in the past though. In the 50s and 60s a band like the Beach Boys could go from being the hippest band in the world to playing oldies circuits in literally a couple of years: "California Girls" came out in 1965 while "Do It Again" (a song that wilfully nostalgised songs like "California Girls") came out in 1968.

Then you had revival bands like Sha Na Na, Summer-of-Love era stageschool kids parodying the music and mores of barely ten years prior.

By comparison, you look at Glastonbury's 2024 lineup, and some of the bigger albums of last year like Cowboy Carter, and it gives me vertigo that the same acts playing in my uni halls in 2000 are still considered hugely big and important and technically never went away.

I mean, at the time M.O.P. was sampling Cold as Ice and rapping over it, but for someone who was mostly in the indie rock space it seemed like an amusing mismatch in 2002ish

also, I old

xpost I was thinking about how Haim debuted 12 years ago and are now rolling out their 4th album, yet still feel like a group in the mid-stage of their career.

1968 was the big year of "back to roots" tho, Dylan and the Beatles did similar moves.

Further to your point tho I submit this, a nostalgic throwback to the doo wop scene of...two years before?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aH7NsW5QfI

xposts

imagine the difference there between a band starting in 1966, putting out 4 albums ending in 1978

xp re: Haim

the difference is probably cocaine

i.e. the reason that a 70s band could put out a record every ten months and be washed up within a decade

it’s tempting to think the clean, clear anti-aging thing is a scheme to keep actors like tom cruise and jennifer lopez in the public consciousness forever

I should mention too, second hand clothes/thrifting has always been a thing but the spread of vinted and depop contributes strongly to the constant resurgence and recycling of fashion trends. The charity shops near me have QR codes that will link you to their inventory on depop, which was really eye opening to me. My sister spends a lot of time going to and from the post office with stuff she sells on vinted. It’s a big change from when I was growing up when this would have been considered strange at best but now when everyone has the internet and access to the same places, buying a random Stüssy hoodie someone is selling from the first time around isn’t a piece that all your friends will necessarily have.

You also see brands like Vetements and Supreme doing different collaborations with brands or content to interpret them for their own audiences and young customers, such as:

https://i.imgur.com/vPjVp6q.jpeg
https://i.imgur.com/jEvfUM4.jpeg

These aren’t second hand in that they are both expensive but the ideas and reference points are both recycled. At a point per this thread’s title the question is: what is this saying? Who is this for? Is the reference interesting in terms of what it’s trying to say or is it interesting in and of itself?

For women I don’t know I could pin down a good modern look in terms of ensemble, there’s a big scale of things that women wear now and that’s good. It’s like everyone has a niche and you can move to that.

It’s strongly US centred ofc but I think seeing basketball and to a far lesser extent (but that’s changing thanks to Lindor and Harper) baseball teams post photos and videos of their men arriving at games so we can see their outfits feels like a shift. It’s social media driven sure, but it’s almost expected now and with male fashion, I feel like seeing famous athletes wearing bright colours and unusual pieces pushes the boundary of what’s acceptable on the street. That’s just a feeling though. And I don’t remember seeing much like that even ten years ago.

gyac your beauty posts here are so good.

Yes it feels like the internet has made aesthetics super niche and micro, which is also interesting. There's a humor and consciousness to even acknowledging them that's packaged with an awareness of the tiny scale and brief moment when they're relevant, or even exist. They seem related to that Japanese boring Halloween subculture which I absolutely love--"person who just got good news on the phone," "person who just went grocery shopping and their receipt is in their pocket," "person who is trying to leave at the same time as their neighbor." Like the relatability and also tininess of the moment that we all share is the whole point.

The flipside of the Nirvana t-shirts are the Friends t-shirts that seem unrelated to the show. The people I see wearing them just seem to wear it for the vibe. (Like the Dead bears!)

Having friends is a good vibe for sure!

I get the impression Supreme are very purposeful about their collabs / IP usage and Undercover pretty much just goes with whatever Jun Takahashi happens to be watching on TV at the time.

https://i.postimg.cc/1tJByxxR/IMG-0478.jpg

imagine the difference there between a band starting in 1966, putting out 4 albums ending in 1978

Or imagine an artist who put out their most recent album in 1966 still being considered a huge star in 1975 (Rihanna)

xps the Wikipedia of "Oldies But Goodies" reckons the oldies it was referring to were Depression-era songs by Bing Crosby and Rudy Valee. But yes, the doo-wop style was well and truly over by 1961

Supreme recently did an Aphex Twin line and that just seems incredibly bizarre to me that someone like Richard D James would ever lend his personal brand to a streetwear brand, let alone that younger people would be interested enough to buy and wear it. That said, despite only releasing sporadic tracks in the last decade it seems his cultural cachet with younger people has only risen recently. I feel there's a disconnect there though; a bit like when it became really popular for Gen Zers to deconstruct and recontextualise The Simpsons into graffiti and cursed digital art; or how whenever I witness a "young people" rave in Bristol they always seem to be playing 'The Vengabus Is Coming' as part of a hard house/donk set.

Hmmm, interesting. It doesn't give any sources for that tho. I'm aware that there was an early 60's doo wop revival from that Dave Marsh singles book, will try to dig that out later.

xp, or at least with the Aphex stuff I think I have a similar quandry to gyac:

At a point per this thread’s title the question is: what is this saying? Who is this for? Is the reference interesting in terms of what it’s trying to say or is it interesting in and of itself?

Music From The Merch Desk was top ten in my college station's most played rotation last month fwiw

xxp

How long is it till people start nostalgising and referencing the lockdown era? I saw a social post being shared around from someone saying "I would give anything to have been a teenager in 2020". No idea whether it was meant seriously or not, but that person was apparently around eight in 2020 and a teenager now

Oh god, yeah, I totally forgot about Music From The Merch Desk, yikes!

one thing that was fun about growing up in the 90s was hearing all this stuff like Beastie Boys, Beck, Stereolab, Ween, etc., and then later discovering everything they were drawing from. it was a cool way to get into old stuff, it's one thing to read reviews of 70s/80s albums but when someone you already like was a big enough fan to emulate or heavily sample it then you already know it's something that's held up.

feel like those growing up today are experiencing this in hyperdrive, for instance if you look at popular YMO videos on YouTube you'll see comments along the lines of "I can't believe this is from 1981, I thought this was 2007", which is funny because there was a big 80s revival going on then too, which I think to younger people may just scan as all being part of the same scene. maybe similar to how I grew up watching Happy Days re-runs and only figuring out it wasn't *actually* filmed in the 50s seeing a recent picture of Ron Howard and going, "wait, shouldn't he be really old by now?"

haha yes!

off-topic but I had similar things growing up watching Western and samurai films and it only occurring to me a lot later that they were actually filmed relatively recently using modern technology. As a kid I assumed cowboy films were just filmed by cowboys

Xp yeah sometimes the q “what is this meant to signify” feels like all we have left

off-topic but I had similar things growing up watching Western and samurai films and it only occurring to me a lot later that they were actually filmed relatively recently using modern technology. As a kid I assumed cowboy films were just filmed by cowboys

lol that's lovely

xxxxxxpost Pandemic nostalgia

For younger kids the early lockdown was a time when people were trying to create this sense of online community and comfort--there were live story times and internet drawing courses from Mo Willems and stuff like that. Lots of places doing virtual tours. That seemed to dry up after awhile but I can see there being a sense of nostalgia.

Supreme recently did an Aphex Twin line and that just seems incredibly bizarre to me that someone like Richard D James would ever lend his personal brand to a streetwear brand, let alone that younger people would be interested enough to buy and wear it. That said, despite only releasing sporadic tracks in the last decade it seems his cultural cachet with younger people has only risen recently.

this kinda happened with Daft Punk too. it felt like the electronica movement as a whole had petered out by the mid 00's and Daft Punk's Human After All album was really poorly received, and yet by the Alive 2007 stuff they were somehow more popular than ever, six years later Random Access Memories was this huge cultural event despite nothing coming in between, feels like a good indicator of how the internet as a whole changes the way people discover music to the point where artists don't really need to put out a constant stream of new stuff like they did in the past

i don't see them at all as pledging allegiance to social rules!

not social rules but fashion ones. to an ingroup that is stylish vs an outgroup that isn't- which is why i was saying to Keyes that it doesn't preculde them being ahead of the curve at all, it actually makes more sense for them to be both

you got that stonewash derriere
spike the top because the weekend is here

Is 60s/70s nostalgia/retromania still a going concern? Or is the idea as quaint as people being really into Vaudeville or Frank Sinatra these days? In the same way that nostalgic cycles tend to peak at whatever was happening 20 years ago, do they also have a shelf life?

What I'm getting at here is how in the 2000s possibly the coolest retro thing to be into was early-80s new wave, electro etc. But by the late-2010s when I thought it would be fun to put on a night of new wave and post-disco type music, I found it a really really tough sell

when i think of gen z fashion that isn't specifically derivative of other eras (so putting baggy jeans, y2k revivalism etc aside) i think of the ubiquitous young white girl uniform of a black top, stone washed jeans, and white sneakers. there was a viral tweet/photo of this recently

“You’ll never find another me” pic.twitter.com/hEi0i5QOx7

— christ (@LordPFJoyde) November 16, 2024

xp Ime as someone who's been in mod revival, skinhead revival, and soulie territory for 25 years that Northern Soul is coming back separately from the 60s/oldie context, more in a late 60s or early 70s way. Less girl group and more "modern." (I am not a stomper so I don't love everything about this but I love the new wave of younger people.)

actually what started me thinking about this was Dave Weigel's prog rock book The Show that Never Ends, specifically around 1978 or so when all these bands had to shift away from prog, not necessarily because they wanted to but because their labels weren't willing to put out 20-minute tracks anymore. you just couldn't make records like Close to the Edge or Brain Salad Surgery anymore, so for a long time, no one did. but then when it came back with bands like Marillion, there was no pressure on any of those groups to change their sound at all, hell IQ has basically been putting out the same record every 5 years for the last four decades. a bunch of the good 00's prog bands are still around but they never sound any different; like the idea of Porcupine Tree scoring a big hit with something like "Owner of a Lonely Heart" seems insane

only modern band I can think of that had an arc sorta like this is maybe Maroon 5, obviously they've been shit the entire way but they did seem to evolve to keep up with the radio to the point where their entire sound changed.

surely you're not a HEALTH listener

i also absolutely adore your "i thought westerns were made by cowboys" post

There are many different types of revivals too

exactly, so isn't it reductive to suppose that distinct strands of past style that are in conversation with the ephemeral fashions of the moment are all part of a unified and apparently perpetual period revival trend

like, what does the relatively minor late 90's old skool revival have to do with the major reappraisal of AOR 5 years later.

otoh the thread premise is more concerned i guess with how certain images that encapsulate a whole lot of things about a moment become a kind of shorthand for the entire decade, like Hendrix at Woodstock playing the Star Spangled Banner that both has a lot of potency and a lot to unpack but is also parody fodder

the Tanya headon bit about Joe meek was very funny. That anyone who plays you Telstar will be sure to tell you it was recodrd in *1963!!!!* and that's because if it had been recorded in 1966 it would have been a punchline

the more recording technology lets you put off decisions and perfect things endlessly the longer people take to make records the longer it takes for ideas to circulate and responses to be formed etc

sorry if this has been mentioned already i haven't read this whole thread but -- in fashion spaces online, especially ones driven by younger people, the concept of the "archive" has become extremely pervasive. there's big IG and twitter accounts that exist only to spot references on runways and red carpets, or to post big photo slideshows from fashion weeks circa 20/30 years ago. you constantly see stars -- and not just stars, but stylists -- praised publicly for pulling xy dress from prada 02 for whatever major actress to wear to whatever award show or gala. prob the most visible example of this would be the kim kardashian/marilyn monroe met gala incident, where kim busted open an original bob mackie dress for instagram likes. there's a very strong feedback loop on social media of stylists being lauded for having the knowledge of specific designer dresses from decades ago and being able to procure them, and then stars for being aligned w/ the powerful/tasteful stylists that can pull the cool old pieces (zendaya/law roach relationship being the major one here), and of course down to the person running the social media account who themselves is envied for being savvy enough to be spotting the same references as the stylists, sourcing old reference photos etc. alexander mcqueen has been dead for 15 years and is still like as ubiquitous as a runway designer thru archive etc pieces as any designer who has subsequently tried to fill his shoes. obv that is partly a commentary on mcqueen being a singular visionary but it's also owing to this culture i'm outlining where it's often cooler and chicer to have access to a dress from 20 years ago than it is to be wearing a fresh piece from a hot new designer

the idea of an "archive" or "vault" has permeated w/in gen z culturally to the point that most gen z or younger musicians -- certainly the savvier ones -- are running their own fan accounts, which usually have the words "archive" or "vault" in the handles, as a means of cataloging their own ephemera. the nostalgia is baked in from the start and is being cultivated in real time

sneakerheads are also pretty wild about that sort of thing, although brands caught on and do drops of throwback models all the time

I am not sure Nike does anything other than that, now

The Latest Celebrity Western Status Symbol? An Actual Horse.

Post Malone is Texas’s newest horse daddy. Meanwhile, Drake, Kacey Musgraves, and Miranda Lambert can’t stop horsin’ around on Instagram.

i think of the ubiquitous young white girl uniform of a black top, stone washed jeans, and white sneakers. there was a viral tweet/photo of this recently

I live near a major college campus and it's pretty wild to see these large groups of girls in *exactly* the same outfit (not quite this one, but close). I fr don't remember that being as prevalent when I was in high school/college, like it would have seemed lame to show up wearing the same thing as someone else. I guess that doesn't even register now?

You go out to take pictures of yourself. It doesn't matter what anyone else is wearing.

And every one of them is probably into a different aesthetic. Two identically dressed girls squabbling over whether French Provincial or Goblincore is better ;-)

I started Status and Culture. Thanks!

well, glad we all have heard of some young people.

Is 60s/70s nostalgia/retromania still a going concern?

I love this video made the week that Supreme dropped their Velvet Underground collab (which was probably meant more for creative-agency guys than teens):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkpuJg_24_Q

well, glad we all have heard of some young people.

I have a coworker in her early 20s who is a total hypebeast

one of my nephews is defo going that way, tho only 16. i got him a voucher for the clothing website end at xmas.

