Trends, Music, and the New Decade

I'm sure anyone with a decent memory or an old yearbook could tell you that trends change.  That jacket you thought was so cool in the 80s now looks ridiculous.  Personally I like to divide eras up into decades, since they have a tendency to approximately punctuate American (and in many cases, international) culture.

For example, we can look at trends in music.  I like to define each decade by who was, in retrospect, the most popular, lasting, and/or influential example of the biggest genre or style in music for the time.  Counting up from the 40s:

1940s: Sinatra

1950s: Elvis

1960s: The Beatles

1970s: I'm not really sure.  I'm not particularly familiar with disco.  The Bee Gees?  In terms of the also-prevalent rock and roll of the time, Queen definitely deserves a mention.

1980s: Michael Jackson

1990s: Nirvana

Naturally, a lot of this is subjective, and of course the decades are only a rough cut.  The 80s were not all explosive, high-energy pop; 1987 saw Kenny G's "Songbird" reach #3 on the pop charts.

If we go off of this, we can see some of the other trends of the period.  In most of culture, the 90s were a period when things became grimmer, darker, more serious.  This was the Dark Age of Comic Books, when basically every name that could be derived from "death" or "blood" was in use as the trends started years earlier by Watchmen started sinking in, but with none of the intelligence or relevance that justified the darker tropes.  This was the decade of Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles; of gangster rap and dark, quarter-hungry arcades.

The reason I bring this up is because it is now 2012, and we're starting to get some clarity on the trends of the last decade.

What are some of the things on which we can now look back and laugh?  The most pervasive trend in music for the last ten-twelve years or so has undoubtedly been, in the words of Todd in the Shadows, "club dance music about dancing in clubs to club dance music".  The decade started off with the boy bands and pop idols and quickly turned sluttier.  While it is still too early to decide accurately who will be venerated by history as the most significant contributor, I believe we can declare the Black Eyed Peas as the frontrunners of the genre, as many other artists take their influence, knowingly or otherwise, from them.

Not to mention, The Black Eyed Peas also represented perfectly the inevitable collapse of the same genre, when their latest album "The Beginning" bombed.  I don't think it was just the music; I think people are finally getting sick of club music.  Though to be fair, the album did suck.

Remember the Atkin's diet?

Looking at the pop charts this week, not one of the top five songs could really be called a dance track, and that suits me just fine.  As I said, decades are not definite markers, but two years into the 2010s it's finally being shaken off and cast into the fires of Mt. Doom.

So, I want you to look at the period from about 2000-2010.  What seems silly now?

I figure this is as good a time as any to talk about nostalgia goggles, since I've seen this image (and dozens like it) circulating:

Music now is exactly as good as it ever was.  You just either don't remember the stuff that sucked or your actively filter it out.  1976, often hailed as one of the best years in music (and it did give us some pretty amazing songs; I'm not saying it isn't), still had crappy music.

Both of these charted.  "Afternoon Delight" was the year's number 12 hit song, while "Baby" hit only number 44 in 2010.  This also means looking at only the very worst modern examples and ignoring all the well-made popular songs made around the exact same time.  Your adolescent memories are not an appropriately objective gauge by which to make cultural judgements.