They got older, the pop-cultural 'smear' as I call it devoured some of their choices and simply smothered the rest. But yeah, it's startling when I think about it.
Apt description.
Oh crap, you done gone set me off. For myself, I can pinpoint where it started.
In 1992 I was still identified squarely with Alternative sub-culture. Sure, I went outside of it for some types of music or experiences, but it was my 'home' and my 'people'. We could recognize each other on the street and draw inferences about each other based on our fashion choices.
That was the year Smells Like Teen Spirit got released. Record companies and marketing people saw the cultural impact it made (and had also paid attention to the kids at Lollapalooza '91), and started mining Seattle and places like it for the Grunge sound, which thanks to radio soon got lumped into the "Alternative" genre -- which was laughable to us fans of Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Leatherstrip, Fields of the Nephilim, Christian Death etc. etc. -- we could appreciate Grunge but to us there was nothing alternative about flannel shirts.
(Tim Burton was another story, speaking of marketing and mainstream appeal).
But it was at Lollapalooza '92 kids rocked out to Ministry *and* Cypress Hill *and* Pearl Jam. It's not like there wasn't crossover before, but this was a tipping point for marketing, and for bored jocks who discovered the heavy **** we freaks were listening to in our headphones and underground clubs and bars.
In 1995 The World Wide Web started getting promoted heavily (the Internet was around long before of course, with bulletin boards etc. but prior to 1995 it was Deep Nerd).
Electronica hit. Rave culture spread. Brit-Pop (which in some way had always been there) joined the fray. You could soon find something like 5 or 6 sub-cultures in one 3-floor club in Toronto with everyone dancing and drinking and getting high together with a good DJ able to move effortlessly between genres. It was the craziest and most diverse party I've ever seen. Fashion started blending.
And it was around this time that mainstream people who used to stare at my friends and I on the bus or yell things out at us from moving cars -- learned to call us 'goths' -- a name we only labeled ourselves ironically, most of the time, as it was too limiting, goofy and conformist before it mainstreamed.
By 2001 Britney Spears had co-opted fetish culture and fashion for "I'm A Slave 4U". What started with marginalized weirdos like Iggy Pop and Joy Division with cross-pollination from the gay and kink communities, ended with Spears.
There are other markers of course -- what happened to hip-hop to turn it into a pale, Top 40 imitation of its history comes to mind immediately -- but there was basically a decade -- '91-'01 -- when marketers and mainstream audiences inhaled everything underground, mixed it in a blender, then diluted it and spat it back out in some shade of beige.
Now I'm 47 and haven't worn all-black in decades, more likely to listen to Brazilian Lounge or Bach instead of NIN, know from my years of working in hospitality that dance clubs are gone, replaced by bars -- maybe a symptom of people not wanting to risk being filmed dancing in our curated social media driven milieu, I don't know ... and when I see a young woman with a crazy dye job or shaved head wearing tall boots with a full sleeve, it's a safe bet I have no idea what kind of music she likes -- not because I'm middle-aged but because there are no clear sub-cultural markers anymore, not really anyway unless you count being poor, and that's a whole other thing.
I could go on and on about this stuff ... I had worked as a freelance design professional both in the arts and in tech, in tandem with being a hospitality professional for 20 years, always working alongside younger people and watching the world change through them in ways nobody saw coming.
Boundaries are gone, sub-culture's diluted, everything including your life is 'branded' and young people can't make their mistakes in relative privacy anymore, while they choke on self-conscious irony and regurgitated, remixed crap from decades ago.
If I had to choose tipping points for Western pop-culture, it'd be:
1989 - Berlin Wall comes down, at least a symbolic end to the Cold War and sparking optimism.
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1991 - Lollapalooza makes marketers pay attention
1992 - Lollapalooza and marketers make mainstream audiences pay attention, Smells Like Teen Spirit comes out
1995 - World Wide Web revs up for mainstream users
1999 - Napster hammers the music industry and changes the way people consume music
2001 - Britney Spears puts on fetish gear (Yes, Madonna did it first but the impact was different) -- this is right where I think sub-cultures died.
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2001 - 9/11 effectively destroyed the sense of openness and optimism that began in 1989
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2005 - YouTube launches
2006 - Facebook opens to anyone over 13 with an email address, Twitter launches
2010 - Instagram launches
Those 4 websites are ancient by current standards, but they've done more to shape cultural discourse and influence marketing, which in turn shapes public behaviour, than anything I can think of to date.
2017 - Donald Trump elected; extreme polarization in mainstream politics & society, in tandem with social media-driven dumbed down discourse.
2020 - COVID-19 Pandemic begins.
1989 - hope
91-00 - big party
2001 - paranoia
05-10 - rise of idiocracy
2017 - apotheosis of idiocracy
2020 - even more paranoid
Really seems like one kick in the nuts after another, don't it?
I'm just thinking out loud. Could be wrong.
So I'm really wondering if The Batman will be another regurgitated, beige product or if it's going to give us something ... not "great" nor "artistic" or even "entertaining" per se, but something with a recognizable *vision*.
As much as I think his films are poor, I'll give that one thing to Zach Snyder. The films are his.
