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I know exactly what the op is saying. I was watching some late night tv recently, a uk show called streetmate in which the host grabs unsuspecting members of the public and matchmakes them. At first i couldn't think what year it was from 2005 maybe? However subtle hints that it was from the ninties came through - the size of mobile phones and style of cars BUT for the most part everything looked the same as now. Fashion in particular. Which year was the program from? 1997.
That's a terrible example because people that sag has no clue that it started as a way for prisoners to indicate they wanted sex. That's not a culture thing, it is a dumbass fashion that some people still engage in.
Those shows are still relevant because they evolve as culture evolves. Both shows tackle current events and that is why they are still relevant.
That's because the TV industry is in a weird place where reality shows took over in the 2000s but they are running out of ideas. We are starting to see reality TV fade from network and cable TV though and originality return. If anything, this example shows a sharp contrast between the 90s and 00s as TV was far different in the 00s than it was in the 90s.
Rap music started in the 80s but just like any genre music, it has evolved a lot since then. The rap music from the 90s and the rap music today isnt anything alike. They are way different much like rock music from the 90s is much different than the rock music today. That is a very poor example.
The 90s was a brilliant decade for music, this last decade the music kind of downgraded and the change in the music industry wasnt really with the music itself but going from hard copy mediums to digital. I have high hopes that we will see some good changes in music this decade.
Tattoos and piercings have been around since the beginning of human beings.
This goes back to before the 90s.
I am sorry but if you think we are still in the nineties, you havent been paying attention. In the 90s, the economy was booming, everyone was working, there was a huge evolution with the internet, we were war free, and entertainment such as movies and music took huge steps.
The 00s were a sharp contrast to that. We have basically been in a economic slump since '01, we have been engaged in war for a decade, entertainment and art went completely stagnant except for the use of technology within, and the digital age become dominant.
The decades are no more or less different than any other connecting decades. There is always going to be overlap but the 00s are as different from the 90s as the 80s were.
I agree and the 90s changed into the 00s on 9/11/01. The world just became a more bleak place for the next few years. Also, I think almost any decade can be characterized by its president. The 00s saw a president vastly different from the 90s.
I'll just be yet another to tell you that the 90's were way, WAAAAAAAY more different than the past decade.
In the 90's, everything seemed to be more original, not a dumbed down copy of something better. Even the remakes of tv shows/movies and covers of older music felt more original.
Rap music was less commercial and actually had some soul. In fact, you could say that about all music in the 90's.
Cartoons in the 90's treated kids like they actually had brains, not like today where it's just dumb/numb ass "entertainment".
People also were less paranoid and more thought for themselves.
It was a decade NOT filled with so much war (for America, anyway).
Actually the 90's ended in late 1998 as we all braced for Y-to-K. Almost immediately the 2000's started up and they continued for their alloted 10 years and they ended right around 2008. At that point the government added a leap year and skipped to January 1, 2010. This mostly went unnoticed but the result was that no one was born in 2009.
The '90s ended in 2001 with 9-11-01. Okay, I won't say they abruptly ended with 9-11, but it was a major right of passage and probably comes to close to being the best "date" to choose for a culture shift.
There was a clear change in pop music then, although it had some precedent in the two preceding years. It went from boy bands and "teenie" pop ('N Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, 98 Degrees) - which at its peak, even some mature adults enjoyed - and rather mellow rock and pop music (Enrique Iglesias, Ricky Martin, Vertical Horizon, New Radicals, Nelly Furtado) to being dominated by rap and R & B music. Of course, rap and R & B enjoyed some success on the charts during the late 1990's (Destiny's Child, Will Smith, Brandy, etc.), but the "new rap", which seemed to arrive in northern Minnesota in 2000 with Nelly's "Country Grammar" was quite novel. Rather than being mere dance music (a la Will Smith) or having an overwhelmingly "gangsta" West Coast / East Coast image and tone (Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre in the early '90s), replete with violent lyrics, it was centered around the Atlanta scene, and its lyrics were cheerfully focused on materialism and sex.
Artists who survived the culture shift changed their image. Such transformations can be seen in Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, and Jennifer Lopez. Another good example is the difference between Nelly Furtado when she initially became popular in 2001 with that bird song, and when she arose with the help of Timbaland in 2006 with "Promiscuous Girl". Musicians took on an "edgier" image, which for female artists meant "sluttier", without going all out hardcore.
The tides again changed in around 2007 to 2009, when electronic music (Lady Gaga, Katy Perry) stole the show from rap and we entered a new era in popular music.
