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Popular culture and the 11 year cycle

  
  

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the rake at the gates
12:41 / 18.12.03
So i recently watched '24 hour party people' and 'live forever' and i was thinking about the times in popular culture when there seems to be one scene, the big ones i can think off, the hippy movement in the 60's, the punk scene in 70's, the madchester/britpop scene in 90's. fashion, music, drugs, art, it all seems to come together in someway and it all seems exciting and new.

i remember reading about this 11 year cycle, where a new sub culture becomes mainstream, does this actually happen? i mean what are the main movements of the last 50 years? why does it seem to me that nothing has yet to come in behind britpop, it ended at least five years ago, its hayday was nearly a decade ago, where did all the excitement go? not just in music, with most popular culture at the moment.

what makes a new movement, is it politics, drugs, what? and when can we expect something new? it could be that im missing the latest scene, but with the really big ones, punk, for example, everyone new about it, it was headline news, so where is this generations movement?

thoughts anyone?
 
 
sleazenation
13:30 / 18.12.03
I think you are talking about theSekhmet Hypothesis an idea that basically maps popular culture movements onto the peaks of 11 year sunspot cycles.
Morrison mentions it here in an interview
 
 
illmatic
13:41 / 18.12.03
I don't think that you can pin down the shifting sands of pop cultue to anything as rigid as an 11 year cycle. The 11 year thing makes me think of the cycles of sunspots, and I have actually seen theories proposing that cultural changes are tied into these. I think this says more about our unconscious "creativity" and ability to link disparate concepts on the flimest of evidence than anything else.

As to why "nothing" seems to be happening right no, well, it depends on where you look, and what you're standards are - "underground" or "huge success". For instance, there's a lot of noise being made in certain quarters about the new breed of UK garage MC's who're coming out, but this is still a relativley low key thing, and I hope it stays that way for a while. The reason I say this is I think (sub)cultures need time in the dark to grow (kinda like mushrooms), but the media machine is constantly hungry for exciting new stimulants to pick up, recuperate (to use the Situationist term) and sell back to us. The speed with which our very well developed "yoof" media can do that these days is amazing and I think it means that certain subcultures don't have the time to "gestate" like they use to - alll of a sudden BLAM! - it's a national trend, being marketed and manipulated, trends don't develop of their own accord, they're hijacked.

Following that, I think the lack of new trends that seem "new" and "exciting" might be a reflection of the way in which we're so heavily media satured - so much so, that in a way we become insensitive. We have so much media now and so many new bits and bytes of info strafe into our heads everyday through the lenses of the Net and elsewhere, I can't think what it would take for something to seem "new and exciting" - a 333 high neon pink Godzilla appearing hovering over the Thames? I dunno. There's something here I can't quite articulate - more later when I've mulled on it.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
13:49 / 18.12.03
Perspective is everything.

Nostalgia is pernicious, and insidious.

I find it hilarious that Britpop has now been granted the kind of "important cultural movement" by people who don't believe that there's an equivalent going on right here, right now - Britpop, now that it's inception is almost a decade old, has become another Golden Age. Believe you me, the grumpy old naysayers of the day were kept very, very busy talking about how it was shallow, not a 'proper'/serious/exciting movement or scene or genre (unlike punk, psychedlia, blah blah blah) at the time...
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
14:11 / 18.12.03
All the big movements are based around the discovery (or more often re-discovery) of specific drugs. IMHO.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
16:07 / 18.12.03
[aside - the 11 year sunspot cycle that was supposed to peak in 2001 is actually peaking NOW, or fairly recently - as in a matter of weeks ago. There was a Yahoo science article about it at the time. Will try to dig it up if anyone's interested]
 
 
Sax
18:21 / 18.12.03
What happened to the bloody Stormers, that's what I want to know.
 
 
the rake at the gates
18:53 / 18.12.03
yeah, after i posted this i thought about the uk garage scene, but i dont think it has the mass market appeal, maybe it's me but i dont think 'urban' music has the mass appeal of say punk, maybye i'm wrong.

