Music Chart Nerdiness

I’m pretty sure the music charts are now effectively dead. Although they still exist, I get the impression nobody pays much attention to them nowadays. It’s hardly worth mentioning that the ways we listen to music nowadays means that the charts mean nothing. Just another example of the loss of a significant unifying plank in our national life.

Then again, they were always at heart a commercial gimmick. They didn’t reflect quality of music and were in a way a cynical, essentially capitalist form of marketing. That said, the same could be applied to the ‘New York Times’ bestseller list without detracting from the quality of the novels on it, which I naïvely assume to be good. I also wonder if my loss of interest in the charts is an artifact of my age. Did I get past them just because I grew up?

Another aspect of this is that the music charts represent an incongruous juxtaposition of the cool and the nerdy. More recently, with the rise of video game popularity and the ubiquity of IT, distinction between the two has blurred, but there was a time when coolness and nerdiness were diametrically opposed, and this was the case during the bulk of the charts’ history and popularity. There’s an air of neurodiversity about being keen on knowing stats about the hit parade which doesn’t sit well with the socialising, emotional resonance and dancing associated with pop music. Sometimes I wonder what nerdiness actually is. Sitting on a train platform collecting numbers from engines is definitely “nerdoid”, but is it really that different from paying close attention to how many weeks a single spends in the charts or at number one, how many number one singles a particular artist has and what quality releases got stuck at number two? Sometimes it seems there’s a côterie of cool kids who somehow get to decide where to draw the border around their coolness, and if something within that border happens to be neurodiverse, so be it. But I don’t know what the process is whereby a nerdy thing infiltrates the apparently impregnable Fortress of Cool.

The idea of music charts seems to have begun with the advent of the Billboard hit parade in the 1930s. It seems quite startling that they go back that far. In fact they might even go back quite a bit further, as there was apparently a time when the sales of sheet music were noted in this way, before there was even recorded sound. This was an exclusively American thing at the time, and it took a couple of decades for the British charts to be established. This means it is kind of possible to extend things way back before December 1952 CE and guess what was popular before then, assuming that US companies marketed records in Britain and vice versa. To be honest, I don’t know whether that’s true. There was of course a British Invasion in the 1960s, but I’m not sure how many British acts were popular over the pond before that. That in itself is a nerdy chart fact, and the answer appears to be that Vera Lynn got into the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1952 with ‘Auf Widerseh’n Sweetheart’, and I presume this means she was also popular with that single over here shortly before. Comparing the UK and US charts over the years, there’s a fairly unsurprising phenomenon where a hit becomes popular in one country a few months before entering the charts in the other. This means that the Zeitgeist of music tends to be blurred and come across as slightly incongruous if you’re paying attention. It can mean, for example, that an American single reached number one in Britain the year after it did so in the US, and the same thing happens the other way round, meaning that the associations one has with a particular year are different. This also provides a time span of a few months for the Zeitgeist, which could actually be measured and averaged. The same process presumably applies with other pairs of countries. As I type this, Men At Work comes particularly to mind.

As far as one’s individual perception of hit singles is concerned, this might depend on the media whereby one received the news. I have never read NME or Melody Maker and presumably those who did would’ve been aware of the goings on in the lower parts of the Top 100 whereof I was entirely ignorant, but because of the likes of Janice Long, John Peel and Anne Nightingale, I would’ve heard many of those singles along with many others, particularly on John Peel and ‘Walters’ Weekly’, which never got anywhere, without being aware of what was popular and well-known. This also gives singles a longer lifetime than some of us were aware of. For me the main sources of information were the Radio 1 Top 40 programme, Tommy Vance’s American charts and of course ‘Top Of The Pops’. I got the impression that I was actuall rather uncool for focussing on these sources, and to be a proper fan of music you really had to be reading every issue of NME. However, like most younger teenagers I didn’t have much disposable income so that was never going to happen unless my priorities were very different. I was also aware that I was much more focussed on the singles charts than the albums, and also on the main charts rather than the sub-genres. This kind of made me less of a proper music fan and more of a wannabe. I don’t know if this matters. Presumably if you are actually a musician, and being from Canterbury I was surrounded by musicians and there were several bands in my 200-member sixth form, you can be into music in a different, more discerning and more informed way than I was. This, actually, seems to lead to a different kind of appreciation for pop music, where it isn’t so much about snobbishness relating to sub-genres as to do with recognition that a particular artist is doing what they set out to do well and also their skill and creativity, to the extent that powerfully uncool bands are sometimes appreciated by the apparently cool. There is a famous incident which remains unexplained in this connection. Peter Cetera, in the music video to the very formulaic and schmalzig 1985 (1984 in the US – see what I mean?) hit ‘You’re The Inspiration’, wears a Bauhaus T-shirt! What does this mean? The two styles of music are poles apart. My conclusion, drawn on this and some other evidence, is that the side the public saw was carefully controlled and packaged by the marketing bods, but on the other side of the veil something else is going on, and there was mutual respect among artists, or perhaps identical levels of cynicism. Somewhat similar clues to the reality exist in the very clear ‘eightiesification of Wham and George Michael’s loss of creative control in 1982. The first two singles are utterly unlike the others. Duran Duran seem to have gone through a similar process but did better out of it, and I vaguely remember something really weird happening in the late ’60s involving Bob Dylan’s support band being The Monkees or something. This makes me feel like pop music used to be packed into a tiny shell like the Universe at the Big Bang, then exploded and ended up with loads of styles which could never meet again. Also in connection with the Big Bang is an aspect of my playful Beatles-related cosmology, that they invented so many things that they defined the genre and it’s like the remnants of the sound waves produced by the Big Bang itself whose traces can still be seen in the voids and superclusters of galaxies in today’s Universe.