TV became much more oriented around reality TV shows and competitive shows around 2003. A writer's strike in about 2005 accelerated this. Although "reality TV" (in the sense of characters portraying themselves and striving towards goals that exist in reality) has existed since at least the 1950's with game shows and such, it seems like what really set off the modern reality TV trend was "Survivor" and "American Idol". Reality TV shows of the nature were popular in Europe at least a few years prior to becoming big in the U.S. Prime-time (network) weekday TV was almost all sitcoms in the 1990's, followed by hour-long "serious shows" (I remember ER, The Practice, Chicago General, etc.), remember. Soap operas scaled back their increasingly explicit portrayals of sex with the 2004 Superbowl "wardrobe malfunction" incident.
Cable networks dropped acronyms or shortened their names by several syllables. This reflected programming schedules that were increasingly non-specialized and/or lower-brow. "Discovery Civilization" became "Discovery Times" and eventually "Investigation Discovery", changing its focus from documentaries on travel, history, and social issues to crime shows; "The Learning Channel" simply became "TLC", reflecting its transformation from a genuine educational channel into one whose programming schedule consisted largely of wedding and pregnancy reality TV shows; "MuchMusic USA", essentially an import of the original Canadian channel at its launch in 1996 became "Fuse"; TNN (The National Network, originally The Nashville Network) became "Spike". Even those networks which did not change their names catered to a lower-brow audience; The Travel Channel, for example, consisted largely of gambling shows and programs featuring ridiculously expensive hotels that nobody could afford to stay in in the mid-2000s. This was perhaps due to the internet attracting the more educated audience away, which was strange, because...
Computers became within the reach of everyone and anyone. Although this was a trend shared with the 1990's, two things, I think, distinguish the 1990's from the 2000's in this regard. One is price - it was difficult to find a decent computer for under $1,000 as late as 2000, but prices had dropped to as little as $200 by 2005. Even more precipitated was the decrease in laptop prices. A "normal" laptop cost $2,000 - $3,000 in the late 1990's, but by 2006, one could find laptops in major chain stores for under $500. This meant computers were more portable, more disposable, and more ubiquitous. The second is widespread broadband internet access. In the 1990's, most people connected via slow dial-up connections; this limited internet traffic to text, some images, and songs which took 20 minutes to download. Broadband put streaming audio and video, and perhaps more importantly, the capability to download massive archives of copyrighted movies, songs, and TV shows in the hands of the average Joe and Jose. This is not even to speak of the Web 2.0 revolution, which I think more accurately is said to belong to the 2010's rather than the 2000's.
Also, mobile communications greatly improved and vastly increased in cultural importance during the 2000's. The text messaging revolution, which took off from seemingly nowhere around 2003 and came to encompass images, and the movement downwards of cell phones to high schoolers, middle schoolers, and even pre-adolescents (with the aid of "free" phones and family plans), have a far-reaching cultural significance which simply cannot be denied and is still coming to fruition. This alone makes the 2000's quite different than the "simpler" 1990's.
In political culture, the gap between the left and right seemed to widen, although I do not believe that it was as much or more an increased venting of anger (at the Bush administration, and later at the Obama administration) as an ideological change. Speaking of ideological changes, it seems that a steeply increasing percentage of Americans, especially young and middle-aged white Americans, embraced libertarian views that did not coincide well with either of the two parties' political platforms.
Traditional sexual morality once again took a full-frontal assault as popular support for same-sex "marriage" increased tremendously, and the "hook-up" culture became prominent across American campuses. This was of course reflected in TV ("A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila") and popular music (female singers who not only flaunted their sexiness, but also their sexuality...Tila Tequila, Nelly Furtado, and culminating with Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Ke$ha, and Katy Perry, etc.).
Issues related to climate change, factory farming, pesticides, etc. sparked an evidently increasing "Green" movement that was embraced by the mainstream public as well as corporations, at least superficially, around 2005. "Green fatigue" - the weariness resulting from "Green" consciousness - already had entered the English vocabulary in 2006.
So the 1990's did end, and a long time ago. I think that's incontrovertible. Personally, I believe we have already left the era that followed the 90's - "the 2000's" - in about 2008.
The tides again changed in around 2007 to 2009, when electronic music (Lady Gaga, Katy Perry) stole the show from rap and we entered a new era in popular music.
Lady Gaga and Katy Perry are in no way shape or form electronic music.
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