the whole 11 year cycle bothers me as well, the dates dont really fit, maybye it's a generation thing, but seeing as the post britpop generation has yet to get it together, IMHO, then maybye it's more complicated than that, maybye it is drugs, LSD for the sixtes, E for the nineties, etc.

and maybye britpop wasn't a really a serious movement, maybye a lot of it was shit, but it was seen by the masses as something new and exciting, something people could identify themselves with. maybye thats all it needs, a nifty label for a group, we're punks, we're indie kids, this is ours, the whole feeling of belonging to a movement. thats what i feel is missing today, the whole tribal instinct, the idea that there is a scene, if you were to break up the last fifty years you could say 76-79 punk, 89-91, madchester and so on, what would they say about the last five years?

nature abhors a vacuum, so arent we long over due some thing for this decade/generation, or am i completely out of touch?

and am i anwsering my own question if i ask, what's a stormer?
 
 
Bed Head
18:58 / 18.12.03
Rake/Gate - Popular culture movements are linked to economic cycles before than anything else. Not drugs, not sunspots. The ‘movements’ you’ve mentioned are just people selling stuff, and lots of people buying.

Or, that’s what I think. It take a certain level of money in society before things like drugs, records, art, fashion, cinema, et bloody cetera become truly popular movements. You could argue that Madchester was a much more vibrant movement that Britpop, but that it withered overnight when it hit the buffers of an extremely severe economic recession, collapsing at almost the exact same moment as the late eighties housing bubble. One of the reasons Britpop completely passed me by is that I couldn’t afford it, I was so bloody poor at the time. But I had friends during that time who were doing very well for themselves, and for whom the records, the clothes, the magazines, cocaine, art, the designer fucking furniture for Christ’s sake, were a culture that came in an achievable and affordable whole. That’s a popular movement, and I’d say that its this pervasive affluence that led to the Britpop parallels with the sixties. Maaan.

Just realised. Stating the obvious. Er, sorry.

(Actually, thinking about it. I wonder if one of the reasons Britpop never sold in America was US economic downturn, rather than simply because, y’know, it was shit? Shit or not, it was still lots of stuff to buy and sell, and it came in such alluring wrapping)
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:46 / 18.12.03
Well, the reason, possibly, why there does not seem to be a major cultural movement going on may be because you have grown past the stage where they are readily identifiable. When you look at the examples you give, they don't really hold up as "big movements" - how many actual hippies were there? How many punks? There's a difference between that and being a consumer; a lot of people who bought Sex Pistols albums were not particularly into punk as a lifestyle, after all. Also, the Sex Pistols might provide a relevant example, as they were the tip of a startlingly small iceberg, in many ways. Likewise Britpop: Blur and Oasis may be going sort-of-strong, but how many albums did Powder or Menswear sell even then? The "mass appeal" argument founders on such issues - basically, Britpop was not a massive movement; it was a major subset of indie rock. How great a part did these kind fo musicians play in defining a culture? And, outside universities, how many people were wandering around dressed as the Stone Roses and wearing "Cool as Fuck" T-shirts?

Context seems important here. I don't really experience garage as cultural phenomenon, but that may be (I have always assumed it is) because I am not part of a phenomenal entity that interacts with it very much. Likewise, I don't really perceive hip-hop as a big cultural thing at the moment, because my cultural expression and perception is not all that hip-hop. But it sells millions upon millions of albums, yes? And promotes a style of dress and speech to its more enthusiastic adherents? What's not to recognise as a culture?


Illmatic's point about a fragmenting culture, and about people having access to a broader range of cultural experiences, is an interesting one, but I'm not sure it tells the whole story. I mean, we have people complaining that it is getting harder and harder to find minority cultural objects, which suggests that a finitude of cultural forms are getting pushed to the front, possibly in relation to consumption or modes of consumption; homogenous product is easier to export, and of course the margin product can survive by marketing itself as marginalised....
 
