the Everything Decade

Ten years ago, Pluto was still a planet. iPods didn’t exist — neither did Macbooks or Tivo or Blu-ray. Clinton was president and I still thought I'd be married by 25. As I’ve been getting less and less sleep over the past 10 years, so much else has changed. I should not really be surprised about it — decades have always marked massive changes in society. Women destined to be housewives in the early sixties were burning their bras by the early seventies, and those getting down during the disco era scoffed at the eighties’ synthesizer sounds.
Clothes, tunes and topics of debate are what decades are remembered for — the sixties were swinging, the eighties was the ‘me’ decade. But what does current popular and political culture say about the decade we are living in right now?

One of the most obvious emblems of a decade are the fashions. From the poodle skirts of the fifties to the bohemian garb of the sixties hippies to the platform shoes of the sevnties and the hot mess that was fashion in the eighties, every decade had a distinct style that will never be forgotten.

To the keen modern eye, practically all of these fashion trends look absolutely ridiculous, but based on some of the fashion from this decade, we should not be the ones to judge. Just think about those Kanye West-style glasses that you cannot even see through, or anything you ever saw in a Lady Gaga music video. Ten years from now, we’re going to look back and marvel at how we could ever think wearing leggings as pants was a good look.

Music is another key trademark of a decade. Each decade has a specific genre that it revived or created; the seventies had disco, the eighties had synth-pop, the nineties had punk and alternative rock bands like Goo Goo Dolls and Counting Crows. Of course, people back then didn’t listen to only one genre.

The current decade’s musical style is even harder to define: with the advent of Itunes and digital music, people can listen to whatever they want through cheap and easily-stored sound files. Much of the new music released today seems to be a reworking of an old idea; The Jonas Brothers are a nineties-style boy band, The Killers sometimes sound straight out of the eighties dance scene and everything from garage rock to jazz has had some kind of revival or offshoot. This easy access to a plethora of music makes this decade the first in which anyone can be their own private DJ; with one mp3 player, you can listen to any of a thousand songs, or even ten thousand songs, whenever you want.

But while clothes and music define culturally what makes each decade different, there’s another, more political aspect — the hot topics that people lock horns over and fight to change. In the sixties, it was civil rights and Vietnam; in the seventies, it was Watergate and feminism. Today, it is global warming, health care and gay marriage. Each decade has major issues or crises that shape it and change the way people think.

Right now, we may feel that the planet has more problems than ever before and that we will be superheroes if we survive them, but that is exactly how baby boomers felt about the Cuban missile crisis, or how our great-grandparents felt about the Great Depression. Just watch: in 10 years the news will be covering the latest political battle over lunar real estate and the rights of cloned babies and what we are going through right now is going to look like a walk in the park.

So when we look back on this decade, the first decade of the new millennium, what are we going to remember? Some big events, like Sept. 11 and Obama’s election, will be universally remembered as milestones. But there is no one band that can be associated with this decade, no particular accessory that we’ll all regret wearing, no two news stations that broke a story the same way. So maybe, for the first time in history, a decade will not be remembered for anything specific; instead, this will be a time of transition when people could listen to, wear, and, in most cases, be whatever they wanted. This is the “Everything” decade, and one day, we will be able to sit in our hover-chairs, reminisce, and smile.

agree?