The late 20th century was a time of contrasts.

I think of my parents as being "hippies" and very definitely children of the 1960s, but, my Mum was 24 when 'Never Mind the Bollocks' came out. Many of the albums I think of as "my" albums came out when I was older than that.

The mind plays tricks on you in terms of personal reference points.

My parents were pre-rock. Elvis wasn't really much younger than my dad, but his pop culture references were from the 40s mostly.

And then in my wanderings through the bighted post-truth landscape of the world I happened upon a professor of mathematics and I spake thusly: "Tell me O Learned One, which is the greater number of days, 14411 or 14528?

And they replied "The former, you aged dolt, you nincompoop." And thus I was enlightened and learned to accept the future fate of my country.

The book in question was City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter which was what I was reading to unsuccessfully distract from the election results. It just was not enough of a page turner to do a good job of that. In part as it was somewhat lyrically written. Am now reading Grossman's The Bright Sword (based on a rec here)which is doing the absorbing story moving along thing somewhat better.

I'm in an airport with no books.

No books and no pebbles

The Pittsburgh airport has two bookstores. And direct flights to almost nowhere.

Found a 'Heritage Booksellers' listed, but then it shows as "permanently closed."

The authorities would like to know precisely what you would want with a book anyway.

I want to buy a book to not read instead of not reading the book I brought or the many books on my phone.

Approved.

Also admittedly part of my confusion was that Tears for Fears coded as more early '90s for me than the mid-80s. I tend to have a pop culture gap around the time my kids were born.

M and I like to play this terrible game, where when a song we like comes on the radio, we see how old the song is, and then find another song that's that number of years older than the first song.

For example: Shaggy's "Boombastic" came out in 1995. In a month that song will be thirty years old. That means that to kids now, "Boombastic" is as much ancient history to them as Petula Clark's "Downtown" or Roger Miller's "King of the Road" were to us.

Or, TLC's "Baby Baby Baby" came out in 1992. Thirty-three years before 1992 was "Mack the Knife" and "King of the Road." Then we get very depressed. It's a fun game.

13.3 contains an error. It was Santo and Johnny's Sleepwalk that came out in 1959, not King of the Road. King of the Road is obviously a much more current song!

The Bright Sword is kinda sorta on the tbr list. Glad that it's kinda sorta what you're looking for!

If you're not sated with Arthuriana when you're done, By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar answers the question, What if Arthur, like Uther, was an ambitious thug and the knights of the Round Table were a collection of weirdos and ruffians who say "fuck" a lot?

https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/08/02/by-force-alone-by-lavie-tidhar/

In Sayers' books, set approximately 100 years ago, I recall them talking of people with attitudes set in "the 90s" when we would now use "Victorian."

13: Good game, so like "Boy Named Sue" and "Rite of Spring."

I just read Rachel Khong's Real Americans, and there's a scene that occurs in 2021, where two teenagers are looking through one of their dad's albums, which are all "dad rock." But the albums are Bob Dylan and CCR. Surely in 2021 "dad rock" is Stone Temple Pilots or the Beastie Boys? This seems too bizarre an error to be accidental, but the dad was not otherwise a character at all, so introducing this fact without highlighting it as a quirk was really weird. (The book was a little nonsensical in some other ways. It was fun to read but I don't particularly recommend it.)

15: nice review. I'm sure you know that "No wonder they all flock to Camelot. It is that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the kingdom are irresistibly drained" is a direct lift from chapter 1 of "A Study in Scarlet"?

In Sayers' books, set approximately 100 years ago, I recall them talking of people with attitudes set in "the 90s" when we would now use "Victorian."

That bit didn't throw me too much because I first read the books in the 1990s, but I remember being brought up by a passage in Gaudy Night. Harriet has injured her head and is talking to Peter's irritating nephew:

"'You'll have to be cropped all round to even matters up and Uncle Peter can wear your discarded tresses next his heart.'
'Come, come,' said Harriet. 'He doesn't date back to the seventies.'
'He's ageing rapidly. I should think he's nearly got to the sixties by now. With beautiful, golden side-whiskers...'

Of course, the 1870s and 1860s.

And there's a reference to how incredibly old General Fentiman is: "For him the Crimea is still the War, and the Boer business found him too old to go out." Crimea was 1854 and the Boer war 1899. And, yes, if you said "since the war", or even "since the Great War", in the second half of the 19th century in Britain, people did indeed assume you meant the Crimea.

15, 19: Not to spoiler it, but that review reflects some of the elements of TBS.

I think maybe the plot of "10 Things I Hate About You" is also lifted from Shakespeare.