 
Tryphena Absent
09:26 / 19.12.03
And there's also the problem of these movements overlapping... early punk and late hippy crashed right in to one another and for the most part they utterly ignored the other. Does that really fit in to the whole concept of these revolving evolutions?

maybye it is drugs, LSD for the sixtes, E for the nineties

Cocaine right now. I think there's a lot to say for this actually. Even when a significant proportion of people aren't taking any of these drugs it seems to really effect the culture. I can't quite put my finger on it right now. I'll think harder.
 
 
illmatic
10:06 / 19.12.03
Coke = boring materialism and selfishness maybe? Perfect drug for these Blair-Bush consumer culture times.

I do think the whole retrospective interpretation is very important here. After all, these phenomena wouldn't even by called subcultures and consquently talked about in these terms, were it not for Dick Hebidge's book. Taking as an example,oh I dunno say "skinheads" maybe, you move from that being simply the way that some working class kids dressed in the late sixties - to a distinct kind of revialism (eg. NF skins/"Sham Army" late seventies/early eighties or anti racist skins into new ska (late 90's? more American than UK?). All of them are drawing on the subculture, but the first one wasn't seen as such but it's participants - at least not at first - and the others seem to rest on this whole self labelling.

ANother example of retrospective judgement: the hippy thing was arguably limited to a small group of people, but it had a lot of cultural impact, probably becuase there wasn't any like it before. The rave scene of the early 90's affected a huge amount of people but somehow isn't seen as of equivalent or greater significance. Perhaps we're not distant enough from it to start seeing in this way. Perhaps it just affected more people numerically but didn't articulate or advance an agenda in the same way as was possible in the sixties/ early seventies.

I';ve been reflecting on this a bit later (see "Nostalgia for the Left" thread in Switchboard). Maybe subcultures aren't or will not arise because these are much more conformist times? The revolutionary agenda of the sixties, which had it's tail end in the nihlism of punk, just isn't possible anymore. Perhaps that leads to a dearth of cultural forms. I don't necessairily believe that - I'm just throwing it out for an idea. Thoughts?
 
 
Sax
13:28 / 19.12.03
Back when the "Generation X" thing was all the rage pre-millennium, there was an article in Sleazenation (the magazine not the barbeloid) about the next decade of youth culture. I think the author was Steve Beard, but I might be wrong. He gave the "noughties" youth culture movement the title "stormers"; I can't remember exactly why except they would be "storming through" to effect change and there was stuff about returning to old values such as honour and dignity. He argued, IIRC, that this brought things full circle as it embraced the kind of optimism and pro-technological Fifties which were followed by the anti-authoritarian 60s, the anti-everything 70s and the anti-nothing 80s. Stormers were to be very influential, blissed out yet realistic, romantic yet pragmatic. It was quite a good idea. I'll see if I can find a linky or my old copy of SN.
 
 
Sax
13:30 / 19.12.03
Fuck, I'm a himbo. It's all there in the Barbelith GM interview.
 
 
pachinko droog
17:05 / 19.12.03
With all the 80's nostalgia going on, I keep hoping for a re-interpretation of some of the better aspects of that decade's musical trends: the great post-punk and paisley underground scenes of the first half of the 80's, and the indie rock/shoegazer stuff that came into being in the second half.

Maybe acid will make a comeback as well. I recall it was big back then.
 
 
Bed Head
17:34 / 19.12.03
Its shrooms now. If you’re really going with this pop-culture-is-dictated-by-prevailing-drug-trends thing, expect shroom-inspired culture to be big and melty in 04. That’s my tip.
 
 
pachinko droog
18:30 / 19.12.03
Shrooms are nice but so hard to find. (Haven't seen them in my neck of the woods for years.)