Count me as another who has started Status & Culture (as an audiobook because I am a lowly, unculture pleb)

Cool. I'm also interested in Marx's forthcoming book on 21st century culture:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/769187/blank-space-by-w-david-marx/

Looks like it's even more relevant to this thread:

Over the past twenty-five years, pop culture has suffered from a perplexing lack of reinvention. We’ve entered a cultural “blank space”—an era when reboots, rehashes, and fads flourish, while bold artistic experimentation struggles to gain recognition. Why is risk no longer rewarded, and how did playing it safe become the formula for success? Acclaimed cultural historian W. David Marx sets out to uncover the answers.

Almost... a liminal space

has 3d printing trickled down or up at all from haute fashion or cosplay at all?

Luigi Mangione made it stylish for the masses

Total tangent but dog latin I found Dave Marsh's claims of an early 60's doo wop revival. It's the entry for "There's A Moon Out Tonight" (1958) by the Capris in his Heart Of Rock & Soul

Smooth and drippy as a vannila ice cream cone, "There's A Moon Out Tonight" was the record that kicked off the best kept secret in rock history, the doo wop revival of 1960-62. The Capris' classic took this role when it was discovered by record collector Jerry Greene, of Slim's Times Square Records, the world's greatest doo wop shop until the mid sixties, when the subway station where the store was located renovated it out of existence.

Greene picked up "There's A Moon Out Tonight", released on the infinitesimal Planet label in 1958, in a swap from an anonymous customer. His friends and customers heard it frequently, as he sought to find another copy, and Times Square built a demand for the disc. Finally, Greene and two friends chipped in fifty bucks each and bought the master, which they leased to Hy Weiss of Old Town. It took off from there, revealing a previously unsuspected desire for "oldies".

Schmaltzy as it is, "There's A Moon Out Tonight" reflects Greene's good taste because it's so ingeniously constructed, from the tacky piano notes at the top to the shrill falsetto at the end. But its real importance is that it provided the first visible indication that the music had both artistic continuity and a really loyal audience that did not outgrow its taste.

So kind of a northern soul thing but in a far more compressed timeframe?

How long is it till people start nostalgising and referencing the lockdown era? I saw a social post being shared around from someone saying "I would give anything to have been a teenager in 2020". No idea whether it was meant seriously or not, but that person was apparently around eight in 2020 and a teenager now

― DLC Soundsystem (dog latin)

already happened, see "Douse, Koishite Shimaunda."

I love There's A Moon Out Tonight. I don't kmow heaps about doo wop but my guess is thst it was starting to fall out of fashion by around 1959 or 60

Dave Marsh is my rock critic bête noire so I instinctively assume things were the opposite of what he says

he was wrong about X, wrong about Queen, wrong about p much everything (except Springsteen, which is a gimme)

Those are value judgements tho not accounts of supposed facts (did he dislike Queen? He was right if so).

I do wonder if he's inflating the degree to which this one store he liked sparked a "revival" but the story of how that record came to hit the charts seems legit and I don't know too many similar examples from 1961.

https://ogden_images.s3.amazonaws.com/www.utne.com/images/2008/08/26151558/907CEB70C01E4229948BE0A48AA4D975.jpg

"An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the colossus of societal failure that looms over the horizon is for the kids to abandon this vain existence and start over."

Just came across this essay from 2008. I'd forgotten, temporarily, how much people raised against 'hipsters' in the early 2000s.

*railed

There's this, from a year and a half ago, on this exact subject, from a primarily high art perspective. It will come as no surprise that this person blames the Internet. They date the phenomenon as beginning around the time of "Black To Black" - "the first major cultural work of the 21st century that was neither new nor retro — but rather contented itself to float in time, to sound as if it came from no particular era."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html

I mean it's INCREDIBLY tempting to say, as they predict I will, "what about (x)" eg what about Mama Said by Lenny Kravitz from a good 15 years earlier, extremely content to be both new and retro and float around in no particular era - or indeed all the incredibly valid observations in this thread that with age you start losing your ability to distinguish the currents of the new.. but it does feel like there are an awful lot of essays like this out there these days

Re: Door wop upthread, I guess The Tokens' "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is maybe one of the most well known doo wop songs of all time, and that's also 1961. Although, like the Capris, I somehow wonder if this "revival" was more to do with white guys and audiences jumping on the bandwagon a little late

Doo wop, not door wop. As ever, apologies for my sausage fingers

The Capris were white too tho!

Never thought of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" as doo wop, it's a vocal group take on a Folk record, but I suppose a case could be made. Dion was having big hits in a doo wop style around that time.

The more I think of it the less I think Marsh is refering to an actual revival of the style (there were doo wop hits in '59, placing it as starting at '60 would mean literal months between the orig and the revival), and more the first evidence that rock & roll records could have a following years after their original release, which isn't quite the same thing.

The Capris? I haven’t heard them for the longest time

The thing is, things get revived and referred to all the time, and that’s not evidence for a stagnating culture. I remember my mom telling me that bellbottoms were a callback to sailor pants from the 1940s - but I don’t think anyone would accuse the 1970s of being stuck in a WWII mindset!

If anything “revival” suggests things have moved on enough that there’s a frisson or extra layer of meaning to be gained by reaching back through the sedimentary layers of the past

When there's no discernible gap, I guess people sometimes refer to it as a "wave", like NWOBHM. Heavy metal hadn't gone away. British heavy metal bands were still relevant. But this was the new wave

dave marsh is wrong about nearly everything but his love for the music of the year 1962 is very endearing

so what do we call '62 doo-wop, second-wave doo-wop? was there, like... a third wave?

Billy Joel and shit I guess

Darts & Showaddywaddy?

One aspect of culture that ILX demographics ensure won't be the first thing most ppl here (myself included) think of is video games - imagine suggesting these have been in a holding pattern since 2000!

dave marsh is wrong about nearly everything but his love for the music of the year 1962 is very endearing

So much of Heart Of Rock & Soul is just him going "nuh huh you're WRONG the period between Elvis joining the army and the arrival of the Beatles was NOT a dry spell", which I agree is endearing - he's right, for one, but also the number of ppl with strong opinions on this issue must be shrinking by the day at this point.

Picking it up I also noticed I had put crosses next to some entries, and was at first puzzled by what those could mean, before I realised this was before napster, let alone streaming, so I was literally keeping track of what songs I had succeeded in tracking down!

Doo Wop revival, and 50's culture revival in general, is also interesting in its longevity - Sha Na Na started in 1969, then you get all the Glam Rock stuff, the aforementioned Darts and Showaddywaddy, Viviene Westwood opening up Sex, Happy Days, all the way to Back To The Future and yeah Billy Joel still nostalgic for that stuff in the late 80's.

When I watched Back To The Future with my dad he laughed uproariously at the "your kids will love this" line because he had interpreted what was meant to be coded as, like, Van Halen as a nod to Jimi Hendrix and the "kids" of the audience to be his generation (he was a boomer). The fact that those numbers don't add up and his parents absolutely were not Elvis fans didn't prevent this, he just viewed the pre-Beatles world as homogenous enough for that to make sense.

One aspect of culture that ILX demographics ensure won't be the first thing most ppl here (myself included) think of is video games - imagine suggesting these have been in a holding pattern since 2000!

This is an interesting one. There have definitely been some improvements to graphics, sound and the introduction of things like haptic feedback in the PS5, virtual reality (which is slowly catching on) etc.

But concurrently there's a conversation taking place about where games are going to go next. The PS5 was so slow to land on release and it STILL doesn't have that many exclusives. Already Sony is talking about the PS6, but gamers are starting to wonder if the technology has now advanced beyond the point where developers know what to do with it.

Elden Ring is a significant leap in terms of technical accomplishment compared to the rest of the Soulsborne games, but when you consider that Witcher 3 came out ten years ago and Red Dead 2 seven years ago, they still arguably still represent the highest watermark in terms of what's been accomplished in terms of open-world games with life-like interactions. They give brand new games like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 a significant run for their money.

To put it in context, the difference between PS4 and PS5 versions of games often look identical, and ultimately you're just getting slighlty smoother rendering and quicker load-times. Compare this to the noticeably huge leaps between systems in the 90s, the Master System > Megadrive for example, or even the change from 2D sprite-based gaming to 3D vector-based gaming with the introduction of the first Playstation, and yes we're in a holding pattern for now.

And after-all, incremental technical upgrades aside, there's been very little change in the way games present themselves in the last 15-20 years - ultimately you're a guy (sometimes a girl) with a gun (sometimes a sword) running around a landscape in third (sometimes first) person dealing damage to enemies and performing tasks. When viewed like that, all that's been happening in the last couple of decades is a refinement of the same ideas.

I was thinking of it more in terms of aesthetics than technological development. The two interact, of course, but I'm more interested in the creative decisions sparked than the increase in level of graphics.

And after-all, incremental technical upgrades aside, there's been very little change in the way games present themselves in the last 15-20 years - ultimately you're a guy (sometimes a girl) with a gun (sometimes a sword) running around a landscape in third (sometimes first) person dealing damage to enemies and performing tasks. When viewed like that, all that's been happening in the last couple of decades is a refinement of the same ideas.

If you only play AAA games, sure.

I think you could argue the explosion in mobile gaming and the demographics (particularly older people) involved have changed things a bit, even if the game concepts remain fairly stable. The other element is how games are consumed - often via Twitch, rather than played directly.

xxp horrible writing on my part there, sorry

the whole Twitch/streaming community aspect of gaming is interesting. but really, apart from experimental indie games which I grant you can represent some new and interesting ways of doing things (even something like Bracket City or Wordle are kind of amazing in that they're such simple ideas - see also Balatro), what has come out in the last ten years that represents a discernible key change or "fashion" in the last 10 years? What makes 2020s gaming definitive compared to 2010s?

1) Indie games as a sector have grown immensely since 2000, I don't think you can handwave them away unless you also think bringing up, like, the Velvet Underground or Indie Rock in this discussion would be irrelevant.

2) "Protagonist with some sort of tool running around a landscape" is such a generic definition, it's a bit like saying "as far as I can tell rock music in 1982 hasn't evolved much from 1964, it's still mostly four or five guys with guitars, bass, drums and keyboards". Your definition applies equally to Katamari Damarcy, Pokemon Go, Death Stranding and Super Mario Odyssey.

Video games that feel very 2020's to me: Fall Guys, Among Us, Venba, Infinity Nikki, the cozy game explosion following Stardew Valley (2016 but obv things take some time to marinate) and the 2020 Animal Crossing, VR gaming experiences have grown by leaps and bounds, oddball stuff like Humanity and Viewfinder, bg3 while from a traditional genre has upped the level of interactivity and ways of playing to a degree I'd never seen in a video game before...you could then also add stuff like foundry allowing players to do tabletop RPGs in an online setting with a stronger technological component. But mostly I'm sure the definitive 2020 games are stuff you and I are both too old to know about.

yeah fair enough. BG3 is a big one I'd forgotten about, and Death Stranding was defintiely bending the idea of what a triple-A game could do

It's all Roblox iirc

I took my son to see the Minecraft movie on Saturday night and the theater was filled with teenagers waving cardboard swords and cheering and applauding like crazy every time an element of the game appeared on screen. It felt like being at the Blocky Horror Picture Show.

applause

VG+

i think that's a thing from tiktok or something. I'm taking my kids as they're obsessed but a little worried about my 7yo who is quite sensitive. he'll bring a blanket to hide behind if it gets scary...

The stuff in the Nether looks a little scary, but overall the movie is just goofy.

thanks! i have zero expectations about the movie and don't care about the game...

Has Napoleon Dynamite become a kind of Santa Claus evergreen character, or is there a generational iteration of him every five years?

I want to say its kind of become akin to a late-millennial Withnail & I, just this movie people like to quote at each other forever and ever

Re: the doo wop discussion above, in Andrew Hickey's podcast A History Of Rock in 500 Songs (Earth Angel episode) he mentions this song and how it was also an example of a doo wop song nostalgising a past from only a few years before. Frank Zappa apparently had some involvement with the record, whcih is interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs1lvFBlY0U

I personally think its not all as complicated as the "end of culture" or whatever. I just think that after, like, 2004, everyone just had the internet, which was a perpetual motion machine of all old things and all new things, just creating a flattening effect where fashion/music/TV/film all just flow in millions of little waves instead of a few big ones. Any real changes in music/fashion tribalism — say, the end of the "indie rock" era or the rise of hyperpop — are mostly motivated by economic factors instead of cultural ones.

So... fashion/culture is in a holding pattern (but maybe not entirely permanent)?

This may speak more to "how narratives are coalesced" as opposed to what an actual narrative is but

The "'90s" is generally defined by the '80s underground aesthetic brought mainstream by Nirvana and then either returning to pop bedrock (e.g., Spice Girls) or drilling down on angst (e.g., Limp Bizkit).

What people call "'00s music" is a cluster of disparate reference points connected only by people's ability to view them a la carte through technology (Napster -> the iPod -> YouTube)

xpost, I would say giant sweeping changes like Afros or skinny ties are probably in a "holding pattern," but now we get tons and tons of new little ones constantly: hyperpop fashion, Stanley mugs, Livestrong bracelets, Yeezys, broccoli zoomer hair, the "Edgar," socks with like pizzas and shit on them, manbuns, that thing now where girls get little tiny tattoos all over their legs instead of one big one, etc

All of which is not as fun to think about as like "Grunge killed hair metal" or "the Black Power movement inspired people to stop processing their hair" but there's just tons of this happening around us all the time, just in smaller doses

I have a related question that maybe deserves its own thread:

If we're to accept that rock'n'roll or rock music is no longer a cultural phenomenon like it was in the 20th century, how long until the same goes for its successors?

There's that bit in Nathan Barley where Julian Barratt's character, sick of his hipster peers, goes for an interview with a middle class Sunday supplement. The editor has a signed photo of Paul Weller on his wall, noodles idly away on a guitar, and drops phrases like "You're rocking the main stage baby!". If anything, that scene cemented the fact that rock music was, by then, truly the niche domain of middle-aged white men. Not to say that there were no innovations in rock music after 2005, but that it was no longer on any way the cultural force it had been up till then.

And it makes me wonder if the same is happening with stuff like dance music or hip hop.

