TV wise, providers still fight hard for Friends and Seinfeld. I still see teenagers slapping on Nirvana shirts. My clothes from back then still fit and are intact and a kid at my kids school asked me where I got my clothes because they wanted some just like them.
OK, but no more than stuff from other decades. Are you really claiming that there have been waves of retro focused content to the same degree as 80s dance parties, 80s aesthetic revival games and music, etc for the 90s? Kool and the Gang’s “celebration” is in every animated film and advert, it doesn’t mean the 70s retro scene is a cultural tour de force that is going strong and infiltrating every cultural touchstone. (god fucking damnit, that song came out in 1980 IDFK, provide your own example of an overused 70s song)
I think in some respects, the ‘decade’ culture breaks had a run from 1910 to early 90s, and less so now.
Before radio and television, culture just didn’t change fast and far enough to really get that sort of clear delineation going.
Then with radio and television, cultural content spread instantly, but broadcast nature had relatively small number of people curating the media everyone got. So folks had a very common frame of reference. Broadly speaking each decade had pretty clear cultural features, but at any time the previous and current decades felt credibly ‘modern’.
In the late 2000s, while the 90s were still ‘current’, streaming basically started to break the ‘everyone gets the same stuff’ experience of broadcast media. So meme’s would crop up and provide some of it, but nowadays the bulk of online experience varies much more person to person minimizing that common frame of reference. So for example, Weird Al has stated that it’s much harder to identify good songs to do than back in the broadcast era, since things are more splintered now.
Or maybe it’s something about no one accepting the genx and millenials getting ‘old’. In the 80s, the 60s were the ‘oldies’, and the closest we’ve come since then is to dare to call the 70s ‘classic’.
I’d say the retro styled games tend to actually target the 90s, which was the peak of pixel art capability before people started doing the 3D stuff. They don’t usually target 90s 3D (because it sucked) though you do have examples like DUSK replicating that Quake I ascetic. Undertale could credibly be considered 80s looking, but most of the retro games would at least need Genesis or SNES to credibly look like they do.
80s was all about strong colors and synthetic music, but by the 90s culture had largely gotten over it and sure, you can recognize 90s hair at a glance still, but day to day clothes and music are, stylistically, persisting, at least insofar as specific styles are persisting among the mix of many many things.
well nothing ever fucking left, it’s called object permanence. Stoners have put posters of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of The Moon” and pretentious assholes* have listened to Bach since they existed. “Retro waves” are when these things become more significant than their usual levels of cultural impact and human ritual.
90s just never really left.
TV wise, providers still fight hard for Friends and Seinfeld. I still see teenagers slapping on Nirvana shirts. My clothes from back then still fit and are intact and a kid at my kids school asked me where I got my clothes because they wanted some just like them.
That’s all fine. Just as long as parachute pants don’t come back.
You know what time it is…
#SubtleBrag
#FormerNaturist?
Well, they didn’t fit for many years and then I lost a bunch of weight and could wear them again, so they just mostly survived a closet…
OK, but no more than stuff from other decades. Are you really claiming that there have been waves of retro focused content to the same degree as 80s dance parties, 80s aesthetic revival games and music, etc for the 90s? Kool and the Gang’s “celebration” is in every animated film and advert, it doesn’t mean the 70s retro scene is a cultural tour de force that is going strong and infiltrating every cultural touchstone. (god fucking damnit, that song came out in 1980 IDFK, provide your own example of an overused 70s song)
If we’re doing 2000s nostalgia, I guess hip hugger bell bottoms and translucent plastic is gonna be trendy?
I think in some respects, the ‘decade’ culture breaks had a run from 1910 to early 90s, and less so now.
Before radio and television, culture just didn’t change fast and far enough to really get that sort of clear delineation going.
Then with radio and television, cultural content spread instantly, but broadcast nature had relatively small number of people curating the media everyone got. So folks had a very common frame of reference. Broadly speaking each decade had pretty clear cultural features, but at any time the previous and current decades felt credibly ‘modern’.
In the late 2000s, while the 90s were still ‘current’, streaming basically started to break the ‘everyone gets the same stuff’ experience of broadcast media. So meme’s would crop up and provide some of it, but nowadays the bulk of online experience varies much more person to person minimizing that common frame of reference. So for example, Weird Al has stated that it’s much harder to identify good songs to do than back in the broadcast era, since things are more splintered now.
Or maybe it’s something about no one accepting the genx and millenials getting ‘old’. In the 80s, the 60s were the ‘oldies’, and the closest we’ve come since then is to dare to call the 70s ‘classic’.
I’d say the retro styled games tend to actually target the 90s, which was the peak of pixel art capability before people started doing the 3D stuff. They don’t usually target 90s 3D (because it sucked) though you do have examples like DUSK replicating that Quake I ascetic. Undertale could credibly be considered 80s looking, but most of the retro games would at least need Genesis or SNES to credibly look like they do.
80s was all about strong colors and synthetic music, but by the 90s culture had largely gotten over it and sure, you can recognize 90s hair at a glance still, but day to day clothes and music are, stylistically, persisting, at least insofar as specific styles are persisting among the mix of many many things.
I think they are claiming there are no waves because it doesn’t need it, the 90s never really left
well nothing ever fucking left, it’s called object permanence. Stoners have put posters of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of The Moon” and pretentious assholes* have listened to Bach since they existed. “Retro waves” are when these things become more significant than their usual levels of cultural impact and human ritual.
*I include myself in this group, Bach kicks ass.
Do you know why Mozart killed all his chickens?
Because they all went “BACH BACH, BACH BACH!”
Thank you, I’ll be here all week!
baroque for life my brother, it never really left, now it lives on every progrock band and 80s videogame composer