Marking Time By Decades Died in 2000

Dec 21, 08:59 PM

Turn on the radio and you’ll usually hear an announcer proudly ramble off their music format as, ‘the best of the eighties, nineties and today’. Hippie flower power was hip in the sixties and you disco danced your way through the seventies (actually the late seventies). The eighties belonged to the yuppies and preps while older folks remembered with fondness the innocence of the fifties (despite communist paranoia, the notion that smoking was healthy and the fact that blacks still couldn’t sit at the front of the bus in Alabama).

But the major social changes that have often been marked off by citing the decade they resided in has come to an end. The whole decade thing seemed to have started to unravel by the early nineties when it became apparent that there were no quintessential characteristics that would distinguish that era from any other. It seemed, in effect, that innovation in cultural circles had come to a stop. Nothing in the nineties, whether it was music, fashion, entertainment or whatever else could be seen as unique to that time. It was the start of the cut-and-paste/mashup/resampling/retro generation.

Add to that the lack of consensus on what to call the decade between 2000 and 2009 (the oh-oh’s? the naughts? the twenty hundreds?) and you have the perfect lack of distinction that heralds the end of the great twentieth century and ushers in the brand new era of been-there-done-that.