The new mid-life crisis lust object isn't a Ferrari or a Les Paul any more, it's a pair of Technics or an XDJ controller, which costs about the same price as a small car.

Online DJ forums are full of gripey ex-ravers complaining about how clubbing isn't fun any more and how young people don't know how to DJ, they just take selfies etc etc... And while it's easy to laugh at this hogwash, there's an element of truth to the way dance music has been commodified and commercialised. Plus there's no better way to kill a scene than to have somebody's uncle moaning how it were better in the olden days.

I say this as a middle-aged DJ myself, but I don't feel like dance music has really been a major cultural force for a long time. There are definitely cool and interesting records coming out, but once rave culture ends up getting eulogised and hagiographed in a museum, with documentaries of twinkly-eyed people talking about how going raving was like "going to church and the DJ was a minister", the cultural cachet has clearly switched from being a dangerous, vital phenomenon to something really quite pedestrian.

You could make the same analogies with hip hop, with all the things a little while ago celebrating "50 years" etc.

Where does that leave things? In other countries, say, South Africa, styles like amapiano represent a true cultural nailing of colours to the flag; it is a true cultural phenomenon that is being represented around the world.

But as far as Western music is concerned I've been leery of a kind of dead-end for a while now

The new mid-life crisis lust object isn't a Ferrari or a Les Paul any more, it's a pair of Technics or an XDJ controller, which costs about the same price as a small car.

Going to have to say this feels reductive and untrue and strange.

Xp yeah I hear you there. The changes are myriad and less felt. It's more like "Oh people do that now? How long has that been a thing?". In fact you could define these incremental changes literally as "things" (as in, I only noticed people saying stuff like "How long has that been a thing?" in the internet era)

Xp, reductive yes. Untrue? Wouldn't necessarily say so

are cars that cheap in england?

So some people who would have bought Ferraris, a purchase of 100k more more, idk, now buy Technics? I'm lost.

I mean, dance music has been eating itself for so long now. We've got a thread on ILM called "the great fake jungle rush of 2013", and people are still releasing and raving to jungle in 2024 - so this must be at least the third, if not fourth wave of jungle.
Will that ever stop? Will we see three generations in a family all basically agreeing that the amen break is the pinnacle of music?

I'm being facetious, I know, but the idea amuses me all the same

I say this as a middle-aged DJ myself, but I don't feel like dance music has really been a major cultural force for a long time. There are definitely cool and interesting records coming out, but once rave culture ends up getting eulogised and hagiographed in a museum, with documentaries of twinkly-eyed people talking about how going raving was like "going to church and the DJ was a minister", the cultural cachet has clearly switched from being a dangerous, vital phenomenon to something really quite pedestrian.

The call is coming from inside the house

The price is not the point guys. Okay, Ferrari wasn't the right comparison but a Stratocaster was. Also, I mean, CDJs / proper decks are expensive - you can spend up to a good couple of grand on new turntables and a mixer, and then you need to spend money on new vinyl etc... My point is that this is a sport that younger people can't really afford as much as older people can

LocalGarda, we're the same age fella - if anyone's in denial it's yourself

Someone once said the golden age of rock 'n' roll wasn't 1955-59 or 1964-69 or whatever; it was whenever you were between 12 and 17. Similarly, hip-hop is music for children and teenagers; the fact that old people are still making it, and listening to it, doesn't change that. And however children and teenagers choose to engage with pop music is the correct way to engage with pop music. How you, an old person, engage with it is embarrassing and sad.

I am exempt because I only engage with old-people music (jazz, classical, metal) and I do so knowingly.

I'm not saying dance music and hip hop are dead, or that young people don't engage with these genres, but when was the last time these were considered phenomena?

I guess there's also the factor of people existing in a state of arrested development as they get older and interacting with "youth" culture well into middle age. Hard to have a new punk rock or a new rave or what have you if your dad's into it more than you are as a young person

Not to mention that a lot of the same DJs have maintained headliner status now for 10, 15, 20, 30 years now.

Incidentally I’ve also seen two male students get perms! You thought that dies in the 80s and you were wrong!

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Tuesday, April 1, 2025 2:18 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i have been seeing more young fellows rockin this look as well. i would definitely never have done it myself but it's kinda nice?

LocalGarda, we're the same age fella - if anyone's in denial it's yourself

I didn't use the words in denial. I simply pointed out that the words you use are as much part of a holding pattern, if not more, than any of the music you believe they describe.

In fact, there are probably posts or threads on this board from twenty years ago with you or others saying similar or more or less the same.

So either culture is always in a holding pattern or the words used, by you and others, to describe it are in fact in a holding pattern. Let's not call for revitalising one while ignoring the other.

Beyond that, dance music specifically has had this discussion for almost twenty five years very overtly, "dance is dead" in the UK media circa 2001, but obviously generally forever as well.

None of this means things don't change, or a genre is exactly the same as it was always and forever, but the essence of much of the recent points itt are just things that could have been said for two decades or more in p much the exact same way. This is regardless of the millions of records released.

If we are going to have a thread about culture stagnating then we prob should acknowledge when the things being said in that thread are exactly the same as twenty years ago, not just societally but on this board by the same people.

So I'm not "in denial", I'm in fact very open and accepting of my age and ignorance. That's why I am confident that arguments I read twenty years ago here and elsewhere do not reflect the reality of underground music for people younger than I am.

For me to change that view I'd need to see some progress in terms of the point being made a third of a lifetime ago.

I don't expect to see that tho.

And don't make me find the threads from twenty years ago because help me god I will

My memory isn't as good as it once was, so i can't purport to remembering those posts or conversations. But if true then what you're saying is that the conversation itself is in a holding pattern.

I still think these things all have a shelf life, and I don't really have much evidence to the contrary right now. You're right - it's impossible for someone like me to have the perspective I'm of a young person, but just as people used to believe in the power of rock'n'roll and said it would never die, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest it could happen to slightly more modern genres.

My broad thoughts are that if you've got a cohort of older people complaining about sync buttons and talking about "proper" raving like the good old days, it is in itself a harbinger. That's a way to sapnthe fun out of anything, and I don't think young people will persevere in trying to prove those people wrong - they'll get interested in other things, e.g. learning how to make short-form video content as a creative outlet.

Again, I'm not saying young people are wholesale going to stop listening to dance music or stop DJing and producing. But I wonder if there will come a time (or if the time has come) where it's all seen as a bit of a widely niche interest like rock, blues, jazz etc..

I feel like the sense of an "underground" - a seething, writhing scene happening just out of view, that defines itself at least in part by not being accessible, that you have to know where to look if you want to find it, has changed in the last 20 years. There is very little music that can't be heard at the push of a button, very little fashion, art etc. Though there is still some very odd music being made - maybe more than ever!

Yeah. Like Whiney says it's kind of an everything everywhere all at once kind of thing. Not a stagnation, not a big sphere, but an ever-growing and expansive flat field (or something)

don't think that the underground concept has changed much. and even if it had, people would still choose not to listen to or find large swathes of the music that exists there, especially on this board.

I think DL and LG have moved apart in interests. It's now more like: TS: Underground Dance Music vs the Underground restaurant scene

I suspect the underground restaurant scene is probably much more interesting at the moment!

It's harder to see your food tho

2020s retro night will surely involve small plates and natural wine

I've seen discussions of the quickness of trends now, with the internet making things instantly visible and fast fashion offering quick adoption, things don't have time to sink in and spread out and be innovated or customized in different contexts etc. All things are hitting and subsequently burning out at the same time. Because everything is in fashion, nothing is in fashion, particularly.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit)

the internet has made aesthetics super niche and micro, which is also interesting. There's a humor and consciousness to even acknowledging them that's packaged with an awareness of the tiny scale and brief moment when they're relevant, or even exist. ... Like the relatability and also tininess of the moment that we all share is the whole point.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit)

doot dee doo

It's harder to see your food tho

― I pity the foo fighter (Ye Mad Puffin)

lol

doot dee doo

I do wanna acknowledge a lot of what's been talked about was already suggested upthread already - it's a loooooong thread and it's an "everything" thread :-)

sometimes it's just nice for these threads to go round and round forever in a... holding pattern

A few observations on the next generation coming into pop relevance (my son's schoolmates):

Their favorite artist is Morgan Wallen.
A lot of them hate Kenrick Lamar because their dads bitched about his Superbowl show.
They use "Diddy" to mean cool.

Someone once said the golden age of rock 'n' roll wasn't 1955-59 or 1964-69 or whatever; it was whenever you were between 12 and 17. Similarly, hip-hop is music for children and teenagers; the fact that old people are still making it, and listening to it, doesn't change that. And however children and teenagers choose to engage with pop music is the correct way to engage with pop music. How you, an old person, engage with it is embarrassing and sad.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Wednesday, April 9, 2025 4:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I agree with that but things have been getting more and more muddled and cannibalistic over time. the pop music of 1965 sounds nothing like the pop music of 1973 which is a completely different thing than what was happening in 1981. but when *I* was growing up, you had all these groups like Ween, Beastie Boys, Beck, etc. who had access to all these incredible 70s and 80s records and synthesized it into its own thing. I remember my parents hearing "The Way" by Fastball on the radio and thinking it was The Beatles. I don't think that was the sort of thing that happened back when they were teens. But that was still before the era of MP3 downloading, you had to pilfer your parents' collection to hear what any of this stuff really sounded like, and a lot of people's parents had crappy taste. Now you just have access to everything and it seems like a lot of teenagers just don't really interact with modern music at *all*, outside of bands who intentionally try to sound like old stuff. granted they have insanely good taste that puts my 17 year old self to shame but I'm curious what they think the "golden era" was

I think DL's point only works if you fail to recognize that culture is cyclical and that the dance music forms of the 90s, while introducing a lot of new and refreshing, bold and underground sounds, were part of a cultural cycle and they did feed off of prior forms.

Culture does come up with some interesting outliers, but there's always some oldhead there to say that Aphex Twin sounds like Iannis Xenakis, even if Richard James didn't intend it that way, and all of the past rushes in. The old man with guitar noodling in Nathan Barley isn't about rock music in total, it's about prior forms of rock. In 2005, we were several years past the "dance music is over, guitars are back, we have The Strokes and The White Stripes, etc!" headlines and were on the precipice of Landfill Indie. Rock music is dead, but we've got guitar bands signed to Warp Records? And it was all intermixed with mainstream electronic producers, certainly not underground, remixing those songs.

Everything new and shocking that has any sort of staying power ends up being subsumed into mass culture. It's why I can tune to a classic rock radio station and hear both Led Zeppelin and Nirvana.

People wistful about illegal raves in a warehouse are a variation of people reminiscing about packing into an over-capacity venue with one working toilet to see a rock band on the precipice. (of fame, not on the edge of the toilet)

If anything, things that are more underground are back to being underground. I haven't been, and I'd probably be the oldest guy there if I went, but the younger people in my city have been putting on shows in a warehouse space that's on the edge of town and it's all "suggested donation" at the door, because it's not a legit venue! The closest I ever went to at that age was a handful of venues that were someone's loft apartment or a house where a bunch of renters would clear out the living room and throw some amps in there.

Part of that is the post-covid environment, where a lot of venues didn't make it through and, in the US, ones that came back ended up being bought out or managed by large conglomerations and ticket prices are now insane, you no longer get 2-3 local acts shoehorned in front of the touring bands, etc. so people are making their own spaces.

They use "Diddy" to mean cool.

!!!

If anything, things that are more underground are back to being underground

This would be my understanding also - the newer clubs in London feel a lot more subcultural and different to when a lot of people's Saturday night out might have meant going to see a DJ.

They use "Diddy" to mean cool.
― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Thursday, April 10, 2025 9:14 AM

Please tell us more about this. What contexts do they use it in? Do they know who/what they're referring to?

I think DL and LG have moved apart in interests. It's now more like: TS: Underground Dance Music vs the Underground restaurant scene

I suspect the underground restaurant scene is probably much more interesting at the moment!

With respect I was making the point that there still is an underground :)

I go to clubs once or twice a year but even listening to NTS or whatever it is obvious to me that there is plenty going on, stuff I like and understand and lots of stuff I also don't really understand or sometimes don't like. As it should be, I'm 42.

Too easy to just pretend that's not the case because of your own situation or age.

That said, lots of people in their forties go clubbing in London, or whatever age really I suppose.

xpost

I don't have a link handy but there was a website circa 2019-ish (?)with a very focused call-out of clubs and organizers, specifically resident advisor, of being very classist/racist in their approach to coverage, not taking smaller scenes that didn't fit into the cookie cutter large club/festival/touring organizational structure. Along with the point that these smaller parties/venues were facing intense policing pressure because they were outside of that framework that negotiates with structures of power.

I think as an economically well-off, middle aged white american there are a lot of things I'm not aware of until they break through into my sphere, if they ever do.

They use "Diddy" to mean cool.

― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Thursday, 10 April 2025 14:14 (thirty-five minutes ago) link

HUH? Are you sure? People post "Nice try diddy" on advertisements on insta etc. as a meme, which is a joke about how Diddy had his hands in many business ventures.

Yeah, they've been using it for awhile, but now there's a set of cool kids who call themselves The Diddy Group.

Not sure how much they know about the crimes. I just figure there's all this stuff in culture like "The Fall of Diddy" and kids think it's a funny name.

It probably makes adults react in shock and a subset of kids being edgelords is a perpetual phenomena

I think as an economically well-off, middle aged white american there are a lot of things I'm not aware of until they break through into my sphere, if they ever do.

Think this is a really healthy attitude tbh.

I sometimes monitor my gen alpha kid's group chats and was kind of revolted to see a 12 year old girl use "no Diddy", in the same way people used to say "no h_m_", to indicate that she wasn't a p_do for saying someone's little sister was cute.

ok, my efforts to censor that word were defeated by markup, but hopefully it made sense.