2004=The Year of the 'Shroom? Big psyche revival would be fab.
 
 
the rake at the gates
21:28 / 19.12.03
shrooms are the new drug of choice i think, that and salvia, and i think shrooms are much easier to get into, what with the grow boxes, and the fact you can buy them in every new age shop, the'ld be perfect drug of choice. what effect would shrooms have on culture? and what was the drug of choice in the eightes?

bit confused as im very stoned right now
 
 
Linus Dunce
21:46 / 19.12.03
I would sit with Haus and Illmatic on this one, though I will say, without wishing to suggest that it is merely a matter of fashion, the anti-war movement is quite a major preoccupation at the moment and if we are looking to music and fine art to supply "culture" then we're taking a very narrow view.

Rake -- From what I remember of the 80s, it was amphetamine sulphate.
 
 
Never or Now!
03:11 / 21.12.03
"what makes a new movement, is it politics, drugs, what? and when can we expect something new? it could be that im missing the latest scene, but with the really big ones, punk, for example, everyone new about it, it was headline news, so where is this generations movement?"

It's you and your mates, isn't it? Barbelith. We won't be "headline news" until twenty years after we're dead and Brad Pitt's playing us in the movie.

Another vote here for 2004 = shrooms, Beat revival nonsense, and the usual goofy shit from the usual goofy suspects.
 
 
Sobek
14:07 / 24.12.03

I have never heard of this "Britpop".

In my late 80s/early 90s youth, everybody was all about the Wax Trax sound/style and acid.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
00:38 / 25.12.03
Man I thought I was the only Stormer in the world back in 2000. Gypsy Lantern and Sleazenation should remember my really horrible orange hair the first time I came to London. It was all about Mark Millar's Authority, 1999's antinomian cinema, studded fetish wear, and chaos magick... and sitting in my room on Vicodin all day long writing weird Situationist trailer trash stories cause there weren't nobody else willing to run with the ball round my neighborhood!

I've heard the sunspot maxima predicted at 1999, 2001, 2003, and now... now? Who's to say although I remember cell phones getting fucked up back in 2000. Whatever, things are way too decentralized now and all energy gets sucked up by the net. As Momus said back in 1991, "In the future everybody will be famous for 15 people." It's the end of history don't you know, when all enemies of the ruling state are classed as terrorists because they're not even supposed to exist. Because we won dammit! Us! Secular liberal humanist capitalism! Us! Fuking Fukuyama said so (we [US State Department] paid him to!) Too bad we got nowhere to go now (except into hyperspace...) Never mind that the CIA now predicts no peace in the Middle East until 2020... it's still the End of History! We won! They don't count cause their religion's frickin backwards (and, ahem, just as Horus-cursed as ours...)

Actually it's possible that Absolute Conformity IS the new rebellious cultural movement... just look at the Millenials, who I'm ever so proud to be one year away from officially being one of. Little shits. See how much they piss us all off??? ARRGGH!! Decadent Boot-licking Hitler Ikea Youth! Challenging my preconceptions about identity and politics! (Actually I don't think this is good, they should all be exterminated and replaced with a new crop that actually have brains not destroyed by PS2 and internet porn.)

The solution... well, I'm up for mushroom warfare as well. (Lovingly petting his pet mushroom crop as it purrs fifth-dimensional Aztec-Aegypto bubble language.) Sadly they'll be illegal again for me when I return to the US so now's the time.

Now that Daniel Pinchbeck's "Breaking Open the Head" is out in paperback, maybe this'll have an effect and we'll have some mass interest in those (old) ideas of psychedelic shamanism again. In times as shit and jam-packed with two-faced lies on all sides of the map as these, with no apparent alternatives anywhere to stalemate culture, it's easy to see people hopping on the whole mushroom/DMT/salvia "extraterrestrial" kick. "Get me outta here fast! Reconnect me to the beyond! Please tell me I'm formless energy playing with the universe cause I just can't handle this death-kick down here on planet Earth!" When academics, politics and culture offer no way forward than you gotta go with the Grays, d00d.

Personally I think we need some industrious garage chemists mass-producing DMT, it doesn't seem that hard (see erowid.org). Flood the streets with that and then we'll have some interesting times on our hands. Or then again, maybe some things really should be kept away, sacred, occult... thoughts?
 
