Poll: What's the best decade?

[andrewducker]

Approaching the end of the first decade of the third millennium*, let's have a quick recap** of the changing face of media since its inception***.

[Poll #1801326]

*Feel free to argue amongst yourselves in the comments as to when decades, centuries and millennia begin/end - for decades I'm going to go with "the second-least-significant digit changes".)

**I mean "Let's start an argument about how awesome/awful the 80s were."

***The novel, of course, goes back a lot further, but having havered**** over what point to pick for the start, I decided "fuck it" and went for 1900 to make it match movies and music. I could have started music in 1890 too, so feel free to complain about _that_ in the comments, along with complaining that it's not fair to not be able to vote for the decade including Mary Anne Evans*****.

****Dithered.

*****You can google****** her if you want to know.

******Assuming that I'm wilfully causing the loss of a trademark to Google Inc. by using the word "google" in a generic sense to mean "search", is it right to use it in lower case?

Comments

[simont]

Assuming that I'm wilfully causing the loss of a trademark to Google Inc. by using the word "google" in a generic sense to mean "search", is it right to use it in lower case?

Yes. Same as hoovering, biros, photoshopping, ...

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

I don't think Xerox or Kleenex have become lowercase yet, though - it's a slow change. I'd go with capitalising Google because it's currently a proper noun rather than being allowable in Scrabble.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

Ooh, nobody else has corrected your spelling of "millennium" yet! Two Ns (otherwise you're deriving it from "anus" instead of "annus" - useful mnemonic that).

[andrewducker]

Fixed, thanks!

[usmu.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1976. That means my formative years were the early nineties. I used to hang out with the slightly older alternative crowd, which means I got a fed a lot of 80s music in my youth. And since we were always a lagging a bit in TV a lot of 80s TV as well. Books and movies were lagging less so there it's 90s all the way. So using the back in my day everything was better yardstick that's what I voted for. Because even though I've broadened my tastes quite a lot from those days I still keep coming back to it. No cure for nostalgia I suppose.

Objectively speaking I have no clue. Apparently there's still as much quality put out percentage wise as always. There's just so much more coming out. When speaking of the past a lot of crap we don't know about because it didn't survive the test of time.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I had to go for the 1930s for the best decade for modern music, because that's when the devil met Robert Johnson at the crossroads and the foundations for modern rock and roll were born - so, no matter how much people may like 60s, 70s or 90s music, none of that guitar/bass/drum/backbeat sound would exist without Johnson's Satanic pact.

For movies you really have to go to the 70s because it's the last decade where Hollywood was seriously committed to making both blockbusters and big budget serious films - so we get Jaws and Star Wars, but also Taxi Driver and similar intellectual fare, plus it's the decade that John Carpenter invented the modern horror film.

For fiction I think you have to hit the 80s, because it's when post modernism finally kicked in and we got away from boring New Criticism and the dichotomy between books that were either fun or serious but rarely both. With the advent of post modernisms impact on novels we were able to get Douglas Copeland, Bret Ellis, Jay McInerny, James Ellroy who whether you liked them or not had a huge fucking impact. Plus that same post moderism allowed Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker and Tom Wolfe to write and have accepted some of their best works and really come into their own. And, of course, with Watchmen we get the birth of the modern graphic novel. So, pretty much, the types of things we read today and the way we read them all from from the 80s.

Computer games are just technology and the latest technology is always the best, so that answer is obvious.

As far as television goes, as soon as HBO created The Sopranos, television started getting much, much better, to the point where it's now often more interesting and intellectual than movies.

[andrewducker]

Dammit - comics! I knew I forgot something!

And that was an awesome comment.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that improved technology definitely makes for better computer games. I grew up playing games on various machines in the 1980's and I think games were better back then. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting technically they are even comparable, and if played today most of those games with their 16 colour graphics would appear to be terrible, but back then they were amazing and gave a huge amount of enjoyment to me and many of my friends.

Partly I think this was because games were relatively simple to make back then, so there were literally hundreds of games released each year. Nowadays games take years to develop and so comparatively few are released. The sheer amount of effort required to make a computer game nowadays also makes innovation difficult. No longer can one or two programmers sit down and create a game in a matter of months.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I put the 70s for music, but had I read your comment first, I might actually have put the 30s. As you say, that's when it all began.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Robert Johnson was actually fairly uninfluential until the 1961 release of the King Of The Delta Blues Singers album. If you want to find the roots of rock and roll, you really want to be looking at Charlie Christian (essentially invented the electric guitar as a soloist's instrument when playing with the Benny Goodman band), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (invented most of the early rock & roll guitar licks) , Hank Williams (first to incorporate a drum kit - til then a jazz instrument - into a guitar/bass driven band) and Louis Jordan (most prominent of the jump bands that stripped down swing into a more riff-based, small band form that turned into R&B).