Their favorite artist is Morgan Wallen

Thinking how a rebel would earn is or her stripes by swearing on MTV or SNL back in the day, saying something that had to be bleeped out, and how none of that profanity has the same edge when you can get an Another Fucking Morning coffee mug or Mom's Fucking Juice wine glass; and how Wallen got caught saying the thing that you can't say in public and it was his swearing-on-MTV entry into being deplorable as a badge of honor.

otoh my son (10 yo) mostly listens to hyperpop stuff like Jane Remover and ericdoa (who is as much a social media personality as a musician)

Forgot to add here, somehow, that I was at a family occasion this weekend and my sister's 17-year-old boy was chatting to me about his interrailing plans for the summer, then as we discussed the German part of the route, he said "Uncle Local Garda, have you ever been to The Berghain"

Lock thread! Dance music will never die.

really shocking to hear that one of the most successful musicians of a generation has a lot of fans who are teenagers

haha

The Berghain!

Oh yeah, that place Conan O'Brien joked about, Lady Gaga had a show at, etc.

I think the other bit about rock being old, hip hop being the uncle that rock and roll was... there are plenty of middle-aged and older people doing the same thing dads were doing when we were young -- telling us that the music we were listening to "isn't real rock and roll"

I threw on the new Playboy Carti album last week and I can imagine someone who was my age who was into rap in the early 90s very easily being all like "wtf is this"

It feels like all the pieces are in place for a wm. gibson-esque prophecy of youth culture spurning human artists entirely in favor of virtual idols, but who has come closest to that? daft punk? random vocaloid streamers?

Hatsune Miku obv

Oh yeah the amount of people my age who would argue that trap has no artistic worth whatsoever...

a wm. gibson-esque prophecy of youth culture spurning human artists entirely in favor of virtual idols

This was the plot of a 1987 Norman Spinrad book:

In the near-future, a music conglomerate called Muzik Inc. hires Glorianna O'Toole, the "Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll", who never made it as a rock star but who was present at rock and roll's creation, and two young computer geniuses, to create a fleshless, Artificial Personality rock-and-roll star.

Xp I'm a traitor to my generation because for me Obama-era rap is the best rap #humblebrag

High Goon era

Yeah stuff like Hatsune Miku is a thing. Also people who listen exclusively to "lo fi hip hop" which is largely just AI generated wallpaper beats

Something I'd be happy to say isn't in a holding pattern is cinema. Especially with something like The Substance being so successful, I don't think that could have happened at any other time.

That said I just saw a trailer for an edgy-looking thriller announced with large yellow sans serif capitals and stentorian dubstep hoover noises and thought "Great, that's the aesthetic for now"

I can't

They use "Diddy" to mean cool.
― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Thursday, April 10, 2025 9:14 AM

Please tell us more about this. What contexts do they use it in? Do they know who/what they're referring to?

― JRN

diddy kong obvs

edgy-looking thriller announced with large yellow sans serif capitals and stentorian dubstep hoover noises

was it a rerelease of Spring Breakers?

Something called The Drop

Mate that's the newsletter from the water company

Haha

It was this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yFE13Gp4c8

can't wait til movies don't have the phone vibrate sound

The real horror is people who don't know how to put their phones on silent at dinner

Something I'd be happy to say isn't in a holding pattern is cinema. Especially with something like The Substance being so successful, I don't think that could have happened at any other time.

I'd agree its success couldn't have happened before (part of that whole A24 gentrification of horror thing), but as a film it fits in very well with the premise of this thread - heavy influence from Society (1989), late 80's/early 90's aesthetics, a subject matter that expects you to either remember or have learned about on the internet about the aerobics craze of that time while also not being a period piece, very much "both new and retro and floating around in no particular era" as Tracer's post had it.

Lotta era-mashup shows these days. Sex Education for instance.

Cinema isn't? idk I'm not like a super cinema buff or anything but the number of sequels and prequels and IP tie-ins and book adaptations seems to overwhelm the number of fully original cinema-first releases.

ofc that's based really on feeling rather than any actual number crunching or research into the topic (keeping with the general theme of the thread, yeah) so could be objectively wrong!

No, every hardcore cinema geek I know thinks the medium has been in a holding pattern, unless they think it's in straight up decline. It does feel like at this point the IP dominance has started to yield diminishing returns, with Star Wars put on ice and a shrinking interest in the MCU, but no real sense of what comes next yet.

I'd agree its success couldn't have happened before (part of that whole A24 gentrification of horror thing), but as a film it fits in very well with the premise of this thread - heavy influence from Society (1989), late 80's/early 90's aesthetics, a subject matter that expects you to either remember or have learned about on the internet about the aerobics craze of that time while also not being a period piece, very much "both new and retro and floating around in no particular era" as Tracer's post had it.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Friday, 11 April 2025 10:41 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, style-wise nothing is without a precedent and there's no such thing as a "first time" for anything, etc... But beyond that, the fact a visceral body horror has broken out beyond cult status into winning awards and mainstream commerciality is pretty new. Also the themes of dysmorphia, ageism, and a particular style of feminism feel like relatively unrepresented topics till now. Getting a star like Demi Moore involved with a project like that too... I dunno, even though I've seen plenty of Cronenbourg and and Asian extreme cinema, seeing it in a theatre genuinely felt like I was witnessing something new and different.

But good point about IP drain, sequel-mania etc - I guess I am seeing it from more of a middle-brow perspective here rather than stuff like MCU (which as Daniel says is starting to slow down anyway)

It's not so much that it has precedents, it's that it's very firmly entrenched in aesthetics from 30+ years ago, yet separate from something like say The Sting in that it is explicitly not a period piece. This isn't about whether it's good or enjoyable or of substance (lol), just that it is very much a case study for this holding pattern conversation, because it deliberately chooses retro trappings for its story and views those as natural choices.

The idea that cinema is somehow free of the cultural stasis that blights other media is absolutely hilarious and completely arbitrary.

"But beyond that, the fact a visceral body horror has broken out beyond cult status into winning awards and mainstream commerciality is pretty new. Also the themes of dysmorphia, ageism, and a particular style of feminism feel like relatively unrepresented topics till now."

Is big upcoming film selling out feminism for buns on seats has been constant for a long while now. Stuff like Barbie?

And, arguably, Lanthimos’ Poor Things.

Well those films are all relevant and relatively current and relatively "new" in their own ways as far as mainstream movies are concerned, I'd say

Thought of this thread when reading this comment on a new PinkPantheress video

the way she uses and embodies y2k + frutiger aero + other 2000s aesthetics and subcultures is awesome, she isn't actually from that time but remembers it and reinterprets it in a very cool and authentic way, it's so representative of genz and the amazing y2k revival overall. she also takes so much from internet culture, kpop, online trends (this video giving bridgerton hello!!) like im sorry shes just a visionary!!! shes the tastemaker of our generation i dont make the rules!!

wonder how much of this is just down to a dwindling sense of optimism about the future. in the 60s and 70s it felt like there was a lot of music presenting the future as this wonderful thing, especially in the wake of the moon landing, it seemed anything was possible. a record like To Our Children's Children's Children feels so hopelessly naive today, it's kind of depressing actually, like you feel that future was stolen from you. but also something like Kraftwerk, those records seemed legitimately excited about technology, like whoa cool I can do banking on the computer now, what's next?? who wants to sound like the future anymore? especially when "future music" increasingly looks like AI slop?

Yes - and it’s depressing to hear politicians say things like ‘Globalisation is over’. So much energy and so many new ideas come from the global interaction - and it feels like a period of retrenchment economically and culturally.

Frogbs onto it there. I can't remember the last time I heard of an optimistic sci fi story or any sort of equivalent in song or art.

Although I was thinking the other day of how a modernised Pete Seeger / Weavers type protest song could work in today's context, a sort of "All this will pass but only if you stand up to it and hold strong" type of message.

The whole idea of thst feels kind of absurd, dated, but it's sad to even feel that way

i'd be ok with "Drop" if it was about this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR3fQzhdgZY

This may sound nitpicky but I think Pete Seeger would not have had any truck with the idea of “holding” strong, nor that anything will “pass”; holding strong is what the status quo does. What WE have to do is fight, and struggle, and change, and chip away, and create new alliances. And that nothing passes without a fight. Easy for me to say.

xpost

I can't remember the last time I heard of an optimistic sci fi story

Pretty much every single short story market, particularly the US-based ones, state in their submission guidelines that they're looking for hopeful, optimistic stories with people working in communities to make a better world and yadda yadda. As someone that actually submits to these places I've pretty much given up! Gloomy Brit? Don't bother.

Although this is all based in a lack of optimism about the future if something radical doesn't change, so they have a point. It just always seems to result in tales where nice liberal Californians end up holding art classes or whatever as the way forward.

Well those films are all relevant and relatively current and relatively "new" in their own ways as far as mainstream movies are concerned, I'd say

― DLC Soundsystem (dog latin), Friday, 11 April 2025 bookmarkflaglink

A film about a toy is new to pop culture is old hat? There have been a few films over the last few years where a feminist layer has been laid on top to cynically start a 'conversation' as a means of selling it.

Also (and yeah I know its not a film but v high profile) have you seen the Simpsons ep about Malibu Stacy?

xpost “Hopepunk” iirc

Yes, "hopepunk" is a thing. xpost!

Will say though you pick any decade of the 20th century and the dystopian will outnumber the utopian, I guess space opera might outnumber both but it's rarely about actual visions of the future. Utopian sci fi is notoriously tricky to integrate into an interesting narrative, things like Star Trek and the Culture novels are outliers.

"wonder how much of this is just down to a dwindling sense of optimism about the future. in the 60s and 70s it felt like there was a lot of music presenting the future as this wonderful thing, especially in the wake of the moon landing, it seemed anything was possible."

This doesn't feel quite right, where a lot of that future was built on post-war reconstruction of bombed cities, in the shadow of the cold war.

Like I can say rn that what I see from China in terms of high speed rail and some of its cities could be a future, but no one ever takes it seriously.

There was a period of 10-15 of relative 'hope' before 9/11 started tearing at that, and then the financial crisis.

Barbue tbf absolutely inconcievable in 2000, would've prob hit the zeitgeist great around 2014, already felt a bit behind the times discoursewise when it came out. Still a good time at the movies mind.

Oh yeah I liked it.

There was a period of 10-15 of relative 'hope' before 9/11 started tearing at that, and then the financial crisis.

That's why I'm nostalgic for the 90s...And it's not just there was 'hope'; there was an absence of a background of constant crisis.

Solarpunk, hopecore.

There is apparently a literary genre called noblebright, also one called mannerpunk.

Obviously I don't suscribe to the "bad times make for great art" thing but it's funny, you certainly wouldn't view the 90's as an optimistic time if you only had the most iconic pop culture of that time to guide you.

the 90s sucked just like now and any times, the global village became multinational corporate wasteland

Just because somethibg has precedents doesn't mean it can't present ideas in a new way or in a form that hasn't been done before. Literally everything ever has a precedent

I didn't love the Barbie movie, but as a piece of media it presented itself as a piece of culture to its audience in a new way. It was a very-much talked about movie. It wasn't the same thing as, say, Masters Of The Universe in 1986.
Similarly just because Cronenbourg had done body horror before doesn't mean The Substance was redundant. There's much more to these things than all that.

Back in the '90s we had Hopepunk, Cashpunk and Jobspunk

Going back to what Jordan posted, this jumped out at me:

online trends (this video giving bridgerton hello!!)

Back in the day you could actually say that certain tv shows had big online fandoms - stuff like Firefly or nu-Who. Now, despite the network shows watched by millions that have no online presence, it is overall taken for granted that any successful tv show will have a big online fandom. The dynamics have been reversed so that Bridgerton, a Netflix tv show based on a series of books, can be seen as primarily an online trend.

Yes. Obsessive nitpicking over shows that are not even puzzle boxes really (White Lotus) is a thing that didn’t really happen twenty years ago.

Twin Peaks and Lost would both like a word with you.

Those are puzzle boxes shows

Box

That's why I'm nostalgic for the 90s...And it's not just there was 'hope'; there was an absence of a background of constant crisis.

― Bob Six

I dunno. Living during the Clinton years in America was my first acquaintance with the sense of constant crisis.

In Eng (which I think is what Bob and I are talking about) there was a renewed sense of hope due to the Tories getting kicked, investment in public services...until 9/11.

Now I don't see any 'breaks' at all.

xpost Yes, the Clinton years felt like one thing after another too—-WTC Bombing, Waco, school shootings, OJ trial, Oklahoma City, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, etc etc

That's why I'm nostalgic for the 90s...And it's not just there was 'hope'; there was an absence of a background of constant crisis.

― Bob Six

I dunno. Living during the Clinton years in America was my first acquaintance with the sense of constant crisis.

xp yah what PK sez

anybody who expresses nostalgia for the 90s gets a three-word response from me:

"so, i'm trans..."

pretty much everybody i talk to realizes their mistake at that point.

I do remember a post-Lewinsky breathing room era -- 1999 into 2000 -- coinciding with my first hedonistic period (I'd just come out).

Weird starting point, but I've been watching a lot of Nanni Moretti lately, and it really makes me think a lot of this thread.

It make me think there's kind of two nineties. In 'Caro Diario' from 1993 he is happy and optimistic, his beloved communist party made it through the tumult of the late 80s early 90s, the news are mostly good. Then 'Aprile' from 98 described what happened then: Berlusconi and Lega Nord jumped in on the scene and wrecked everything, what should have been a leftist wave ended up being neoliberalism and a resurgent far-right. A shift in the mid-nineties coincides with Srebenica, Oslo accords and murder of Rabin, etc. I now think there are kind of two periods of postmodern 90's. Optimistic and cynical/hedonistic.

Also, it's striking how different middle class homes looked in the late-nineties, early 00s. There's so much stuff! There's a whole library in the living room, for instance. Today, the same type of people can only afford half as much space, and there's no reason to have a library, whatever books you have is for fun and pleasure. So me and my friends bookshelves does look a lot different than what our parents looked like, and that's without getting into the dvd/cd collection that nobody has anymore. We did live differently.

Made me think the world still changes quite a lot, and quite rapidly, but in different ways. The streets of Copenhagen look the same, but they sound differently after electric cars, for instance. I'm not sure there is any 'stasis'.

There's so much stuff!

Living rooms in the 80s/90s/early 00s had a lot of highly visible tech - big TVs with glass tubes so they stood out and into the room, VCRs, cable and satellite receivers, hi-fi systems. In the 70s people might have a small TV, a record player, and maybe a telephone in their living room. Late 00s onwards all this tech either miniaturises or its functionality gets folded into other devices, like your mobile phone.