Speaking of the Beatles, I must’ve been in the ’60s because I can’t really remember them. I have two frustrations regarding the 1960s. One is that I can’t remember the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, although my father used to have reel-to-reel tape recordings of the radio traffic so that I have heard. The other is that I am very close indeed to being able to remember the Beatles before they split up, but can’t quite do so. The first number one single I can remember is Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’, which entered the charts on 16th November 1969 and got to number one on 14th December. I do also remember other records from the same time, such as ‘Sugar Sugar’, ‘Ruby Don’t Take Your Love To Town’ and ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’, and there’s also a weird anomaly I’ll get to in a bit, but I don’t remember ‘Let It Be’, which was released three months later. I do remember ‘Something’, but I don’t think I knew it from the time it was released. In fact the only “normal” Beatles song I remember at the time, rather oddly, is ‘The Long And Winding Road’ from July 1970. I say “normal” because of the two tracks which were heavily slanted towards being appreciated by younger children, ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘An Octopus’s Garden’, which anyone of a certain age will remember in the same way as they’d remember Ted Atking’s and Alain Feanch’s ‘Children’s Carnival’ or Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’. The latter is 1972 but the former I can’t place although I think it’s earlier. ‘Yellow Submarine’ was from August 1966 but was presumably incessantly played to children for years afterward, and ‘Octopus’s Garden’ isn’t even a single!

About the anomaly. I can’t explain this at all but it intrigues me. I seem to have a reminiscence bump for pop music dating from May 1967 even though I wasn’t born until the end of July. I seem to remember the following singles as current rather than from replays or as oldies: ‘Don’t Sleep In The Subway’, ‘Puppet On A String’, ‘If I Were A Rich Man’, ‘Music To Watch Girls By’ and possibly ‘Edelweiss’. Looking at the top 35 from 25th May 1967, there are of course plenty of other singles I know from later, but to me those four singles seem to be actual memories at first play. I’m not sure what to make of this. I’m aware that the fetus is able to hear from just over five months because our daughter jumped around a lot in response to fireworks in November 1993, and there are ultrasound scans of fetuses kicking along to the rhythms of percussion, so that does happen, but I also thought that at that time senses were blended – synæsthesia. This means I ought not to remember how they actually sounded because I wouldn’t’ve experienced them as sounds. I do, however, remember them as muffled. My brother is unusual in having survived being twelve weeks premature in 1973, so this might go some way towards explaining what happened. I doubt I’ll ever get an answer to that mystery. Looking at other singles from before July 1967 doesn’t yield the same kind of familiarity, including July itself. There’s just that one little island of apparent memory.

My earliest memories of pop music apart from those were that they were just tunes which were kind of “around”. I wasn’t aware that they were new or old, just that I heard them. One of the earliest is ‘Knock Three Times’ by Tony Orlando and Dawn. For years I though Dawn was a person! A particularly traumatic memory for me was ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’, sung by Middle Of The Road in October 1970, when I was worried about my mother disappearing forever and waking up in the morning to find her gone. This was because she was in and out of hospital at the time. Both of these are from autumn 1970, when I was staying with my grandparents while she was in hospital and my uncle, who still lived with them at the time, was listening to them on the radio a lot. It may or may not have been Radio 1. I can also remember ‘I Can’t Let Maggie Go’ from 1968, but that’s due to its use in the Nimble ad. For the same reason, ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’ is very memorable, and was released in November 1971. ‘The Pushbike Song’ is also clear in my mind, and is once again from late 1970, and from earlier in the year I remember ‘Yellow River’. However, these weren’t chart hits for me but just music. For some reason I can also remember ‘Bend It’ by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick And Titch, though presumably not from September 1976. I can only assume I know it from some members of the older generation who were still sometimes playing it. ‘Get It On’ is also very clear and I remember T. Rex still being called “Tyrannosaurus Rex”, but that’s probably because they were named after a dinosaur and little children are really into them. While I’m on that band, ‘Ride A White Swan’ is also very clear, and that dates once again from October 1970. This does mean there’s a run of three successive number one singles I can remember clearly from summer 1971. This period is actually before anyone in my immediate family was at all into pop music, so it would’ve been from the neighbours or my uncles.

Longer stretches of remembrance begin from about 1974. In fact it seems to start with ‘Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’, a single which, embarrassingly, is probably the first pop record I ever owned, unless you count ‘The Woody Woodpecker Song’ from 1961, which I had on orange vinyl. The Osmond record dates from December 1972, and interestingly like a lot of other songs I heard first as a child, it sounds more high-pitched to me now than it did back then. The final gap in my memory occurs in January 1978 with ‘Up Town Top Ranking’, which I can’t remember at all from the time. This is probably due to my sister getting into pop music. I can remember listening to the charts with my sister in January 1977. However, on the whole at that point I regarded pop music as silly and vapid. I have a distinct memory of hearing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for the first time in late 1975 and finding it ridiculously theatrical and rubbish. This is the kind of child I was at the time.