[steer.livejournal.com]

that's when the devil met Robert Johnson at the crossroads and the foundations for modern rock and roll were born

Ach.. I hate that "because the origins are" argument -- you end up pursuing this to its conclusion and the best decade for music was when Ugh the caveguy showed Blag the caveguy how to bash two rocks together in a vaguely rhythmic fashion.

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

I have no idea but I like this post.

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

(Lizzie)

[andrewducker]

Thank you!

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

I was born in December 1981 (hey, I turn 30 in less than two weeks!), so in theory most of the stuff that should have ideally suited me would have come out in my formative years, the 90s and 00s, but I felt that much of the stuff pumped out in the 90s was crap, and the 00s even worse.

Hyperbole and generalisation to follow.

Music, I think was best in the late 60s through to the early 80s (particularly the stuff that is a product of the political climate), although that's not a hard rule. There's stuff from the 50s and 60s (or hell, earlier centuries) that's amazing, and there's the odd new thing that's good, but the majority of music produced in the 21st century has been overly produced generic crap. Kiddie punk, hip hop, rap, and R&B are all things that started off great and became unrecognisable abominations (assuming R&B has anything whatsoever to do with Rhythm & Blues). Oh, and pitch correction >_<

Films are increasingly crap, and I blame it mostly on the CG (and actors with no gravitas, and endless remakes). There's something about CG that seems to me to be a cop out -- it stands out like a sore thumb, and I'd much rather see a good model or puppet. This doesn't mean that Toy Story, or other entirely CG films are bad, only live action films with crappy space ships or monsters. Money is not a substitute for good plot, good adventure, and good actors. The 70s were a great decade for certain types of films, particularly sci-fi. It's difficult to generalise here though, as styles change so much between decades (and there's that element of films that you remember from childhood being better, and good films don't date quickly). George Lucas keeps on going on about how technology is enabling him to realise his dreams, well his dreams suck, and the original trilogy is good because his ideas got filtered through other people. A note about early films: a lot of them now seem a bit hammy, or quaint, and a little bit sanitised and a product of their times (I'm not suggesting that gritty realism is essential, but a little honesty helps).

Video games reached a peak in 1990-1998 (particularly on the SNES), and while good games have come out in the 00s and 10s, they are much fewer (e.g. Thief, Minecraft, Portal). The improved graphics aren't making games better, and interaction is getting far too complex nowadays. I haven't given up on gaming though, it's just that I generally prefer older games, where you didn't have to have XBox Live store all your achievements, and 100 page manuals telling you how to interact with everything. And raytraced black (I'm looking at you, Doom 3).

As for TV, well I like fantasy (I was obsessed with Buffy, and I like Merlin), and that's generally consistently well done throughout the decades. I love cop shows, but there's far too much hand waving and technology these days, instead of police work. My favourite characters in NCIS are DiNozzo (solves cases by old fashioned police work), Ducky (Edinburgh medical school graduate, does it the old fashioned way), and Gibbs (instinct, and a killer interview technique); I like Ziva's character, but she needs to do more; Abby and McGee are just boring, because there's too much nonsense tech involved. I lost interest in CSI once I realised that half the tech was made up crap, and that the characters were one dimensional. It was a real eye opener watching Due South again, and noting that they didn't rely on technology (except for the odd large mobile phone), or Abby's material analysis to solve the case in 5 minutes, just Benton's sense of taste and tracking abilities. I've enjoyed going back to Columbo too. Life on Mars was genius, which proves that you can make a great cop show today, but only if you emphasise the important bits (attitude and police work), and older decades did that better. Conclusion: mixed, although the 90s were pretty good.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

(note: LJ has a character limit of 4300, who knew?)

As for when the millennium started, I would say 2000, rather than 2001. Why? Well it's an entirely arbitrary system, starting from an arbitrary date, so there's nothing inherently interesting about the year, only the number we assign to that year (any year X is still 2000 years after some other date). 1999->2000 featured a change of all four digits, including the most significant. 2000->2001 featured a change of only the least significant digit, so 2000 was a much more interesting change.

Similarly, the 90s started in 1990, because you say "nineteen ninety". Hence calling a year with a "ninety" in it a member of the "eighties" sounds rather daft.

On the other hand, I prefer to index from 1. I do not see this contradiction as a problem.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Damn, completely forgot to mention sci-fi. Doctor Who was best in the 70s, then the 60s, then the 80s. Dreadful in the 90s, average in the 00s. Star Trek was best in the 60s, and then the 80s/early 90s. Farscape was great, and that was late 90s/early 00s. Firefly, ... Oh crap, there are tons of these.