The Algo fed me this Mina Le video on my sidebar and I watched it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXtBFiF_32k

growing up this was stuff i actively avoided, because fashion was For Girls. for me now? it's more intellectual. I watch it to remind "the algorithm" that I'm a woman I watch it because I don't _know_ fashion, know what fashion means to younger women. I'm not looking for fashion tips per se.

my sense of fashion is very basic. i learned to wear clothes that fit by using "body triangles". I'd thought that wearing a dress would inevitably make me "look like a man", and quickly learned that it wasn't about being "a man" but about wearing the right clothes for the body I had. this wasn't something I ever _thought about_ pre-transition. what Le refers to as the "Joan Didion wardrobe" is what I learned as the "capsule wardrobe". It was important for me because pre-transition I had a very basic sense of fashion. It wasn't really possible for me to put together a "bad" wardrobe, because the basic look I had didn't really allow for clashing colors. Jeans or khakis. I still looked terrible in those outfits, mind you, because I hated wearing that stuff and they looked wrong for me.

The other thing I see in Le's video is talking about how age affects fashion. This is kind of a big issue for me - expenditure on fashion, the graph she shows off says, drops after 44. And it is very gendered, at least for me. It wasn't until age 43 that I started caring about how I look, and, well... this is one of the paradoxes of "passing", which, I note, is something Didion specifically talks about as a purpose for her two-outfit rule. "Passing" can mean all kinds of things to all kinds of people. It just happens to be always be an issue for me, not because I _don't_, but because I _do_.

The reasons behind her "Joan Didion wardrobe" were also really interesting to me. One of the things that really does influence how I present is my chronic depression and ADHD. I haven't worked in an office since March of 2020. Motivating myself to do _anything at all_ is very difficult. I try to put on clothes every day, but doing it with any sense of style at all is, honestly, beyond me. Since I stopped working full time in September, I've been doing what I call "boymoding" - wearing the same kind of clothes I did pre-transition. T-shirts, jeans, sweaters. And a lot of it is that it takes a lot of effort to look good. External validation, Le says, is a huge motivator for fashion. This is complicated for me because when I was younger, dressing how I wanted to dress would have resulted in a _tremendous amount_ of external invalidation. And that's carried over. People are going to validate me if I go out looking good - I know that - but when I'm depressed, I'm kind of afraid of external validation. Because I know I don't have self-confidence, and I know that external validation can't replace self-confidence.

The other thing that I get from Le's video is that... I kind of like the idea of "assigned female". Because it's not just something that happens at birth. I find that when I go out, I am _assigned female_, in the sense that people look at me and tend to instantly come to the conclusion that I'm a woman. When I was earlier in transition, some people didn't like the word "pass" because it implied, to them, that one was appearing to be something one wasn't, and preferred the word "blend". (For my part, I do think that I "pass" - not as a _woman_, which I am, but as _cisgender_, which I'm not.) And people who are "assigned female" also have these restrictions on how we are allowed to express ourselves. Fashion is, for a lot of people socially assigned as "women", one of the only ways in which they can exhibit self-expression. For my part, I attempted to exhibit self-expression through fashion - I went through a phase of wearing thrift store plaid sportcoats - but I wasn't ever able to self-express through fashion the way I'd like when I was younger.

The flip side of that is that I have an EXTREMELY STRONG AND DISTINCT PERSONALITY. Even when I'm adopting my basic-middle-aged-white-woman look (which is to some extent a fundamental look for me), I stand out. If I'm out there being myself, I'm going to stand out. In 2020 I was OK with dressing how I wanted to, even if it drew attention to me. For the past couple of years I've been actively trying to avoid other people's attention, which has led to the "boymoding" thing. Honestly? Honestly a lot of it is a matter of _safety_. This whole idea of the way fashion changes with political tides - there's something to it for me. I'm always going to be the nail that sticks out. If I get hammered down enough, I'm going to start trying to camouflaging myself so I don't look like I stick out. Even though I'm safe where I'm at, I'm very careful about where I wear my trans pride T-shirts these days. i don't know what it means to be "proud" of being trans these days. i'm glad i'm alive, i guess. not having a job affects me a little bit. i spend less time looking at Torrid. that's the other thing, i'm fat. not, like, morbidly obese or anything. i just don't look good in twink fashion, which, honestly, is 90% of fashion. i know very, very little about fashion, but it does seem to me that runway fashion is, to a great extent, stuff that's designed to look good on twinks. i don't mean that as a condemnation. i am a big, big supporter of twink fashion. i'm just _well_ past my twink era.

so no, i don't think it's a permanent holding pattern. i think that there is a place for emergent cultural behavior, but it's not something that's really happening organically within fashion and design right now. a lot of trends for me, when i was younger, are about finding new collective ways to be within current socio-economic-environmental constraints. and in fact, i don't know _any_ way to be within current socio-economic-environmental constraints. i don't know how to perform collective self-expression in ways that don't involve direct opposition towards the forces creating those artificial constraints. every other form of collective self-expression seems to be co-opted by those forces and twisted to make it appear to support those constraints. so, i mean, what else is there?

Even stuff like “clean girl/minimalism” aesthetic is very misleading because it’s built on so much money. The influencers pushing “clean girl” have lip fillers, buccal fat removed, veneers, highly expensive skincare regimes and there’s a real shift towards spending a TON of money on the facial interventions so you can always look a certain way at all times. You wake up and your eyes are wide open from your mini brow lift, your lips are always plump, your skin is perfectly tight because you paid someone to make it that way - it’s kind of inhuman. Never look tired, never look sad, never look anything except blank. It’s all so samey - all these women have huge pillowy lips and fox eye lifts and use the same filters. Jessica deFino covers this all on her substack, here’s a better way of explaining it from a recent post:

― triste et cassé (gyac), Thursday, April 3, 2025 6:20 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

my 8yo daughter watches this YouTuber whose face freaks me out for reasons I find hard to articulate. one of it is exactly that, she looks the same in every single thing she does. it's not even like the Real Housewives thing, at least those women have a number of different looks, sometimes you see them in their bathrobe without makeup...this woman is like a cartoon character, even if she was changing the valve in a toilet she'd be done up the same way. but more than that it's the particular way she looks, the wide eyes and shiny perfect teeth and exaggerated expressions, her face seems to be surgically optimized for YouTube thumbnails

There are a number of areas we've looked at, like music and fashion, but what about philosophy and cultural studies more broadly? Is that in a holding pattern? When I was in university critical theory felt pretty vibrant, Althusser and Foucault had only recently died, you had people like Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser and Donna Haraway and Luce Irigaray and Paul Virilio on the syllabus, really quite wild stuff, or at least so it felt, provocative, anti-establishment, ornery... it felt like there was a kind of anti-canon revolution happening in the humanities. What is it like today?

Why bother being anti-canon when the universities themselves are under attack in so many places?

why bother being anti-canon when you're a university in the first place?

Not the question but okay

iirc everyone is in STEM now and you take a single philosophy class that's called "philosophy and ethics in technology" where you talk about Karl Popper for a few weeks and then watch the Spielberg movie AI and talk about whether robots are sexy

the post wwii prosperity bump for a few decades a la picketty's capital explains the heyday of critical theory afaict. but yeah capitalist desperation won out, or the marxists were right, and that coupled with the climate apocalypse - is there really anything more to say? zizek seemed like a last gasp and a turn away from the university. i'm way out of touch but the last good thing i read was a post-hardt and negri "taking stock" kind of piece in the baffler (i forget by whom). i get the impression that humanities programs right now are so fucking dysfunctional that thought isn't exactly happening in them, everyone is too busy getting fucked by admin robber barons. the fact that it was different for a while is an aberration afaict. spinoza wasn't exactly tenured faculty ya know.

that thought isn't exactly happening in them

i'm sure that was absurdly ungenerous and i just don't know anything. it's nice to see a good butler piece every now and then.

It’s strongly US centred ofc but I think seeing basketball and to a far lesser extent (but that’s changing thanks to Lindor and Harper) baseball teams post photos and videos of their men arriving at games so we can see their outfits feels like a shift. It’s social media driven sure, but it’s almost expected now and with male fashion, I feel like seeing famous athletes wearing bright colours and unusual pieces pushes the boundary of what’s acceptable on the street. That’s just a feeling though. And I don’t remember seeing much like that even ten years ago.

― triste et cassé (gyac), Thursday, April 3, 2025 11:32 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

years ago i read an excellent article which argued Michael Jordan, on and off court, had by far the biggest influence on mens' fashions in the 90's and not just in the obvious ways. i was completely convinced it was otm. when you posted this, i tried to find the article and couldn’t, and later forgot about it. i still can’t find it! but this is also good and mentions how the stylists to pro ballers have since become important liasons to Euro fashion houses:

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29470986/michael-jordan-changed-fashion-game-one-beret-gold-hoop

it is v v hard to think of *any* area of mens style that wasnt transformed at least indirectly by MJ at the time

There are a number of areas we've looked at, like music and fashion, but what about philosophy and cultural studies more broadly? Is that in a holding pattern? When I was in university critical theory felt pretty vibrant, Althusser and Foucault had only recently died, you had people like Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser and Donna Haraway and Luce Irigaray and Paul Virilio on the syllabus, really quite wild stuff, or at least so it felt, provocative, anti-establishment, ornery... it felt like there was a kind of anti-canon revolution happening in the humanities. What is it like today?

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 16 April 2025 17:09 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I'd say much of it is still dancing around the same territory as the '60s-'90s boom, though it's not a complete dead end. Haraway has managed to still be at bleeding edge of some of the hottest stuff of the last ten years or so, with a shift from posthuman cyborgs to more-than-human, multispecies etc. stuff that could feel more like a change in focus rather than something radically new. (This is also all over contemporary art.) In that vein ecological perspectives have been big, hence the maybe already diminishing proliferation of ideas elaborating on the Anthropocene, e.g. Capitalocene, Plantationocene. Also of course lots of work trying to make sense of AI or the politics of data and so on, though that still tends to take pointers from the big beasts of old like Haraway or Foucault. A more global turn has also been important - returns to decolonial thought, indigenous thought etc., although the interest in decolonisation has been watered down and absorbed as a selling point by universities and art institutions with exceptional speed. As map suggests there are various returns to Marx, especially new Marxist feminisms and ecological Marxisms. So lots of familiar stuff, though not necessarily a holding pattern. I'd say that there have been quite substantial stylistic shifts in the last twenty years (maybe post-2008 returns to Marx as decisive here), with a perhaps excessive reaction against the prevarications of the deconstructive mode into a somewhat more hard-nosed default today. Of course this is all swimming against the tide of the kinds of departments where this kind of work can take place being torn apart.

Yeah I am somewhat tuned in to New Materialism especially, and Panpsychism, Posthumanism to a lesser extent because I'm an animist, even though I'm mostly unfamiliar with philosophy and critical theory. But I've been under the impression this stuff is super fashionable in academia.
Butler is foundational, and also Laclan and Latour (I've only encountered the first two secondhand). Jane Bennett's book Vibrant Matter or her essay Thing Power are good intros. Karen Barad also has a critique of Foucault that might be a worth a look if you're familiar with Foucault (I'm not, and haven't read it, though it's on my list)

Shift might be from "these are radical new ideas" to "this is the background we now think and work against".

Lol that reminds me of something the prof of my "Foundations of Semiotics" class said, in her intro to the class, that there's an irony in the name, since semiotics is inherently anti-foundational

That was the class in which she famously (?) asked for bi-weekly essays on extremely knotty questions and the length requirement was that each essay had to fit on one side of one sheet of US Letter paper, using whatever fonts and margins you wanted. Tough!

That… sounds awesome. Like it’s almost equally a graphic design challenge.

I was actually just about to read a paper today on why New Materialism hasn’t converged much with Indigenous studies despite the obvious resonance.

I don't have that patience to read through this whole thread and a lot of it seems way out there, but agree with some of the concepts

The look I remember from my macho mostly male outdoorsy college in the mid 70s was lace-up leather hiking shoes with tube socks and long shorts, sandals with heavy wool socks, boat shoes with or without socks, heavy lumberjack flannel shirts, a general fashion for oversized clothes that were meant to sexualize your hot body, and lots of head hair but not much in the way of beards or mustaches, and absolutely no tattoos. Some of those things repeated in the 90s and are repeating again today

I still think the guys from my era were the most sexy ever

lol that sounds like a Derek Guy fever dream. check out the pictures in this article

https://dieworkwear.com/2024/05/03/american-space-cowboys/

Guy’s “rugged Americana” obsession dovetails with this conversation imo, in that most cultures adhere to what i think of as the baseball haircut theory of fashion. baseball players tend to stick with the hair style they wore in their prime, either out of superstition or just as a kind of way of trying to stay in touch with whatever it was that was working for them then. If you look at France they’re obsessed with preserving the art nouveau era when Paris was the centre of Western high culture, with perhaps a little bit of the unruly hair and sideburns of the ‘68 era. do the New york times crossword and there are words in there that were current in the 1950s heyday of literary publishing, look at fashion and style and there’s just this endless appetite for the late 70s early 80s downtown scene. Cultures have these consensus high points and people want to just live in them. 90s house music. (somewhat bizarrely). Anyway it seems that post-war college campus style has become one of those sinkholes. corduroy jackets. oxford shirts and straight leg jeans. Paul Newman and Robert Redford type of stuff. it feels eternal.

On the other hand one of the consensus high points of the 20th century that hasn’t seen this treatment is rock music. very few people under 20 years old gives a shit about rock music. think about like, husker du. cinderella. warrant. the grifters. silkworm. the jean-paul sartre experience. great white. robyn hitchcock. the trashcan sinatras. danzig. it’s all impossibly ancient, like opera or something. yet my boys will actually consciously decide to put on r&b or soul music - lean on me. mr postman. weird!

wrt French style, “beau monde” late 1700s early 1800s fashion in furniture and clothes, bleeding into Second Empire, remains to this day an identifiably French style, and you see it in the dainty interiors and side tables of Parisian apartments. Sartre seemed already like he was suffocating in it by the time he wrote Huis Clos. it was the style that hell was decorated in, the one his characters couldn’t escape.