I always liked ABBA although at the time I had a concept of pop music in general as simply trash I didn’t want to listen to, and perhaps sometimes with a nebulously threatening undercurrent. I think these attitudes must have been inherited from my parents. I actually now think that that was to some extent a fair assessment and certainly I find much contemporary pop music doesn’t hit the spot for me. Looking at that in context, there seems to be a period during which new music has one in its thrall for many years and it only relinquishes its grasp some time after one has settled down and had children of one’s own, but even then the bands one was previously into still demand some loyalty as they leave the limelight. Sarada also often says that the gap between the music of the previous generation to hers, which is as I’ve said Generation Jones, that is, that of her parents, is much wider than the one between our own music and that of our children. We seem to have happened to live through a historical moment when popular music underwent a huge revolution.

I can distinctly remember the moment when my ears were finally opened to contemporary pop music. It happened on the morning of Saturday 28th January 1978, while I was watching ‘Multicoloured Swap Shop’ on our black and white TV. I was ten. ELO came on with ‘Mr. Blue Sky’ and I was utterly amazed! I suddenly underwent a complete about-face with my attitude to pop music and decided it was brilliant. For some reason though, my interest manifested itself in an odd way, where I interpreted ‘Mr. Blue Sky’ as a form of art rock requiring a high degree of intellectual and learnèd appreciation when in fact they are generally regarded as a bit crap. Personally they remind me of Queen to some extent. This theme of art rock was to become separated over the next few years to concentrate on things which actually were art rock, such as Laurie Anderson and David Bowie. Actually, David Bowie had already made an impression on me much earlier with ‘Space Oddity’, with my shock at hearing a Cockney accent on a pop record. Hearing it now, it really sounds very mild, but you have to remember how Americanised even British pop was at the time, and also the dominance of Liverpudlian accents, which had no particular associations for me except ‘The Liver Birds’. I think I had to kind of fool myself into thinking the music was somehow deep in order to give myself permission to enjoy it. However, I did proceed to branch out into bands which were more or less universally regarded as awful, such as Bucks Fizz and Five Star. I didn’t censor my tastes after the first few years.

After a while, and I think probably everyone has this experience, pop music became the soundtrack of my life and I came to forge strong associations between songs and my personal life. I felt, as most of us probably do, that songs were speaking to me about my emotional life. At this point I feel the urge to raise a note of caution. I’ve previously said that the adage that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the human race doesn’t mean they pass good laws, and in the case of love songs this does, I think, have affects on one’s expectations about relationships and sex, and these can often be gendered. I sometimes wonder if this primed me for particular kinds of behaviour, particularly towards Vicky, although this was still several years ahead. On the other hand, maybe it was just a case of me finding emotional expression in them during my adolescence and early adulthood.

A number of technological changes in my personal life then ensued. In 1980, we finally got colour TV and this probably boosted my keenness on music videos. Music in the late ’70s and early ’80s was going through a weird apocalyptic phase which I’ve never heard anyone mention even though it’s really glaring. This was of course also the New Wave era, which is linked. I’d been primed for the idea that music videos were “art” and integrated with the music because of Asimov’s depiction of the visi-sonor in several of his novels and later in his ‘Light Verse’, although the idea there is closer to Winamp visualisations. As a Gen-Xer, I took all this in my stride. In 1983, ‘Give It Up’ by K C And The Sunshine Band was the only single to make it to number one without a music video. Additionally, we got a stereo record player in 1980, although I’ve never been able to trust myself with treating vinyl with the delicacy required. Consequently my record collection was always very small throughout the late twentieth century and only began to grow in the late ’90s, and my chief experience of pop music was from off-air recorded mixer cassettes. I didn’t acquire a means of playing CDs until late 1999. Therefore my life was boosted considerably when I got a mono radio cassette recorder for my birthday in July 1980. I already had a few albums on cassette, actually just Mike Oldfield’s ‘Incantations’ and Tubeway Army’s ‘Replicas’ and it stayed that way for a long time. I think the next music album I bought was The The’s ‘Soul Mining’ along with a 12″ of Uncertain Smile. I was really heavily into The The, and later Prefab Sprout, which I think shows my inexplicable tendency to back losers.