 
Brigade du jour
16:54 / 25.12.03
Just as a sorbet after Boy in a suitcase's impassioned yet highly articulate outburst (I wish I could combine those two adjectives!), I'd like to offer these two thoughts:

1. Wouldn't telly be great if all those I Love The 90s nostalgia shows actually comprised this depth of debate?

2. "The world will end either in paperwork or nostalgia". I've said it before and I'll say it again - Frank Zappa was right.
 
 
No star here laces
22:29 / 26.12.03
Young people are boring. Our whole culture is focused around them and their needs these days, so its no wonder they're not doing anything whatsoever of any note.

I'm waiting for the first wave of Senior Citizen culture to strike. That's going to be awesome.
 
 
.
15:47 / 27.12.03
Yep, I've been thinking a lot about this- I read the theory back in the early nineties, was waiting for the big *whatever* to happen ever since. All in all a fascinating topic, and I'm sorry that I don't have time to read the whole thread at the moment, so here's some quick (ill thought out) thoughts.

* Perhaps the eleven year cycle did become mainstream, with it's own drug, dress code, and woodstock, and it was- militant islam. Think about it, the same vilification by the popular press, the same ideas about "turning on and dropping out", the same anti- (western) authorian attitudes... OK, so I'm being facetious, but why assume that just because you're part of the so-called counterculture you're going to like the next wave in the eleven year cycle?

* Alternatively, why assume that the cycle will happen in UK-USA again this time? Maybe something really big has been kicking off in Japan, or South America?

* Or perhaps individualism has taken over from mass youth tribal actions? Remember that the concept of teenager is barely fifty years old, yet alone the concept of youth culture etc. Perhaps we're looking at a purely late-twentieth phenomenon, never to be repeated?
 
 
kid entropy
10:48 / 28.12.03
off topic a wee bit,but i've just moved to madchester and need to know what's happenin beneath the surface.something other than fucking norwegian blue.
 
 
rizla mission
11:51 / 28.12.03
my current view of subcultures is largely the same as my view of musical genres;

the standardised history we accept of HIPPY: 66-69, PUNK: 76-79 etc. has little to do with the actual life cycles of the cultural trends involved, and everything to do with the media coverage of them..

The idea of these 'movements' exploding out of nowhere and choking to death a few years later is basically untrue.. they have a long, long gestation period before they reach a sufficient level of momentum to gain attention from the outside world and an official 'name', and, most importantly, they don't die. They just retreat back to the 'underground' as the media focus turns elsewhere..

I could spend hours tracing that theory through the wider history of 'punk' and 'hippy' outside their official timezones, but I can't be bothered right now, I'm sure you get the idea..

The lack of any definitive youth 'movement' for the late 90s - early 00s (and who says that's a bad thing?), I'd put down to several things;

as others have pointed out, the increasingly fragmented nature of pop culture - maybe this is just nonsense, as I'm too young to have really experienced any other era first hand, but it does seem to be the case.. in purely musical terms, there are dozens and dozens of sub-genres, sub-cultures, each with a more of less equally small (relatively speaking) audience, but with very little crossover .. the mainstream tends to occasionally clip an act from one or the other of them, but never wholeheartedly embraces the totality of any particular style or aesthetic for very long..

And similarly, there's the media's failure to really grab one of the numerous balls flying around and run with it, hyping a subculture up to the level of a mass movement..

But then, to autoctrique pretty much everything I've just said above, what about the role of the public themselves in adopting a Next Big Thing? What about the endless legions of kids in Slipknot hoodies - magazines and TV certainly didn't tell them to go for the nu-metal thing, and record companies didn't start doing any bigtime promotion of it until the momentum was already well underway.. what can you say? (shrug) for some unfathomable reason, it just caught on..

And conversely, the magazines and TV can blather on all they like about about a New Big Thing, but if there aren't enough takers in the cheap seats, it'll be dropped within a matter of weeks..