(upper class Parisian apartments i should say)

90s house music. (somewhat bizarrely)

Flagged this post

lol i thought that might get a rise from you

Speaking of theory, one area where we're definitely in a 'holding pattern' is people basically not being able to figure out what comes after postmodernism for decades. Are we still postmodern? Are we meta modern? Have we gone back to being modern, or was modernity a mistake all along? In a way the big problem might just be as Lyotard said, that there are no 'grand narratives' any more, and without that it's very difficult to get whatever innovation people come up with seem truly momentous. Because stuff definitely changes all along. But it does feel smaller than before.

I'm surprised that the looming threat of being able to turn ourselves into literal furries hasn't put transhumanism/posthumanism in the lead.

postmodernism just meant the thing that comes after modernism iirc, sort of like how metaphysics was the part of aristotle’s book that came after the part called physics. that said there is a strong argument to be made imo that postmodernism is really an elaboration of and extension of modernism

That paper had a section called "Columbus Discovers Non-Human Agency". Linda Hogan said much more profound things about this 20 years ago.

It's funny to read theorists promote sensuality over intellectualism in academic jargon.

Maybe one of the odd things about postmodernism is that it managed to become a grand narrative itself. But I also think people today are less scared of grand(ish) narratives, with new emphasis on the racialised and gendered dimensions of capitalism contributing a lot to that. Postmodernism itself seemed to be unpicked from a number of directions - a feeling that an art historical category was illegitimately being made to do the work of a category of historical periodisation, a decline in prominence of the art that seemed to fit into that category (although the direction of contemporary art that followed is probably even more difficult to pin down), a feeling that postmodernism was ultimately a Eurocentric category, a realisation from Marxists that labelling anything that had anything to do with gender, race, sexuality etc. as postmodern (pejorative) wasn't really doing it justice (revanchist modernists coming to see some value in 'postmodern' perspectives), a sense that dismissed aspects of modernism and modernity were actually still at work across politics and culture (and vice versa). With all of that pulled together maybe something like 'globalisation' became the new default category, though with less agreement on what that entailed than we had with other categories (and maybe now the explanatory power of that itself is breaking down).

Good piece about this in the New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/193563/trump-podcasters-hollywood-right-wing-culture

It’s broad in scope but hits on a lot of themes that are very relevant I think.

This is content chewed up and spit out so often that it has no texture—a puree of overly vivid colors, chaos, and dread. The pink slime is here. It’s not all AI-generated, but it might as well be. Between MrBeast, stuntmen, the hype houses of blood relations, and the weirdly adventurous kids, these channels boast hundreds of millions of subscribers who add up to billions of views. This is the content Hollywood studios are really up against, whether they know it or not. In March, YouTube creators held “up-fronts,” teasing their coming content as a way of persuading advertisers to lock in placement. (The tradition of up-fronts was started by television networks to lure in and secure ad dollars up front.) An estimated 150 major brands were in attendance. Billions of dollars were at stake.

very few people under 20 years old gives a shit about rock music. think about like, husker du. cinderella. warrant. the grifters. silkworm. the jean-paul sartre experience. great white. robyn hitchcock. the trashcan sinatras. danzig. it’s all impossibly ancient, like opera or something. yet my boys will actually consciously decide to put on r&b or soul music - lean on me. mr postman. weird!

Weirdly my 16 year old son is very much into 80s and 90s rock music. He has mentioned that his favorite album is And Justice For All by Metallica. His taste kind of seems all over the place as someone who came of age during that period (though I guess it is all broadly in the same genre), we listened to his music library on shuffle in the car the other day and there were songs by Slipknot, Bush, Alice in Chains, Korn, Live, Dinosaur Jr, Megadeth, Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I ask him if he listens to any current rock or metal and he says no, he thinks 80s-90s is when all the best music was made.

I ask him if he listens to any current rock or metal and he says no, he thinks 80s-90s is when all the best music was made.

It's up to you to introduce him to the glories of rock music from 1969-75, then.

pretty cool kid you got there silverfish!

Both my nephews (17 and 21) like rock music as the main music they listen to, fwiw.

Is it recent stuff, old, or a bit of a mix though? Just out of interest?

What I find strange, in a culture-shocky type of way, is that whenever I speak to students and younger people around Bristol, or encounter a soundsystem in the summer, it's drum'n'bass/jungle that continue to reign supreme; occasionally hard house (I'm constantly hearing 'The Vengabus Is Coming' inserted into sets as some sort of jokey selection. It's older audiences who seem to be interested in newer styles like amapiano etc...

Now, to me having grown up with the first wave of jungle, then late nineties d'n'b, and eventually seeing its absorption into the mainstream by the 2000s (CFCF's 'Liquid Colours' album being an exploration and observance of this), I find it quite hard to imagine how this style can possibly be pushed much further. There's already a thread on ILM called 'The Great Fake Jungle Rush of 2013' about a jungle revival that happened over ten years ago now.

But any time I'm DJing, I'm guaranteed to be asked by some broccoli-haired kid in tube socks if I've "got any drumnbass mate?" - it happens so frequently and yet I'm surprised at its endurance. I wouldn't be so curmudgeonly as to tell them to discover their own type of music, but it crosses my mind.

Then again, is it too different to people my age in the 90s and 2000s being into 60s sounds? I was obsessed with the Beach Boys and the Zombies in my early 20s, and wouldn't have thought twice about putting some on at a party.

Anyway, just prattling on... Where's me cocoa... etc?

Some recent stuff but definitely lots of older stuff. Radiohead, LCD Soundsystem, etc. They don't only like rock music but it is sort of the main element I think of their taste.

I wonder how easy it would have been for older ppl to assume millenials don't care about rock music either, with how dominant rap and dance music were in the charts of my youth. The amount of non-embarassing mainstream rock was already quite small, it seems to have shrunk further but I dunno.

Being old enough to go to nightclubs is a thing that helps people to get into dance music but is maybe forgotten when looking back.

For sure. I didn't really get to go "proper" raving till I was quite a way into my twenties, and rarely got to go to actual city nightclubs back then as it would involve an excursion and lots of money. I experience clubs more now than I ever did

But any time I'm DJing, I'm guaranteed to be asked by some broccoli-haired kid in tube socks if I've "got any drumnbass mate?"

Maybe d&b is perennially appealing to the youth, just the speed & energy of it. And mainstream d&b is more like EDM & brostep, right? Obnoxious noisy basslines, drops, big simple drums, super loud. I doubt they want to hear old-school jungle, but I'm just guessing here and could be very wrong.

Yeah I think you're right. It's the heavy metal of dance music in many ways, and heavy metal will never not be popular among a certain swathe of people

I wouldn't be so curmudgeonly as to tell them to discover their own type of music, but it crosses my mind.

ngl this is basically my reaction whenever i see young kids wearing 90's pants.

i came across this style archaeology in max’s newsletter. I have no idea what this website is, it feels forbidding. and somehow i feel it both confirms and denies the premise of this thread lol

https://www.are.na/evan-collins-1522646491/gen-x-soft-club

love that. i was 15 in 1996 and just got the internet and saved a bunch of .bmps and .jpgs that I thought were "cool". I think there would be some overlap. definitely translucent pharmaceutical packaging was a thing.

“I have no idea what this website is, it feels forbidding.”

Its kind of fun experiencing this feeling, entering my 40s and not understanding young ppl stuff as well. Like, there’s a lot of humor that flies over my head, but it’s sort of comforting in a way.

it reminds me a little bit of a modern attempt at what rhizome.org tried to do in its early days.. “a playlist for ideas” (!)

cough pinterest cough

lol dang busted

Would love to hear a take from someone about the age of 30 on how they view the 00's 10's and 20's so far and their aesthetic differences in all aspects of life (including online)

So today I asked my co-worker (28) about this:

2000's - UK Garage, post-90's House, Destiny's Child, butterfly patterns, everyone super skinny
2010's - Nu Rave, skinny jeans, the tv show Skins, neo soul ("you mean like Adele?" "no, more like Janelle Monae")
2020's - flares, Charli XCX

A lot of the 00's and 10's signifiers there read to me as signifiers from the decades preceding but that's true w/ a lot of 20th century stuff too.

Juana Rozas feels like a revival of Electroclash minus the specifically 80s elements. Those signifiers are just kinda subsumed into the 21st century dance/rock received sleaze.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKaxV2S35k8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2g7reCjO2I

i came across this style archaeology in max’s newsletter. I have no idea what this website is, it feels forbidding. and somehow i feel it both confirms and denies the premise of this thread lol

https://www.are.na/evan-collins-1522646491/gen-x-soft-club

― Tracer Hand, Sunday, May 4, 2025 2:56 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Are.na is sort of a Pinterest/Tumblr/Wikipedia hybrid that anyone can use, iirc, but Evan Collins uses it for his Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute project, which catalogs design aesthetics of the past 50 years. I've been a fan ever since I discovered Global Village Coffeehouse and felt deeply nostalgic for, like, old issues of the Utne Reader.

Anyway, I came to this thread to post this Atlantic article, which I haven't read yet but seems relevant: "Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture? Meet the critics who believe the arts are in terminal decline."

(And yes, as I predicted upon reading that headline, one of the critics is Ted Gioia.)

Spencer Kornhaber interviewing Ted Gioia is a real meeting of the minds. I've written about that article for the edition of my newsletter that's going out on Friday, but it's for paying subscribers only. Here's what I said:

This Spencer Kornhaber story in The Atlantic tackles the question of whether American pop culture sucks now, and if so, why. (He also asks whether fine art sucks now.) He talks to aging Boomer finance bro turned professional cultural prognosticator Ted Gioia, Millennial art critic Dean Kissick, former indie musician Jaime Brooks, and second-generation music critic Kieran Press-Reynolds (son of Simon Reynolds and Joy Press), and ultimately comes away hopeful, for exceedingly dumb reasons. (Do we get to hear about Beyoncé and Taylor Swift? You bet we do.)

“Each declinist I spoke with made a convincing case that large, inexorable forces were wearing culture down”, Kornhaber writes. (I did not find any of the doomcriers’ arguments convincing — Brooks got closest, but her complaint was mostly about production methods and distribution channels dying off, not the creative spark itself.) “But they also left me clinging to scattered counterexamples that might tell another story. I’d seen the omens of death; I needed to make an effort to find signs of life.”

My position is this: If you say “there’s no good, new, creative music being made”, what you’re actually saying is “I am not hearing anything that strikes me as new or creative”, and that’s a you problem. I hear great new (and new-to-me) music every single day (as does Ted Gioia, which the article makes clear). But that’s because I go looking for it. If you don’t, what’s your excuse? Also, some of the arguments being made in order to act like the culture is dying are frankly absurdly nitpicky, like the one about how “every year, a greater and greater percentage of the albums streamed online is ‘catalog music,’ meaning it is at least 18 months old.” Oh, no! People are listening to music from the year before last! Music is dooooomed!

People will always make music. What might disappear is the music industry writ large — the bloated infrastructure that created payola in the 1950s, rock festivals in the 1960s, arena tours in the 1970s, MTV in the 1980s, and the diamond certification (more than 10 million copies sold) in the 1990s and 2000s. There will never be another generation of huge stars: Taylor Swift, sure, but before her Kiss and Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson and Madonna and the Eagles and the Rolling Stones and whoever else you care to name. That’s all going away. But if you think that means people are going to stop making music, you don’t know any people.

We are going to pass through the age of the pop star and return music to what it was before, say, 100 years ago — folk culture. No more arena concerts; instead, “There’s a guy in my town who’s an amazing guitarist.” My own contributions to culture follow a simple philosophy: “not everything is for everyone.” When I decide to release an album on Burning Ambulance Music, I press up 500 CDs. I don’t think it’s my job to share music with the entire world. It’s my job to share music with 500 people.

If you’re reading this, I bet you think similarly. And I bet you’re as optimistic about the continued vitality of the human creative spirit as I am. Don’t listen to the cranks and the doomers. They’re just mad because nobody’s spoon-feeding them things anymore. They have to go out and actively search for the good stuff, and that feels too much like work.

I seem to have read that argument before somewhere - from 1991!

tl;dr: “Jackson and Madonna are the last of their kind. In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” https://imomus.com/index499.html"> https://imomus.com/index499.html

are.na is bit like delicious, also very trendy in design/coding/art research/uni etc

i came across this style archaeology in max’s newsletter. I have no idea what this website is, it feels forbidding. and somehow i feel it both confirms and denies the premise of this thread lol

https://www.are.na/evan-collins-1522646491/gen-x-soft-club

― Tracer Hand, Sunday, 4 May 2025 20:56 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

This seems tangentially related?

The Great Millennial Colour Drought

Just popping up here to say nobody who used to work with that little fash Dean Ki$$ick at ESM liked him very much.

Man's inhumanity to man

i have two are.na boards, one for mood-boarding my novel and one for design/art inspirations for my zine

it’s great

ofc my ex who is three years younger than me and also in design/tech introduced me to it

Also, some of the arguments being made in order to act like the culture is dying are frankly absurdly nitpicky, like the one about how “every year, a greater and greater percentage of the albums streamed online is ‘catalog music,’ meaning it is at least 18 months old.” Oh, no! People are listening to music from the year before last! Music is dooooomed!

the thing about this is that people always listened to old music, we just didn't have a way to track it before streaming. and if the percentage is growing each year, might that not reflect that the average person who streams music online has gotten older as the overall streaming audience has steadily expanded?

(I've now read the Atlantic article and see that Kornhaber does make that first point.)

is anyone seriously claiming that people will stop making and listening to music? the question is more about whether the world is geared towards people being able to accomplish the same big changes in music and art that we saw through the 20th century. It would be really nice to be able to say "Yes, of course, art and music are as vital as ever", but it's hard for me to square, I dunno, the popular adoption of the phonograph all the way to Aphex Twin's 'Windowlicker' and be able to imagine a similar leap over the next hundred years. There's no way to know of course

I think the fact that there is more music released every year both undermines the contention that music is "in decline" and also makes it harder for any one person to feel like they have a grasp on what's going on in music these days.

What has declined, perhaps, is a culture of music journalism that curated our collective sense of what was new (from an artistic perspective) and worth paying attention to. It seems to me that there is less narrative-building about how music or even particular genres are evolving, so people are more likely to experience new music as an undifferentiated glut.