The early to mid-’80s saw a number of remarkable chart events. Two singles in particular lasted a very long time on the top 100. The first of these was Tears For Fears’ ‘Mad World’, spending a relatively modest eighteen weeks there from October 1982. Just over a year later, after heavy promotion from John Peel, Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ was released on 24th October 1983. Just as it made it to number one, the BBC banned it when Mike Read noticed that the lyrics were suggestive and potentially obscene. This did the record a lot of good, and it ended up on the charts for seventy weeks overall. I’m not sure this was in one go, because it was re-released in 1993, but if it was this means it continued in the charts until mid-March 1985. This is practically all of the time I spent in the sixth form. However, this is nowhere near the record. Another oddity probably shows what counted as a successful formula at the time, and funnily enough also involved Frankie. This was the time when three singles, all called ‘The Power Of Love’, got into the charts, by Frankie, Jennifer Rush and Huey Lewis & The News. Although my recollection was that this was simultaneous, apparently it wasn’t. The Frankie track was a Christmas record, entering the charts on 1st December 1984. The fact that it’s a seasonal release makes it hard to track, but it’s spent a total of thirty-nine weeks on the chart, taking it to the end of August 1985. This is likely to be spurious. Jennifer Rush’s song spent thirty-three weeks there from 22nd June 1985, taking it to 7th February 1986 assuming no re-entries. Finally, Huey Lewis & The News’s ‘The Power Of Love’ was released in June 1985, and oddly seems to have no record on the official UK charts website. This is of course the song which forms the signature tune for ‘Back To The Future’. Hence this would’ve happened in June 1985 if it did. But it doesn’t end there! There are in fact a total of ten records with that exact title and two with it as a subtitle! I think the explanation for this is that pop songs are very likely to be love songs and the Jennifer Rush song at least is a power ballad, so it’s along the lines of ‘No Limit’ having the words “techno, techno, techno, techno” repeated in the chorus, which is the name of its genre just in case the listener doesn’t realise what kind of record it is. The other records with the same title may or may not be cover versions of the others. There are even more songs with this title which were not released as singles or didn’t chart, including one by the Everley Brothers in 1966, a country music song used as the title of its album in 1984, a 10cc album track, and so on to a total of a minimum of sixteen pieces of music excluding cover versions. It’s completely ludicrous!

I got a stereo boombox in 1984, which marked another big advance in my perception of the music I was into. There were then a few weeks after I left home when I didn’t have any way of listening to recorded music, into November 1985, which actually made me utterly miserable. However, at the same time I started going to gigs, notably the Prefab Sprout one on 24th October 1985. Over the next six years or so, I got more heavily involved in live music, helping to organise a fundraising festival in Leicester and ending up getting into a series of free concerts for fund-raising purposes up into the 1990s. By this time I was getting to know professional musicians fairly well. This had in fact been the case since 1980 but in a more low-key way. For some reason, in spite of this involvement I never managed to achieve “coolness”. I also started going to folk clubs in the mid-to-late 1980s. And maybe the explanation for my persistence as infra-dig was my partly terrible taste in music.

1990 begins to show gaps in my memory of number ones, which up until that point were remembered continuously from early 1978 on. This is partly to do with workload and partly connected to a romantic relationship I was having at the time where I kind of lost touch with who I was for a while. I got back on track later that year and this continued for several years. 1991 saw the sixteen weeks at number one single from Bryan Adams, ‘Everything I Do’. However, this single only spent twenty-five weeks on the chart because it was deleted when it was still selling to give other acts a chance. This seems to have been a symptom of a very slow singles market in the summer of ’91.

The next gap in my recollection coincides with our daughter’s birth and infancy, which doesn’t need explaining. It starts to come back in June 1994, with songs I associate with her babyhood such as ‘Mr Bombastic’ and Eddie Reader’s ‘The Patience Of Angels’. Another gap occurs about the time her brother was born. I’m actually surprised to see how persistent my interest was. This may have been about the time another weird thing happened to the charts, when singles started to go straight in at number 1 on a regular basis and the general pattern was for songs to enter the charts at their highest position and go down thereafter. I don’t know why this happened, probably because I was losing touch at this point. However, it’s notable that the charts seemed to show an objective decline in perceived significance as they became less significant to me. By this I mean that it wasn’t just me who perceived them as less important at this stage, but part of a wider trend. Digital singles by well-known artists began with Duran Duran’s ‘Electric Barbarella’ in 1997, which however only entered the charts in January 1999. By September 2003, I was so out of touch with them, and they were making themselves irrelevant by this point by not including downloads, and later on streaming and online music services until it was far too late, that I perceived Dido’s ‘White Flag’ as a discovery of my own in spire of it being a number one song.

But there were a couple more surprises in store. One was provoked by the death of Margaret Thatcher and the campaign to get ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ to number one, which had started in 2007 and finally succeeded in Scotland in 2013, and got to number two in the UK charts generally. It was of course banned. This also holds the record for the shortest ever top ten single at fifty-one seconds.

‘Top Of The Pops’ ended on my thirty-ninth birthday in 2006. It was closed down by the same person who had presented it at the start in 1964, the notorious Jimmy Savile. Less said about him the better. The last act to appear was Girls Aloud, the first one having been Dusty Springfield. It’s been said that the internet killed the video star.

A current oddity is the record-breaking ‘Mr Brightside’, The Killers’ debut single released in September 2003. It has now had three hundred weeks in the chart and is currently at number 76. I hadn’t even heard it until about a year ago, and associate The Killers with ‘Human’, their 2008 single which has never reached number one, but then neither has ‘Mr Brightside’. I can’t even pretend to understand what’s going on here and enlightenment would be helpful.