Yes, early sci-fi was better, but the modern stuff is okay, just they've masssively upped the drama quotient, so it depends if you like sci-fi (in which case the earlier decades) or drama in space (in which case the later decades).

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

For music, the decade 1966-1975 starts off with Revolver and ends with Wish You Were Here. That would be my pick.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I can't begin to answer those questions because my tastes are broad but my exposure has not been broad enough that I feel qualified to have a firm opinion. I will always have a nostalgic love of 90s music because I was a teenager in the 90s but I wouldn't argue that 90s music is superior.

That said, I'm loving reading everyone's comments so I approve of the post ;)

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

The best decade started in 2011! We have easy, ready access to all the really good stuff from the past, plus all the new stuff being produced now. There are already waaaaay more excellent pop music, movies, fiction, games, and TV produced than you can possibly listen to in an ordinary human lifetime, unless you are absurdly picky or have a very strong preference for new stuff purely because it is new.

And most of the stuff produced in the past was rubbish. Seriously - pick any 'golden age' year you like for whatever medium you like, and look at the totality of offerings in that year. There will be plenty of greats (since you picked specifically) but there will be a huge, huge amount of appalling dross.

If you happen to think, for example, that the finest popular music available to humanity is rocksteady, ska, reggae, dub and so on originating from Jamaica in the period 1967-1981, then (a) you may well be right, and (b) you can actually get your hands on pretty much all of it now - from the famous greatest hits to the most obscure B sides - which was extremely difficult back then, even if you lived in Kingston (c) it's cost you way, way less money than back then, possibly even in nominal cash terms for some of it, and (d) you can fit it all on to a single MP3 player you can carry with you everywhere. You get all that, plus anything else since that might be worth a listen now and then.

If you'd asked about non-digitisable things, like the experience of going to live performances, or theme parks, it'd be a different question. IMO those have on average got considerably better too, but I'm prepared to accept that other people's tastes are different.

[fub.livejournal.com]

I like the way you think.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The best decade is right now in terms of creation/consumption, because the ease of creation and access means there are opportunities like never before.

If you don't like big budget Michael Bay or saccharine romcoms, or Call of Duty or years-past-best-before-date reunions in the O2 arena, you've got independent films, documentaries available digitally, episodic content on youtube sometimes with near-Hollywood production values, miniseries on the web, BBC iplayer, Hulu, bands putting their new tracks on youtube, soundcloud and myspace and getting fans regardless of whether they're looking to get signed or not, bedroom DJs creating shitty dubstep remixes putting it online and getting play in clubs without necessarily needing to press a record or CD, you've got self-publishing 27 part vampire romance to kindle and non-proprietary formats, indie games on Steam and GOG or Newgrounds.

Yeah sure, there are tons of things to complain about, in respect of current films, TV, games etc... but all the complaints, to my mind, fall in the face of the sheer scale of what's available if you look outside the mainstream. Anyone complaining about the mainstream really makes me sad that they a] are hating on what's popular and really, all they're actually doing is sneering at other people's tastes and b] possibly aren't looking widely enough themselves.

[jack-ryder.livejournal.com]

Though my picks were different, I think this is absolutely spot on. I'm constantly finding stuff that makes my jaw drop and it can come from anywhere. I have a pet theory that the music you respond to the most (instinctively) is the music you heard whilst undergoing puberty - though dedicated music fans can obviously redirect their tastes to a more suitable decade.

In terms of popular culture, stuff I never thought would see the light of day is emerging from archives and film restoration units all over the place. If Hollywood isn't make films to your taste, well, there's always European films, or Asian films that are now more accessible than ever before to restore your faith in cinema. One of the best movies I've seen in years was Love Exposure from Shion Sono - something I never thought I'd see, but wound up freely available from our local dvd/music chain.

Not only is there still amazing stuff being produced even as I type this, but our access to cultural artifacts from the past is deepening (though there is still an issue with some films disappearing due to rights issues as formats change.) The internet is one huge recommendation engine - if you can't pick up a thread that will lead you to a song, or a tv show, or a movie that's the one thing that you've always been after but never knew existed, then you're just not trying.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

What about comic books?

[andrewducker]

Done!

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> Approaching the end of the first decade of the third millennium

and

> for decades I'm going to go with "the second-least-significant digit changes".)

I'm confused by both those. Surely the first implies we're about to end the current decade, while the second implies that the decade came to an end at the end of 2009? I'm not nitpicking the statement, just confused by both in conjunction!

(Trust me to talk about that rather than the actual question... for that I have no idea.)

[andrewducker]

Yes, I'm running a year late. And clearly wasn't awake when I managed to completely contradict myself!

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

It might have been even more interesting with a blank to fill in for the specific year, rather than the arbitrary zeroes.

[andrewducker]

I agree. Sadly LJ's polls don't do scales that way. Tis a shame.