The decline of centralized curation; cue ensuing discussion of whether that is a feature or bug

I was talking to Nabisco last year about his 2009 "Decade in Indie" essay for Pitchfork, which surveys how "indie" as a genre evolved over the previous decade and anticipates how it will continue to evolve. But what actually happened, we realized, is that it mostly just collapsed as a signifier. There's no trajectory to follow anymore.

unperson otm

Ted Gioia claiming that his generation didn't listen to the music of his parents' generation, followed by his recommendation of two musical acts that were bossa nova and surf rock -- with the latter having a lot of youtube views! -- kind of kills me. I feel like his entire shtick is pretending new things don't exist because he either listened only to the top ten and dismissed it, listened to more things and just didn't think they were any good, or just didn't listen to much at all and is making some strawman argument. Great premise: We need more new music that caters specifically to my tastes.

the question is more about whether the world is geared towards people being able to accomplish the same big changes in music and art that we saw through the 20th century.

The music industry as all of us understand it was a bubble.

I first became aware of Gioia over a decade ago through his year-end top 100 albums lists. They were interesting because he seemed to listen to a wide range of music (pop, rock, jazz, classical, etc.) and didn't follow any kind of critical consensus. (Most of what appeared on the lists was unfamiliar to me.)

So he is clearly putting in some work to discover new music, and I wonder if he's just salty that other people don't have the same habits. But that kind of voraciousness -- listening to hundreds of new albums across various genres per year -- would have made him an outlier in any era.

ok, I shouldn't spend my life bitching about Gioia but.. he's complaining about a dearth of interesting new american music and one of his picks is australian?!

mark s once asked, on this board, whether music that’s not written about can matter. i think about that question quite a bit actually

A dumb guy with broad listening habits is still gonna say dumb shit about what he listens to, which is Gioia's problem. It's nice for him that he listens to a wide variety of music, but his actual thoughts about music and culture are like if Malcolm Gladwell was kicked in the head by a horse.

he wasn't?

That explains the hairdo

W David Marx has entered the chat, arguing (in response to Spencer Kornhaber's Atlantic article) that poptimism is responsible for the perception of cultural decline: https://culture.ghost.io/the-missing-piece-in-conversations-about-cultural-decline/

There's a kernel of truth there, but it falls apart slightly when he mentions trap as 'radically new-sounding'. Because that was pop! And I'd argue a big reason 'poptimism' won in the 2010s was because pop-music was undeniably great for a few years. Just like indie was pretty great in the 00s. It wasn't a conspiracy or anything, Lemonade is just a better album than Parquet Courts or whatever was the alternative in 2016.

But where I still think he has a point is that poptimism has turned out to be quite hard to get past, even though a lot of the big pop stars make absolutely awful music today. Tortured Poets Department is as uninteresting an album as any mega star has made, but it still got the thousand thinkpiece treatment. That is probably more of a media problem than a music problem, though.

the straw man poptimism of "it's popular therefore it's good" has grown into a monolith, but if these theorists actually took a look at what they are supposedly arguing against they would see that a vestigial enclave of music journalists writing buyers guides for an audience of obsessive fans is not a mistaken critical position, it's just the only market left.

I'd like Groucho Marx's take.

the straw man poptimism of "it's popular therefore it's good" has grown into a monolith

certainly, "it's popular therefore it's good" was not a claim advanced by the original poptimist critics in the 2000s, but a weaker version -- "it's popular therefore it's worth engaging with" was (and still is).

The poptimist generation of critics in the 21st century rejected this separation of high and low art. They argued that there was no meaningful difference between Mariah Carey and Kurt Cobain

I'm quite tired by this 20-year-old argument, but let me say for the fucking hundredth time that sentences like the second one are bullshit. It's not that "no meaningful difference" existed b/w these acts -- a bad critic would fail to discuss those differences. It's that Mariah Carey deserved considered New Yorker essays like the Kurt Cobains had earned for years.

I would say it was in a way arguing that, in the sense that some people would insist it was a matter of fact that Nirvana were superior to Mariah Carey. From memory, a lot of optimism at the beginning was establishing that kind of thinking should be abandoned and anything can be interesting. Which doesn't seem a hugely controversial point, tho you could say that there are now a lot of ways of discussing pop music that display the same inherent certainty or demand that you must think xyz.

That was one thing that was interesting about poptimism, and why it also kind of freed up better ways of discussing other genres which if not pop had enough shared characteristics, like dance music, rap etc but probably others too.

poptimism*

otm

By 1995 taking Madonna seriously was no big deal, especially after her 1990-1991 Camille-Paglia-is-paying-attention-to-me imperial phase. But in 1995 Madonna didn't take Mariah Carey seriously.

the desire to prove through algebra that your taste is objectively the best will never die, hoorah

I feel a bit conflicted as there is some terrible stuff out there that might claim to be poptimism or be accused of it, but I am not sure that supposedly serious critics liking pop music is always poptimism. And agree with the comment upthread that that's prob more a media issue than a music issue.

Not sure people know what they're really arguing against or for considering how terrible traditional music writing was/still is, or how boring and suffocating it is to encounter writers whose goal seems to be to force people to accept what they believe must be accepted, because of history or whatever else.

xpost exactly!

Like a lot of things the concept under attack, poptimism, is a facade and the real issue is bad writing, bad thinking, internet cliches, death of media etc?

The Singles Jukebox hates bad popular music all the time btw

Any artist with a million-dollar promotional budget has no need of critics. As a writer, I prefer to engage with the work of artists who need my help.

the straw man poptimism of "it's popular therefore it's good" has grown into a monolith

certainly, "it's popular therefore it's good" was not a claim advanced by the original poptimist critics in the 2000s, but a weaker version -- "it's popular therefore it's worth engaging with" was (and still is).

I believe Marx is saying that it used to be that there was a whole swath of mass culture that was dismissed by tastemakers, who focused more on cultural output that was seen as artistic/creative/innovative/edgy/forward-thinking. Once the tastemakers (critics) widened their purview to engage with some of the mass culture that they previously would have dismissed, and indeed found reasons to praise some of it, then a broader perception developed that "culture" was declining because what the tastemakers were holding up as worthwhile was no longer limited to the artistic/creative/innovative, etc. (Or at least those terms were being redefined to include a wider range of cultural objects.)

To accept this argument, I don't think you need to buy into the idea that poptimism meant "it's popular therefore it's good," only that poptimism created space to consider the possibility that more things could be good and that "good" could mean different things.

Just like indie was pretty great in the 00s.

We lived through different 00s.

xp he shifts between the two completely different positions as suits him

Any artist with a million-dollar promotional budget has no need of critics. As a writer, I prefer to engage with the work of artists who need my help.

The second part of this post is fine and laudable. The first presumes that music criticism is only about making ppl aware of artists they didn't previously know - which I don't think is true at all. As a reader I often check out reviews of albums I've already bought, sometimes ones I know intimately, because I find it enrichening to hear new perspectives on the music. Promotional material does not do this; whether the artists "needs" it doesn't come into it, critics are writing for their readers.

The implication is, according to unperson's binary, that a critic of popular music participates in promotion.

The implication is, according to unperson's binary, that a critic of popular music participates in promotion.

Exactly. Critics are part of the promotional ecosystem. The degree to which the critic acknowledges that is up to them, but there's no denying it.

I never found much value in music criticism (aside from alt-weekly local coverage back in the day, which was about raising awareness) but the decimation of record stores had a major impact on my listening/consumption.

The new release section at the cool local stores (curated by the staff/owner), the listening kiosks at Virgin or the import section at Tower Records were stronger mediating influences than Pazz and Jop - as they died off (and MP3 blogs had already died off) finding new stuff became work. It took almost a decade for other sources to fill in - radio live sessions on Youtube, bands popping up on Instagram, DJ sets on Youtube, algorithmic playlists (Spotify was pretty good for me, the only thing I miss about dumping them because Apple Music's algorithm is ass).

My awareness of current trends in rap has never recovered from the gas station where I bought bootleg mixes from 2002-2008 getting turned into a QuikTrip.

Exactly. Critics are part of the promotional ecosystem. The degree to which the critic acknowledges that is up to them, but there's no denying it.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson),

oh, I do, and it's especially so with less known acts.

Exactly. Critics are part of the promotional ecosystem. The degree to which the critic acknowledges that is up to them, but there's no denying it.

Sure, who cares? The fact that they do so does not mean that's the only thing they're doing. As I said, I'm a reader not a critic. If I'm clicking on an Ornette Coleman album review it's not to find out whethee the record is worth buying.

I think marketing and PR are too often opaque to the reader. One of my weird hobbyhorses is that I think year-end lists should be formatted Artist, Album Title, Label, PR Firm.

(xposts) Poptimism always had a few different strands. One was that, in the early 2000s, the truly exciting and avant-garde developments in music were happening in pop and hip-hop, but the scourge of rockism led people to overlook them. This view accepted that creativity and innovation were the values by which culture should be judged; the problem was just that certain critics had a narrow perspective of where to find them.

Another strand was skeptical of the entire idea of judging music through a lens of cultural significance in the first place, an anti-canon impulse. Like, why can't we praise a song just for being a feel-good jam, even if it doesn't mean anything or move culture forward or whatever?

Then you had what Whiney called "Poptimism 2.0," where critics embrace certain kinds of pop music but evaluate it in rockist terms. Crucially, though, I feel like this has mostly been taking pop musicians seriously enough to see them as artists who make personal/cultural/political statements that worth discussing and dissecting. While they may be commended for the way they make use of various musical genres or tropes, I don't see many attempts to claim current pop stars as aesthetic innovators.

Anyway, for as much as I think some of these developments have been positive, I think all of this *has* led to a more diffuse and amorphous sense of what is valued in culture and where culture is going.

bad writing, bad thinking, internet cliches, death of media etc

new board description plz

being bored is what gives people new and interesting ideas but nobody has been bored since approx 2010

ihibidtace

everyone's not-bored but also hyper-bored? twiddling with your phone used to be less present prior to apps and passive content consumption but now it's just scrolling

I keep seeing the useless off-duty cop acting as in-store security at the local grocery store scrolling videos recently. Missing the days when they'd be at least be playing Candy Crush. That was interactive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RUCFQ0xHZw

We may not be bored, but we are certainly being boring.

From p4k today:

"The British singer-producer’s new album is a portal into an alternate universe where UK garage blew up in America and fashion froze in 2006."

Charli XX has a new record already?

Is that Jamie's sister?

They argued that there was no meaningful difference between Mariah Carey and Kurt Cobain

this writer invoking mariah carey in this comparison is a flashing red indicator that poptimism as a critical framework is still a necessary counterbalance to people who view history thru... well, a kurt cobain centric POV! whatever you want to say about her -- mariah carey is plainly a historically important musical innovator. you can tell me that "smells like teen spirit" is a better song than the "fantasy" remix w/ ODB but if you can't see how the two are comparable as landmark songs that altered the trajectory of music and pop culture then i'm simply going to say you're out of your depth in this conversation

using mariah as a stand in for mindless pop frivolity when her career was actually entirely defined by her, at great personal risk, rebelling against her label to base her music on her creative decisions, and those creative decisions being about elevating black music to the level of white pop -- it's not an exaggeration at all to say that it only takes the opening of a single book to understand this. one of the problems i have w/ anti-poptimists is that they never seem well read, at all, on the topic

Yeah I've read a lot of critiques of current warped not actually poptimism that have some truth to them but ultimately some framework to think about music beyond received wisdom and opinions masquerading as fact will always be necessary.

xpost

or rather they're well read on the topic of "poptimism" but not the actual pop music in question, so they end up fighting shadows bcuz they're still fundamentally unable to critically approach the actual thing xp to myself

And also no perspective from the pov of a fan of other genres.

this writer invoking mariah carey in this comparison is a flashing red indicator that poptimism as a critical framework is still a necessary counterbalance to people who view history thru... well, a kurt cobain centric POV! whatever you want to say about her -- mariah carey is plainly a historically important musical innovator. you can tell me that "smells like teen spirit" is a better song than the "fantasy" remix w/ ODB but if you can't see how the two are comparable as landmark songs that altered the trajectory of music and pop culture then i'm simply going to say you're out of your depth in this conversation

Yeah, her existence as more symbol than artist is a real fuckin' problem. I mean, I'm mister "free jazz and death metal all day," but when I got my Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot I voted for her without a moment's hesitation. I mean, she writes and produces her own music. She's an Aretha-level figure and should absolutely be recognized as such, even if I don't actually listen to her music for my own pleasure.

“she writes and produces her own music” is the ultimate rockist thing to say lol

but if we’re talking about the rock n roll hall of fame it’s probably the right criterion tbh!

someone should do a run down of how many bands actually had a single songwriter who maybe even played most of the instruments on albums but mostly had a full band for touring

Poptimism was and is Animal Farm

you can tell me that "smells like teen spirit" is a better song than the "fantasy" remix w/ ODB but if you can't see how the two are comparable as landmark songs that altered the trajectory of music and pop culture then i'm simply going to say you're out of your depth in this conversation

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), 14. maj 2025 19:59 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Speaking from outside the US, I'm not sure this is true at all? 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' literally changed Danish music forever as well in a very short time, I'm not sure Fantasy (Remix) did anything? Perhaps by osmosis twenty years later, but that's still not the same.

Which isn't to say Mariah Carey isn't important or innovative. She was also the one pop star my music teacher would teach.

ok thank you denmark for your contributions, your allotted time is over. we now will move onto the delegation from ecuador

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cQlVww0zKo

Not sure the Fantasy Remix altered the trajectory of music and pop culture in America either.

??

open the schools!!!!!

I mean wasn't music already on that trajectory? This is after Mary J. Blige and Method Man, TLC, etc.

Arts criticism and the humanities in general are in a perilous state right now, there are so few arts journalism jobs left, universities are under immense pressure from every side to produce little more than business degrees, we've had nearly half a century of open scorn for things like English degrees, nobody can afford to even find time to make art of any sort unless they have a trust fund, and now we have to deal with fucking AI as well, and this guy is saying "hey the real problem is that we've been too interested in music that doesn't match my personal taste" - that's all this really comes down to, isn't it? That arts critics should stop paying attention to things he doesn't like and start paying attention to things he does like.