Finally, there’s Pinkfong’s ‘Baby Shark’, which was in the charts for seventy-three weeks and never got to number one either. It has the distinction of being known to my granddaughter, and like my earliest memory of ‘Yellow Submarine’ is a children’s song. It’s apparently part of K-pop, like ‘Gangnam Style’, which did get to number one but is now a decade old. In a way, then, the charts are kind of morphing into viral memes.

In closing, I just think it’s a bit sad how we don’t seem to have this unifying pop culture phenomenon any more, just like we lost ‘Morecambe And Wise’ and the rest. It feels oddly like we’re all blundering around in the dark discovering things, and that’s fine but it’s still a shame we don’t even know what we have in common any more.

Talkin’ ‘Bout Sarada’s Generation

Legs & Co dancing to Kool & The Gang on TOTP in 1981

Sarada does not like Legs & Co. I don’t know what she thinks of Kool & The Gang or ‘Jones vs Jones’ but I do know that Top Of The Pops was a huge influence on her generation in this country, as it was mine. But one interesting thing about our relationship is that she and I are from different generations. I’m a Gen-Xer and she’s Generation Jones. Steve, who also reads this blog, is too.

Phrases such as Baby Boomers, the Beat Generation, Millennials and Generation X are all well-known, and I think probably all coined by journalists. However, there doesn’t seem to be a popular term for the people born between the Baby Boom and Gen-X. Consequently the term “Generation Jones”, which refers to these people, doesn’t seem to be widely known. This actually reflects the essence of Generation Jones as a group of people who have tended to miss out and be ignored by things. The generation before and after them are connected to each other. Here’s a graph of the birth rate in the UK from 1940 CE to the 2010s:

The Baby Boom is really clear. It stands out on the graph, and it also seems to have two peaks, perhaps for when eldest and second children were born. Gen-X is also fairly clear and can be seen as the single, gentler slope up and down peaking in the mid-1960s. It’s a smoother curve because it represents a different kind of generation. People seemed to have had children when they were about twenty according to this graph, although they tended to wait longer before they settled down and the double peak after the War is also manifested in the fact that these are people of varying ages. There is then a rapid decline into the mid-’70s followed by a less regular, shallower and longer peak from about 1979 to 2000, then another even vaguer peak around 2010. This represents the smearing of ages which occurs in generations. If you have a 23andme account, you can see this in estimates of your ancestry, which get longer in duration the further back in time you go. If you imagine the average age of a parent to be twenty-three (this is roughly three score years and ten divided by three) but possibly as young as eighteen or as old as twenty-eight, that gives the generation before you a range of ten years, the generation before that a range of thirty and the one before that of half a century. There was a specific, definite event just after the War which is becoming smoothed out by this effect, meaning that the age distribution of society is returning to how it was before the Second World War.

Gen-Xers are the children of Baby Boomers. This is not precisely true, but it is a fair guide to where the peak of that generation occurs. However, we are the peak generations in terms of our population. Generation Jones is in the trough. This may give them common ground with people born in the late 1970s. It means that culture was more youth oriented before and after they were young, because there were more young people at that time, but not for them. The Swinging ’60s were something exciting happening to older people and the Yuppies and the Second Summer Of Love happened after they’d got past the point when they could enjoy such things. Generation Jones, sadly, occupies a dip.

I’m aware that I’m talking about this second hand. I am not myself a member of this generation, although because my parents were older than average when I was born, and also late adopters, I might have more in common with them than many of my contemporaries. If my mother had me when she was 23, I would’ve been born in 1956. This is a peculiar counterfactual conditional but I’m going to let it pass, because I think you know what I’m saying. I think I’m a mixture for this reason, and it may be a factor in Sarada and I being together. Just to make a general point about the situation, if a couple have a big age difference, maturity and life stages are not the only factors in making productive or problematic differences between them. Being in different generations can be equally important. A fairly trivial example of this in our own relationship is that I like music videos and Sarada hates them, and this is purely a generational difference. In the past I could also have noted that people say exactly the same things about The Smiths and Leonard Cohen except that I actually think Leonard Cohen is bloody brilliant and am completely disillusioned by Morrissey’s recent behaviour, so that doesn’t really work.

The term “Generation Jones” was coined by Jonathan Pontell (I have very little idea who that is by the way, and this time Google is not my friend) as a way of pointing out that Boomers and Gen-Xers peak far apart and there was a distinct experience pertaining to people born between 1954 and 1965. These people were children during Watergate and stagflation, that is, an economic situation where unemployment and inflation are both high, distinctive of the ’70s and having an obvious major influence on family life. Divorce was also becoming more common at this time, as were single mothers. In America, a lot of Gen-Xers would’ve grown up in an atmosphere of cynicism about politics because of Watergate. In Britain it would’ve included the Three Day Week and powercuts, but on a different note we all remember the summer of ’76, though how formative that is I don’t know. Jonesers tend to be pessimistic, cynical and distrust government. This actually doesn’t sound like Sarada at all.

