Takuya Matsumoto, "Black To Blue"

When did we stop thinking in decades?

I was at a restaurant yesterday where I guess they had put on the “Alternative Hits of the ‘90s” playlist, because as soon as I sat down it started with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Walk on the Ocean” and went from there. (If you remember the ’90s as a participant you will now have Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Walk on the Ocean” stuck in your head for the rest of the day. I’m sorry about that but I’ll be damned if this is a world I will walk through alone.) Round about the time Better Than Ezra’s “Good” came on — again, apologies — I got to thinking: When we were in the ’90s, we were super-conscious about it being the ’90s. “This is how we do things now that we’re in the ‘90s,” we’d say, as we spilled coffee on our flannel shirts and stopped playing Tetris on our Game Boys long enough to call our roommates on landlines and remind them to drive by the grocery on their way home to pick up some clear beverages. “This is the music we listen to during these years of the ‘90s,” we would tell our friends as another sludgy-sounding Seattle rip-off act came over the speakers as we checked out the zines at the used CD store. “Everything’s different now, here in the ‘90s,” we would remind ourselves as we drove our punk-rock Subarus to our McJobs etc. I was also fully conscious during the entirety of the ’80s and there was a similar, if more mercenary, awareness at play; my memories of the ’70s are cloudy and tangential at best but all the histories of the era I’ve read indicate that those perceptions were also present. And don’t let’s get started on the ’60s because those people haven’t STOPPED taking about it and won’t until they finally die, even though every fucking thing they’ve done to the world has been terrible and poisonous and the fact that they are leaving on a legacy of making Donald Trump the last boomer president is a shame that would silence any decent generation for the remainder of their days.

In any event, was there any sense of decade-consciousness after the ‘90s? I feel like in the aughts, which we didn’t really settle on as a name until way late in the era, everyone focused on the turning of the millennium and then forgot about it. And the teens, can you point to anything specifically “teeny”? Maybe we were too busy getting through the financial crisis? Maybe the fact that the ’00s and ’10s don’t lend themselves to sonically pleasing nicknames has us less likely to conceive of them as specific chunks of a defined era. Or maybe, and this is the theory that I am partial to, the way the Internet has made it every era all the time everywhere now keeps us from thinking in this admittedly reductive fashion about our specific period. (Given how little time we’ve got left this is probably not a bad idea.) I can’t say for sure, although when I brought it up with a friend last night I was told it was a topic I should absolutely write about, which, on reflection, was less an expression of interest than a desire to shift the conversation to something else and also a sign that my friend does not have my best interests — or yours — at heart.

Anyway, think about it and get back to me. In the meantime, here’s some music from NOW. Enjoy.