The Nirvana vs Mariah Carey example really is interesting not just for the reasons above but because his definition of work of value as being "rare and innovative culture" - and his example is a famous rock band from 35 years ago! I have nothing against Nirvana, but if you have a look at what was going on elsewhere in music in the early 90s, it's just a ridiculous example to pick. If he wants to say not enough attention is paid to genuinely rare and innovative music these days well that's great, but this isn't down to poptimism, it's the rotten capitalist world we're all suffering through. If he thinks people should write less about Taylor Swift, well she's the biggest star in the world right now, I don't really care for her music but many people do, she is a huge part of our culture - and our culture is worth thinking about and writing about.

Cultural critics are as susceptible as everyone else to conflating "I don't like Mariah Carey" with "Mariah Carey represents everything that's facile and cheap about our society."

fwiw, the original linked article by Kelefa Sanneh, which the Mariah Carey / Nirvana juxtaposition is pulled, does not make the argument that Marx claims

From punk-rock rags to handsomely illustrated journals, rockism permeates the way we think about music. This summer, the literary zine The Believer published a music issue devoted to almost nothing but indie-rock. Two weeks ago, in The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Vowell approvingly recalled Nirvana's rise: "a group with loud guitars and louder drums knocking the whimpering Mariah Carey off the top of the charts." Why did the changing of the guard sound so much like a sexual assault? And when did we all agree that Nirvana's neo-punk was more respectable than Ms. Carey's neo-disco?

That was a quarter of a century and many genres ago. By the 1990's, the American musical landscape was no longer a battleground between Nirvana and Mariah (if indeed it ever was); it was a fractured, hyper-vivid fantasy of teen-pop stars and R&B pillow-talkers and arena-filling country singers and, above all, rappers. Rock 'n' roll was just one more genre alongside the rest.

So his claim isn't that these two artists should be written about as comparable, but that using the charts as a battleground with inherent sexism is gross and popular culture is pluralistic.

Why are you looking at charts, especially those that encompass all genres, if not to see what's popular? You've got me, Nirvana won the pop music war that week

Weird that Vowell wrote about Nirvana knocking Carey off the top of the charts when the famous story is that they knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the charts.

have you guys ever read the billboard oral history of the making of fantasy? the whole thing is fascinating but the part about odb doing his part is just next-level

Dave Hall (the song’s writer/producer), Cory Rooney (the A&R rep on the song), and Nashiem Myrick (engineer) tell the story behind the singer’s iconic hit.

Rooney: As powerful as Tommy Mottola was, and as much as he controlled the world of pop music, he really had no reach in the world of urban music. I had come from Uptown Records (Mary J. Blige’s What’s The 411? and things like that) so right away, as an executive, he would defer to me. It started with me connecting him with Dave Hall [a producer for Blige, among others].

Hall: I worked on her single the year before, “Dreamlover” — I produced and co-wrote that with her. That was the first time we worked together. They wanted a little bit more of an urban sound for Mariah. I was a young, up-and-coming producer, so I wasn’t going to say no.

Rooney: With the original album version, everybody in urban radio, and even urban inside the building [at Sony], was like, “Nice record, great sample, but really pop with all the bells, string lines, etc.”

Hall: At that point in time in music, the sample was really big. It was different for the pop [world] — they weren’t really doing that. So I guess what I gave her was a little bit of urban — but not too much. Enough for her to be edgy, but the core fanbase was still happy.

She came by my studio, and said she liked that record [“Genius of Love”]. About four hours in, just working through chord progressions and her singing melody lines, we got the concept. I used to just run the tape, and let her just freestyle on the mic for 15, 20 minutes. Just let them be free, and they’ll run into what it’s gonna be. I think that art is lost now. The way people write songs now is by email — you miss out on that interaction between creative people. But too many people [in the studio] is a hindrance also.

She’s just a real focused person when she’s in the studio — she makes sure it’s perfect. Her vocals gotta be perfect. Some quirky stuff, I’m not gonna comment on, because I still make records for a living [laughs].

We wrote another song the same day [“Slipping Away,” later released as a B-side]. It was a ballad, a slow song. I kept hearing people say, “This is the best song she ever wrote,” and I never even realized she put it out!

Rooney: Tommy said, “Man, who could we get to remix this record, bring it to the center of pop and urban?” And without even hesitating, I said Puffy. I knew Puffy from the Uptown days — since he was an intern for us there.

He’s so rude sometimes, but there’s a method to his madness. He would just bluntly come in, like, “Oh my god, that’s whack — erase that.” And you’re looking at him like, “Who the hell are you? You’re not a musician, what the hell do you know. You don’t know shit about music.” But when you backed away from the board, you’d go, “Damn, this shit is alright.” Just raw hip-hop. That’s what his ears told him to do, and he did it. You got to respect the ears of someone like Puffy — he was a consumer more than anything.

First Tommy shot it down. He said, “We need someone more musically inclined.” I said, “Tommy please — we need the opposite. We need a guy who’s going to completely disrespect this record.” That was Puffy in my eyes, all day long. He ran it by Mariah, who loved the idea because she was a huge fan of Puffy’s. I reached out to Puff right away, who said, “Absolutely not, she’s whack. I’m on a little streak right now.” You know that’s the way he talks. He said, “I don’t need no whack juice on me right now.”

So I sent him some stuff [about her], and he called me about an hour later, saying, “Yo, you didn’t tell me she sold like 28 million records. You think they’d give me $60,000 to produce this?” I said, “Yes, I can get you that, no doubt about it.” Lo and behold, without hesitation, Mariah, Tommy, everybody agreed to give it to him.

He showed up to the studio and within 15 minutes, he said that the first problem with the record, other than all them corny bells and shit, was they looped the wrong part of the sample. That ain’t the hot part. He said you had to get the break part and the drums, that’s the part that’s hot. Then he did his parts on there (“What you gonna do when you get out of jail/I’m going to do a remix”).

Puff had Mariah sing certain things over, but she was never in the studio with him. At the time with Tommy it was like, this was his wife. And it’s young Puff, who’s all over the place. Once that came together, the only thing missing was a rapper. Puff said he wasn’t going to rap on it, but Mariah suggested ODB, because she loved what he did with SWV. She loved his records, period — all the Wu-Tang stuff. We would ride around in her limo, and she’d have a little pink boombox, listening to friggin’ ODB records. And the look on Tommy’s face…like, “This is the most ignorant shit ever.” He was miserable. But it’s what she loved.

Myrick: I did the programming for Puff — I actually did the remix, you know what I mean? It was simple because we used the same [sample] as the original, we just broke it down to the essence, made it more hip-hop. Slowed it down. The pocket was totally different — the original was more up-tempo, more mainstream at the time. We just took it down — you know, it’s the Bad Boy remix, so it’s gotta be raw.

I could tell it was a hit when I did it — even without Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the way she was sounding on it…since we slowed it down, I had to have the engineer take her vocals and tune them to the sample. It’s still in the same key, but slowed down [a tiny bit lower]. Hearing her screaming over the raw version that we had put down, it was out of here. That song was already on the radio — it was already a single — and it was Mariah Carey, so that’s 50 percent of it right there.

Me and Puff had one of our little tug of wars — to this day, people remember we used to actually fight. I think it was because I was taking a little too long to do the remix, and he knew [ODB] was on the way. I’m like, he can’t be beefin’, he don’t even know how work the equipment! He don’t know what it takes! What the hell is this guy talking about?

Rooney: I reached out to ODB and he wanted $15,000 to rap on the record. At the time, that was a lot of money, but it really wasn’t for Mariah Carey’s budget — so, no problem. He finally showed up, three hours late, and when he got there, it was about 10:30 at night. He had been drinking, and was on the phone when he walked in. Irate, screaming at some girl how he’s gonna come kill her, he’s going to kick her ass…and then whispering, “I love you.” Then screaming again. This went on for an hour.

He finally came out and was like, “Yo, pardon me, this bitch is driving me crazy. I need some Moet and Newports before we get into this record.” I said, “It’s 12:30 at night now bro, I don’t know where we’re going to get Moet from.” He started yelling at the assistants, calling them white devils, saying, “You white devils, y’all don’t want black people to have shit.” They went out for like an hour, and the only thing they could find were some Heinekens. He was so disgusted, he threw a bottle on the floor.

At this point Mariah had been calling every hour on the hour, wanting to hear something over the phone. Tommy was pissed because Mariah was keeping him up, so he finally got on the phone with ODB — and after that, finally we started to record. He said one line — “me and Mariah, go back like babies with pacifiers” — then paused, said, “Yo, I need to take a break,” and went to sleep for 45 minutes. He woke up and was like, “Yo, let me hear what I did so far.” We played his one line back, he sang another line or two, and then slept for another hour. He would come up with a line, punch that in, go to sleep. He went to sleep 3 different times in the middle of trying to get that one verse done. If you listen to the record now, on his verse, you can hear that it’s punched in in pieces. He actually told the engineer, “Y’all better have your shit set and record it right, cause I’m not doing it twice.”

I stayed in the studio until we finished it. So I was sleeping in the studio when Tommy and Mariah called me, and said they loved the record. But Tommy had a bright idea: let’s get ODB back in the studio, and instead of just, “New York in the house,” do [a line] for every city. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Of course [ODB] wanted another $15,000. He came back to the studio, a little more mellow but dead tired. He’s sitting there picking food out of his teeth — he pulled a piece of food out of his mouth so big it was scary. I was like, “How long did you walk around with that food in your mouth?” Like, it was unbelievable. Then he fell asleep on couch, kicked one shoe off. His foot smelled so bad, we had to let him sleep and leave the control room. Eventually, we got the other parts done and that was that. I thought the story was over.

A week later, it was time to shoot a video. We reached out to him, and he wanted another $15,000 dollars. No problem. So I sent a car to his house and he drank every friggin’ thing in the limo, showed up at Rye Playland [in New York], and went to his trailer. I had asked him, “Do you need the stylist to buy clothes for you?” He said, “Nah, this is hip-hop — I’m just rocking some jeans and Timbs.” [That day], he was in the trailer, in and out of consciousness, when I said, “We’re getting ready to do a scene.” He said, “I don’t got no clothes, how am I going to do a video if I ain’t got nothing to wear?” I started screaming at him.

Tommy told us take my corporate credit card to the mall. ODB disappeared for a minute, and we found him in a store trying to buy Louis Vuitton luggage. He said, “I’m going to use it for a scene.” He came back [to the set] with all these bags of Tommy Hilfiger clothes and Timberlands.

It was finally time for him to do his scene, and I promise you, he put on a pair of jeans and Timbs, and said, “I’m not going to wear a shirt, I don’t need no clothes.” I wanted to shoot him. He was like, “I have an idea — I want to tie up the clown.” Plus, Mariah turned him on to peach schnapps, which she used to always drink. He drank like two bottles of that. So between the hot sun and him drinking two bottles, what a disastrous day that was. The video was a miracle, a real miracle.

Myrick: Back then, there were two Hit Factories, a few blocks apart from each other. Me and Puff, we would walk between the studios all the time together. That’s who he was at that time — it was just me and him, walking New York City together. It was the infant stages of Bad Boy. Puff can’t walk outside by himself no more.

Rooney: One night, we went to dinner at Sylvia’s in Harlem — me, Tommy, and Mariah. On our way back, we were riding in the limo and every club, every car was bumping “Fantasy.” Mariah put her sunglasses on, and tears came down her cheeks, because she couldn’t believe her record was getting played all through the hood. That was the beginning of her not turning back to pop.

She once told me though she was grateful for her success, she would trade in all of her record sales to get the respect that Mary J. Blige got. She said, “Mary doesn’t have to sell 28 million records to be respected — people respect Mary, and I just want to be respected like her.”

https://www.billboard.com/music/rb-hip-hop/mariah-carey-songs-collaborations-history-stories-7272606/

I mean wasn't music already on that trajectory? This is after Mary J. Blige and Method Man, TLC, etc.

― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Wednesday, May 14, 2025 3:41 PM (forty-three minutes ago)

you can frame a lot of landmark art this way (including "smells like teen spirt") if you want to. but anyway what i would say is that yes the overall project of melding rap and r&b had already been started -- which is why mariah brought diddy in to produce the remix -- but the blending of rap, r&b and glossy mainstream pop into a distinct genre of music unto itself was crystalized w/ "fantasy". mary j & method man were still leaning into more classic notions of a "duet" whereas "fantasy" establishes a blueprint for the singer and rapper finding common ground on unfamiliar territory in order to provide counterpoints to each other

sorry at the risk of spamming i just realised that's a lot of italics to read

Rooney: As powerful as Tommy Mottola was, and as much as he controlled the world of pop music, he really had no reach in the world of urban music. I had come from Uptown Records (Mary J. Blige’s What’s The 411? and things like that) so right away, as an executive, he would defer to me. It started with me connecting him with Dave Hall [a producer for Blige, among others].

Hall: I worked on her single the year before, “Dreamlover” — I produced and co-wrote that with her. That was the first time we worked together. They wanted a little bit more of an urban sound for Mariah. I was a young, up-and-coming producer, so I wasn’t going to say no.

Rooney: With the original album version, everybody in urban radio, and even urban inside the building [at Sony], was like, “Nice record, great sample, but really pop with all the bells, string lines, etc.”

Hall: At that point in time in music, the sample was really big. It was different for the pop [world] — they weren’t really doing that. So I guess what I gave her was a little bit of urban — but not too much. Enough for her to be edgy, but the core fanbase was still happy.

She came by my studio, and said she liked that record [“Genius of Love”]. About four hours in, just working through chord progressions and her singing melody lines, we got the concept. I used to just run the tape, and let her just freestyle on the mic for 15, 20 minutes. Just let them be free, and they’ll run into what it’s gonna be. I think that art is lost now. The way people write songs now is by email — you miss out on that interaction between creative people. But too many people [in the studio] is a hindrance also.

She’s just a real focused person when she’s in the studio — she makes sure it’s perfect. Her vocals gotta be perfect. Some quirky stuff, I’m not gonna comment on, because I still make records for a living [laughs].

We wrote another song the same day [“Slipping Away,” later released as a B-side]. It was a ballad, a slow song. I kept hearing people say, “This is the best song she ever wrote,” and I never even realized she put it out!

Rooney: Tommy said, “Man, who could we get to remix this record, bring it to the center of pop and urban?” And without even hesitating, I said Puffy. I knew Puffy from the Uptown days — since he was an intern for us there.