Why is it called Jones? Well, they’re also known as the Lost Generation, which makes more sense to me at least, because they’ve missed out. But apparently it’s because they “jones” a lot, meaning that they hanker after the more prosperous and optimistic past of recent memory which they saw disappear as they reached adolescence. There’s also the aspect of “keeping up with the Joneses”, i.e. trying to be as “good” as the people next door, in this case temporally because their neighbours are the Baby Boomers and perhaps also us lot, the Gen-Xers. They had high expectations as children which were dashed as they reached adulthood. For us, that didn’t happen because we basically can’t remember the ’60s so we are strangers to that wave of optimism and are used to hopelessness. Most of them are not the children of people who fought in the War or were on the Home Front at that time, although some are. Another link with the name Jones is that it’s one of those very common surnames which is used to suggest anonymity, because these people are not seen, recognised or noticed.

Four out of five Jonesers do not identify with either Boomers or Gen-Xers. They tend to be less idealistic than their predecessors. They’re used to struggling to find work or make money from what they do. They experienced the loss of secure employment. After retirement, many of them wish to reconnect with the optimism and idealism they experienced second-hand in their childhood. They want to do it themselves rather than just watching others do it. There’s a sense of constant unrequited craving in their lives. Their reminiscence bumps would range from 1969-79 to 1980-90. The very different characters of the ’70s and ’80s suggests that they themselves might be divisible into two halves.

They’re said to be more practical and rational in their approach to change because they were forced to be pragmatic by conditions in their early adulthood. They dislike high-pressure sales techniques and are more likely to do digital detoxes because they have extensive experience of the pre-Web world as adults. Some of them see themselves as pioneers because they were forced to make things work after the old world had changed due to what the Boomers had done and due to the collapse of Keynesian economic policies.

So far so good then in this outline, but in my mind there’s a problem or two with this idea. One is that it reads a little like a horoscope. It kind of feels sufficiently vague and maybe flattering in a way, perhaps “sympathetic” is a better word, that most people would feel it describes them. The second problem is that to a great extent it feels like it describes me even if it is specific to Generation Jones. This might be due to me being Generation X, but older than most of my cohort, being born in 1967, making me almost a Joneser, and also possibly connected to my parents being older than average for a Gen-Xer’s. I can also see some of it in Sarada but not all, but then why would I? Everyone is also an individual.

I want to end this post by addressing Jonesers personally, as people with direct experience of being from this generation. In particular, I’m talking to you, Sarada, and you, Steve, but anyone else is free to respond too. Do you feel that this is you? Does it chime with you? Or is it more like a load of things cobbled together which could apply to anyone? How do you see me, as a Gen-Xer, as different or similar to this?

Decayed Decades?

This is shamelessly inspired by a KnowledgeHub video on YouTube, which nonetheless raises an interesting point which can be extended. I’ll summarise the argument of the video first, then move further.

KnowledgeHub’s view of decades is that they’re an exclusively twentieth Christian century phenomenon characterised by popular culture and consumerism, which began in earnest in the 1920s when a wide range of people began to have a fair bit of disposable income. Then there was the Depression, when nobody had any money again and therefore there was little consumerism. This was followed by the War, which dominated popular culture as can be seen, for instance, in military-inspired fashion and films such as ‘Casablanca’. This was followed by the Baby Boom and the return of disposable income which led to the advent of a decade often appealed to as some kind of ideal time, though not by all, and the rise of rock music and its associated youth culture. His thesis includes the notion that the decades also focus on the young. The boomers reached adolescence in the ’60s, with the rise of the counterculture, then in the ’70s, as some of them settled down and had children, a secondary boomer generation arose referred to as Generation X. This decade, the ’70s, was accompanied by an economic downturn and ended with the breakdown of the Postwar Consensus, followed by the ’80s, which once again involved people splashing cash around a lot and the evolution of production-line film making which targetted their audiences more precisely. Then in the ’90s a fragmentation began which meant there was a strong hindsight association mainly with grunge because this dominated the early part of the decade before this had begun. The fragmentation continued into the twenty-first century where experiences of popular culture became more individual due to the increasing ability to produce media oneself and successfully find works which were to one’s personal taste. In the meantime, the aftermath of 9/11 had a major influence. As for the 2010s, and here the decade is too recent for hindsight either to pin it down precisely or to caricature it, social media came to dominate and this had a more long-lasting influence and broadened appeal beyond youth. It also accelerated changing trends, which made it harder for particular movements in music and the like to be marketed effectively, so the media companies turned to nostalgia in order to cash in on older generations. This will work for a while, but the time will come when there’s nobody left to be nostalgic about anything because no-one will remember when decades had their distinctive atmospheres, and social media seem to be permanent.

That’s the summary of the thesis. Now I don’t want to turn this into a simple parroting of “wot that bloke sed in that video”, so I will broaden this out somewhat. I would say that from about the middle of the 2010s it felt like the future was becoming less predictable, to me at least, with for example the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump’s victory, both of which seemed to have similarities. Also, it’s instructive to look back into the nineteenth century, and perhaps further, to identify other trends, and to broaden this beyond popular culture into wider political and social happenings.