AND ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT NOTE: I'd be well up for a psychedelic revival in 2004.. it's all Terrence McKenna, Hawkwind and not shaving properly down at this end right now..
 
 
Logos
18:21 / 28.12.03
"This body carries us as the ocean carries logs."

Unity is temporary. Even though we are passing through a region of aparent diversity, the big voices grow ever fewer. The individual voices grow more puny, and no one can hear themselves think over the ceaseless chatter of the multitude.

We will all conform. And then, we will get tired of conforming, and then the perfect unity of the machine will fail, as it always does. The boot stamping in the face of humanity will get clogged in the exposed brain matter, and will trip and fall. Change is the only inevitability.

We change the situation as easily as the world turns, not on purpose but by our own perfect nature.
 
 
Bed Head
21:59 / 28.12.03
Er, yeah. I like Ignatius’ point about the anti-war movement, I wonder how a Bush re-election will affect that, whether it will redouble opposition or just deflate it? I remember the UK seemed to feel severely fagged out after Tories somehow won the ‘92 election. Yet, I’m arguing that mass-cultural phenomena are fuelled by economic prosperity, and a US recovery might be the only thing likely to save Bush’s bacon. Could be a good time to be selling off-the-peg rebellion again, if it’s not the shoom-monged ‘new apathy’ kind of thing I’m currently buying shares in. Chill-out music, psychedelic wall hangings, soft furnishings.


I don’t think magazines and tv are so very important anymore, the real business of musical trendsetting is going on in places like Matthew/flux’s blog. That’s where people are looking for their soundtracks/attitudes these days. It’s like the punk fanzines, or summit. As soon as a sound comes along with all the right poses bolted on via some blog, and it fits in with some kind of ‘real world’ scene like drugs or squats or anti-capitalism or whatever, and there’s some kind of fashionable outfit that goes with it that makes one look well fuckable, then tv and magazines will be fighting each other to pretend that they invented it, and people will be falling over each other to buy it. And we’ll all know that it’s actually, like, so over already.

I'd be well up for a psychedelic revival in 2004.. it's all Terrence McKenna, Hawkwind and not shaving properly down at this end right now.

Maaan! It’s all R.Crumb, 1920s blues and the Grateful Dead round here. And lentils. That's how these things start, the elements start to come together by chance. All this stuff just starts accumulating around me of its own accord over the last year: I get given a whole bunch of Crumb comics, completely out of the blue. I get shown a load of dahl recipes, which isn’t strictly relevant, but I always think of hippies as doing things with lentils. Then, I win the first competition I’ve ever won in my life, and get box sets of Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane albums delivered to my house. And then I begin to notice that normal people who shouldn’t know about such things have started mentioning psyc. mushrooms in otherwise straight conversation. And now I'm here, spreading the word.

Ah, it’ll never catch on. I hope it never catches on, but it’s been such a lovely year, nonetheless.
 
 
griffle
21:27 / 01.01.04
To the person who said 'wouldn't television be wonderful if all those 90's revival programmes reached the intellectual depth of this debate'. WHERE HAVE U BEEN! BBC4(Television not radio) is currently advertising for viewers to add to the existing 60 or so. No but honestly its a really cool channel like Radio 3 with pictures. There are loads of interesting debates with the likes of Bonni Greer, Mark Lawson, Tom Paulin, the other Greer (Germaine). I think its a good channel.

Plus, they really are starting to scrape the bottom of the barrell with the 'celebrities' they use for these 90's revival shows. Back in the day they could count on getting the likes of D list personalities like Jenny Eclair and Simon Peters, now they seem to have gone through the E,F,G,H,I nay the whole alphabet of the great and the good. They have scraped the bottom of the barell until they have scratched through to the other side. For instance if they want to do a piece about the demise of John Major, who do they bring in? Mr Brumpton head of politics at Brighouse sixth form.
 
