firecat

The Dazed and Confused Generation by Bruce Handy in The New Yorker

I haven’t seen the movie this article covers, but the article discusses how some of us who were teens in the 1970s thought “our” decade was incredibly boring, and I remember feeling that way. The article is whiny and I want to say “OK, Boomer” in response even though I agree late Boomers are difervent from early ones. But it was interesting to re-visit that white suburban 70s kid feeling of “born too late, everything cool’s been done already.”

Our generation naturally had no equivalent watershed events, no epochal gatherings worth lying about having attended. Linklater and I reminisced about what a corny, cynical dud the Bicentennial had been. “The Comet Kohoutek of holidays,” he called it.
[…]
Linklater confessed surprise at the unironic affection with which younger audiences embraced the movie and its trappings….”I was thinking, O.K., there’s no way this film will ever kick off a nostalgia for the seventies. I’m going to make a film to show how the seventies kind of sucked….It was funny to realize, Oh, shit, people like this!”

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From:

firecat

I agree with your analysis of the thrust of the article. And I don't disagree with your assessment of the 70s vs the 80s and 90s. I'm not sure how I would have felt during those decades if I'd been a teen during them. Looking back on the 90s, I thought there was a lot of exciting stuff going on in tech, but that's I started working in tech in '88, so I would. I think 70s fashion is more iconic than 80s-90s. But maybe fashion doesn't get iconic until more than 40 years after.

From:

silveradept

We can say in hindsight that the 70s were better for a lot of people who weren't straight white men, so the 70s will get a bad rap, and the 80s was the backlash that tried to undo all that progress and kill anyone who might have benefited from it, and so it gets idolized as something wonderful. The 90s really were good if you were into technology (as I was), but Reagan's third term and Bill Clinton being a center-rightist made it tough, and then we had to suffer Bush the Younger, so there's a long string there of "for very specific things or people, it was okay, but overall, not great."

I'd say iconic fashion becomes iconic on the second go around with it because by then, it's been decided what the iconic fashion was, rather than everyone trying everything and hoping to become a hit.

From:

firecat

All that makes sense except the 70s weren’t better than subsequent decades for people who weren’t straight white men (glam rock notwithstanding). They were differently bad but not better (from my perspective of being 9–18 during them)