Looking back at the start of the twentieth century in what was then the British Empire, we have a period close to a decade which we refer to as the “Edwardian Era”. The use of the word “era” to refer to relatively short periods of time seems incongruous to me, possibly because I learnt it first from its geological application. The average length of the three eras of the Phanerozoic Eon is 180 million years, and even the short Cenozoic Era has lasted 66 million years so far. Historical eras are bound to be much shorter but I can’t help feeling the word is overused and refers to ever shorter periods of time. Then again, the eras of the early Universe were only supposed to last tiny fractions of a second, so maybe not. However, maybe it makes sense for the word to do this due to accelerating change. Nonetheless, the “Edwardian Era” was only nine years long, and over a century ago, making it difficult to fit into this tendency. It really amounts to an oddly-labelled decade, more or less, and brings to mind the preceding sixty-four years of the Victorian Era, again in the Empire as opposed to elsewhere in the world. However, preceding the Edwardian Era was the “Gay Nineties”, also apparently known as the “Naughty Nineties”, although I only know the former term, and which even now is associated in my mind with ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’, from 1891. The 1890s were also known as the “Mauve Decade” because of the invention and use of aniline dye by Henry Perkin in 1856 at the age of eighteen when he was trying to synthesise quinine. It’s notable that it took over three decades to become trendy. Maybe that was just the pace of things at the time.

The trigger is said to be the Second Industrial Revolution, which was the development of a second wave of innovations following on from the first phase, which had plateaued a few decades earlier. It was underway roughly from 1870 to 1890 and involved improvements in agricultural productivity, rail travel, the invention of the internal combustion engine and the telephone and these and other events all worked together to improve potential standards of living. The record player was invented in the 1870s and cinematography in the 1890s, and these two alone would go on to have major influences on popular culture. The aforementioned aniline dyes are part of this too. However, it took a while after these inventions for them to be widely used and penetrate society. Cinema, for example, although a major influence eventually, would have begun as a mere curiosity, and you can easily imagine people saying sound recording and films would be a flash in the pan and never catch on.

In terms of design, one early influence which can be identified easily is the Arts And Crafts movement. This was a reaction against industrialisation and mass production and lauded the artisan, and was of course led by William Morris. It led to the Edwardian Art Nouveau, and could also be understood as a “back to nature” movement. William Morris’s own ‘News From Nowhere’, published in 1890, espouses libertarian socialism in response to Bellamy’s more state-oriented vision as expressed in ‘Looking Backward’. It’s interesting that the advent of consumer culture was preceded by this very different version of how things might be, and it’s conceivable that everything that happened afterwards has an element of “bread and circuses” about it. Nonetheless, like most other people I do feel an emotional attachment and strong interest in popular culture.

I can certainly see that the apparent acceleration of change would “shrink” the decades. The Arts And Crafts Movement was a reaction to the kind of trends which were epitomised by the Great Exhibition of 1851, and continued until at least the 1890s. If Art Nouveau is seen as part of it, it lasted even longer and in other parts of the world it was still current in the 1920s. This is seven decades, an entire lifetime for many at the time. The gradual infiltration of recorded sound and cinema into popular culture also took several decades, and the advent of radio was significant. It’s also interesting to note that in the US, the hit parade precedes ours by a decade and a half, beginning in January 1936. Here in Britain it began in November 1952, which precedes rock and roll, and that genre of music is a response to the creation of the charts themselves. I’m not sure when the charts ceased to have much real meaning because I’m old, but I would say it was after the Spice Girls, which rather neatly places it near the end of the twentieth century. This in itself could be seen as a barometer for the times because the advent of MP3 downloads and YouTube probably did for them in terms of them having much significance. I remember in the mid-‘noughties not realising that Dido’s ‘White Flag’ was at number one and getting the erroneous impression that I’d “discovered” it. Apparently that was in September 2003, so that fragmentation does seem to date it to around the end of the century and the consequences of widespread online access and always on internet connections.

If accelerating change, which has been a tendency probably for centuries now if not longer, destroys decades, this suggests there would’ve been a point at which the rate of change matched the decade perfectly, although oddly it might have been an instantaneous inflection on a curve. This would mean that there would be a most “decady” decade at some point, and I have a feeling this was the 1960s although I’m not sure. This would then presumably mean that the 1970s would show a more notable change of Zeitgeist between the early and late halves. It also means that my preferred division of dating into twelve-year cycles would place the most “cyclical” cycle slightly earlier, unless there’s a psychological and marketing influence on what a decade is. I also wonder if the growing awareness of a vast interval of time in the new millennium influenced us to think more in the long term, or perhaps simply to lose track, and the difficulty in referring to what I call the ‘noughties but others call the 2000s, which is more ambiguous, might lead to a kind of vagueness about the “Decade That Dare Not Speak Its Name”. Then we have the issue of thinking of our own lives as having teenage years, and we then have a shorter stretch of time we might call the “‘teens” from 2013 to 2019.