 
Rage
06:40 / 08.01.04
DIY experimental warehouse noize shit will never become mainstream, says the fringe of Amerika.

And cyberpunk went the other way around.
 
 
pomegranate
15:58 / 08.01.04
no one has mentioned the indie/riot grrrl thing of the early 90's.
also, whomever was speaking about coke being big in these bush/blair times, i support that, cos the last time coke was really big here was in the 80's, yes? and i don't know about british politics but here it was more of the same conservative, reagan shit. when those type of people are in charge, it def makes *me* want to do drugs...
 
 
ignorance
12:19 / 28.01.04
my understanding was that it is a 22 (or 23???) year cycle.
the summers of love of 66 and 88 correspond as the apices, and the nadirs are rock'n'roll in 55 (teddy boys slashing seats), punk, which hit hard in 77, and the gangsta of 99, which hit pop culture via eminem. give +or- a year and its a rough cycle that makes sense to me.
the high due in 2010 may lead us straight into terences eschaton, or maybe the singularity will be upon us then.
 
 
eddie thirteen
18:38 / 28.01.04
It's an interesting notion, but the dates seem a little fuzzy. The Summer of Love is (I believe) either '68 or '69, you could put the rise of rock n' roll probably at any year between '55 and '58, depending on at what point you choose as its biggest mainstream flash point, and...man, I gotta say, if '88 was the Summer of Love for somebody, if definitely wasn't me (though I was barely pubescent at the time, so I guess that could account for it; still, I've never heard this era -- defined largely in terms of sexual paranoia, due to an ignorance of the causes and transmissability of AIDS in the minds of most people -- even kinda described this way). And Eminem might have brought gangsta rap to someone in 1999, but it's a genre that was really kinda played out by the mid-'90s. It doesn't make me any happier, to be honest, but if I were going to find a zeitgeist figurehead for the '99-present era, I think Britney's a more logical candidate.
 
 
chairmanWOW
09:09 / 18.02.04
All the big movements are based around the discovery (or more often re-discovery) of specific drugs. IMHO.

I have to agree piquantly with Money $hot about the fact that certain new movements are spurred on by the re-introduction and the resulting magnetism of a certain generation towards a certain unambiguous drug. Almost inextricably correlating that movement or period with their drug of choice, forever. Whether sunspots influenced, in point of fact, the invention of certain movements or instead, whether certain drugs skewed an entire generations perception to the point where an inexorable re-imagination of everything from the art to the music of that period. The specifics are self-evident. Psychedelia had LSD, the 80's were divided between two drug (seeing that it was the decade of excess). The yuppies have their coke while the emerging rave culture was experimenting with E in its infancy. Moreover, the punks preferred “sniffin glue”. Britpop wasn't actually the huge cultural movement everyone has played it up to be; instead, Grunge should get that entitlement. It was a far more legitimate movement in all aspects. It had its own dress code (flannel and ugly brown boots); it had its drug and incongruously the same drug that ultimately killed the movement founder as well. Britpop was like most movements that have emerged from Britain, a passing fascination that no one ever really took seriously (The Beatle’s don’t count because they’re tentatively quasi-americans after all. Nevertheless, if Britpop wasn't the 90's answer to the 70's punk movement and grunge was, then it supplicates the question what is the 00's answer to the 90's grunge movement. It would seem reinvention and re-amalgamation is at the order of the day as most of what has already come to pass has been reheated, tossed in a blender and been doled out to the masses as something new and different. I am of course talking about the current or now dated Resurrection of Rock. The tight vintage print t-shirts from the 60's worn with the even tighter jeans from the 70's punk movement make up the new uniform. The drugs have been spread out into easy-to-understand the-right-drug-for-the-right-occasion meal plans. LSD when you want to go away, Heroin when you are feeling self-deprecating, ecstasy and coke when you have to work nightshift and then the new drugs when you want to show up your friends (among these Ice and Veto, are shaping up nicely to be the decades new favorite high). We have, it seems, become greater than the sum of our parts.
 
  

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