Using the dozen-year division based on the duodecimal system could have the effect of slicing time up into slightly larger sections which might reveal the influence of marketing. The gross of years which ended half-a-dozen years back in 2016 began in 1872 if we stick to the round numbers rather than use the “+1” approach of naming centuries, and in fact decades don’t match centuries perfectly either because although 2000 is the last year of the twentieth century, it’s also the first year of the ‘noughties. The twelve-year intervals are then: 1872, 1884, 1896, 1908, 1920, 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992 and 2004. Doing this extends the period back to before decades really becoming a “thing” and perhaps out the other side to when they stopped having much meaning. This list of numbers also reminds me of the feeling that there is always a year in a decade which seems to epitomise it, and that oddly that year rarely ends in a 5. There’s 1933, 1945, 1955, 1968, 1977, 1984 and 1999. This might just be me of course, but I can make an argument for the focus on 1984, as stimulated by Orwell, and the protests of the ’60s peaking in 1968. Two of those numbers also coincide with the start of decades. The span from 1980 to 1992 is bounded by the year Reagan was elected and the year John Major was returned to Parliament by the “Shy Tories”, which perhaps describes a trajectory beginning with proud support for what was seen as freedom, reaching a crescendo with the “greed is good” rhetoric and then becoming something people were quite ashamed of but still quietly supported. This takes it somewhat away from popular culture.

There is another way of looking at decades as somewhat shorn of the movies, fashion, music and the like associated with them, although of course these things form an organic whole and can’t be entirely separated. This is in terms of time periods when particular historical events and social changes occurred. Going way back, the fourteenth century was a period of crisis for Mediæval Europe which can fairly easily be regimented into shorter intervals. The 1310s were characterised by poor weather for farming, crop failures and severe famines, and this seems to have led directly to generally poor health and particular susceptibility to the Black Death in the 1340s and ´50s. A couple of centuries earlier, the Crusades marked a particular episodic pattern which would have made the 1090s, 1140s, 1190s, 12000s and 1210s quite distinctive, particularly involving young men and in the last case children, who were sold into slavery. More recently, the English Civil War and Commonwealth period and the Regency spring to mind, covering the 1640s, 1650s and 1810s. The reign of Edward VII is closely identified with a particular decade, suggesting that the monarch used to be considered as bestowing a particular character on a period, though not a decade. This would enable the times of the following sovereigns to be identified with decades: Ælfred (890s), William Rufus (1090s), Richard the Lionheart (1190s – closely associated with a Crusade), Henry IV (1410s), Edward IV (1460s), William and Mary (1690s), George IV (1820s) and of course Edward VII (1900s). These are just coincidences of course but they do lend particular decades a certain distinctive character. Altogether there are fourteen of these including the famine and Plague examples, but social change was very slow most of the time before the Industrial Revolution.

An argument exists that technological change is slowing down, because the differences made to lifestyle from 1920 to 1970 were much larger than from 1970 onwards. Such a deceleration might be expected to “kill” the idea of distinctive decades by extending the period over which changes are likely to have an impact. Moore’s Law contradicts this, but seems to have ceased to operate. It’s also been suggested that mobile devices have reached some kind of peak beyond which it isn’t necessary to go any further, or rather, that new capabilities would probably not be popular but would be more likely to be perceived long-term as gimmicks or just not worth paying for. Televisions have also reached the stage where increasing resolution will make no difference to picture quality because the angular diameter of individual pixels at a sensible viewing distance is now smaller than the resolution of human colour vision (human monochrome vision is lower resolution anyway). All that said, it often seems to the people living in a particular time that they are ultra-modern and no more innovation is possible except the apparent fads which end up changing the world.

What if there’s a combination of increasing and decreasing rate of change though? Pure deceleration of change might be expected to lead to homogenised decades. This would be a bit like the unifying effect ‘Andy Pandy’ might have on our childhood memories, as only twenty-six episodes were made and it was then repeated in a cycle between 1950 and 1970, and continued to be shown until 1976, but across the board. Maybe twenty-year or quarter-century periods would then become more important. On the other hand, trends and fads are now so short and fragmented that they are much briefer in nature. Is it perhaps that we no longer notice the big picture because the little details and the short term have become more attention-grabbing? Certainly we have less in the way of unifying experience, although the pandemic probably is one.

Maybe, then, what’s happening is that we no longer have popular culture-based flavours of decade, but we still have social and historical change-based decades. I wonder also if the changes were partly fuelled by baby boomers and the events leading up to them. The roaring twenties were a time when it was genuinely believed there would never be another recession. This came crashing down at the end of that decade, leading to the exploitation of hard times by fascists and Nazis, and through them the Second World War. This chain of events easily gave the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s their own characters. Then came the baby boom, and with it an attempt to put the genie of women in the workplace back in the lamp by encouraging domesticity, leading to the combined ’50s boom in teenage culture and rock and roll along with the “cosy” feel attributed by some to that decade. Then, in the 1960s, the boomers were teenagers and young adults and the acme of the attitudes of the young became manifest. Towards the end of that decade, the boomers had children of their own, ensuring a future of a second boom with further significant consequences. The ’70s were like a hangover as the ideals of the ’60s turned out not to work, and the ’80s marked the Generation X children of the boomers reaching adulthood, although this was more smeared out because people don’t all have children at the same age. In the ’90s, Gen-Xers were kind of settling down, to the extent that we could, and we had the even more diffusely distributed Millenials and Gen-Zers. In the meantime, people all have to cope with an ageing population, leading to resentment of the boomers and perhaps a reduction in disposable income. So ultimately, maybe one thing that’s happening is that the effects of the Second World War on the ages of the population are just getting more diffuse, leading to a return to the situation which existed before, where there was childhood and then adultood, due to a more even range in ages in the population.

I don’t know. Are the decades over? Why or why not? What do you think?