But the albums are Bob Dylan and CCR. Surely in 2021 "dad rock" is Stone Temple Pilots or the Beastie Boys?

a) That's assuming that "dad rock" means just "the rock that any given generation of dads listen to" rather than a specific and fixed set of bands. Art Nouveau doesn't just mean "new art", it means a specific group of artists, none of whom are now particularly new.
b) Even granted a), do men of that generation still listen to the Beastie Boys, even if they listened to it in their youth?

23b - They were looking through albums. I think it's relatively rare that men (or other people) of that generation and onward listen to any music on physical media, as opposed to on streaming services, so the albums would have been an artifact of an earlier time, when they still purchased CDs or records.

"Sabotage" was great.

I've gotten used to it now, but in my mid-30s the thing that would make me feel the oldest is seeing a woman who is obviously much younger than me with a child who is kinda old. Like a 28 year old with a 5 year old or whatever. I know the math worked, but it always threw me for a loop, somehow much more than say a woman my age with a teenager.

23b: Yes, if we go by my brothers-in-law.

Related to the OP: I was walking through a group of teenage skateboarders the other day and one of them was wearing a Tower Records t-shirt.

I grinned at him and said "Now THAT is is vintage t-shirt," and he said, quite adorably, "It's my dad's!"

is *a

Moby. So many apologies. I specifically have noted in 2022 that the">https://heeblygeebly.wordpress.com/2022/03/13/with-a-fried-egg/">the pebbled walls are gone.

whoops. Oh well, I'm in a car and not fixing that anytime soon.

23- I always got confused by that with art. Modern is actually quite old? There's a postmodern? Contemporary is maybe the same thing but also could be separate from postmodern?

Maybe we can take some of the apologies JPS is sending my way and just route them directly to Moby. Cut out the middleman.

I spent hours looking for them. Or maybe minutes.

31: It's hard when everyone wants to find a synonym for "Right now!" for the latest trend.

I was like, "huh, I guess we're just about ready for post-contemporary art" and indeed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-contemporary

Seeing teens wearing Ramones t shirts, yes not just in NY but in Arrakis too, and I'm the only old fucker around who has actually seen them play live

23: I am now habituated, inured even, to the fact that an almost-contemporary friend of mine has multiple great grandkids. And did when I first got to know her, I dunno, six or seven or ten years ago?

...when our kids would have been just hitting their teens

My students all seem to be wearing Nirvana shirts right now and I have Feelings even though they're probably sick of my stories about listening to Bleach on cassette tape. Then again, I also make them listen to feminist and union folk music (for genuine educational purposes connected to SLOs in addition to my desire to expand their palettes), so I might as well be a senior citizen as far as they're concerned.

5 or 6 years ago, I remember having to explain to a class of honors freshman--the vast majority of whom were engineering majors--that their bickering over something having to do with the invention of digital cameras and scanners was moot because not only did computers in the relevant time period not have enough storage space for any of those files, they also didn't have graphics cards. I regaled them with tales of ascii art, the first time someone on one of my BBS message boards mentioned the internet, and the South FL BBS New Year's Eve 1993 or 1994 Party* where I was introduced as "[my handle], who still has a 2400-baud modem." Then I cried a little, mainly for my colleagues in computer science who are apparently stymied that even compsci majors no longer know what a file tree is (knowledge I could safely assume most of my students lacked at least a decade ago).

*I know everyone's worried about predatory men and social media now, but boy howdy was the 90s BBS scene I participated in as a middle school statutory rape central. All three of us underage girls I can think of had at least one much older boyfriend, and even in retrospect those were mostly the relatively less sketchy dudes. Of course, this was also true of my Catholic youth group, the national speech and debate/forensics circuit, and pretty much every other community I remember in the '90s.

39.1: I did get some smiles when I described a particular recording of "Bread and Roses" as "a banger." (Inaccurately, but I was trying to wake them up.)

I felt so vindicated the other day when lourdes and I were searching for a particular song across various streaming platforms, couldn't find it anywhere, and then it turned out I still had the physical CD of rarities and b-sides and could put it directly on the stereo.

I know there's a whole retro aesthetic, but I remember seeing elementary school peers of my son with T-shirts for video game systems that were obsolete before they were born. (And that I had owned and played). That was a real old-man-shakes-cane moment.

Seems to me that reminders of the personal past and how surprisingly much of that there is, these are a relatively gentle aspect of aging. The real problem is that there's much less future left, that any thoughts oriented towards eventually or maybe this effort will pay off later, those thoughts are echoes and delusions, that whole orientation is no longer relevant, or at least not relevant in the same way.

My students all seem to be wearing Nirvana shirts

My high school senior has one.

Also, I think kids today have much less sense of what's current and what's not, leaving aside massive viral sensations like Taylor Swift, who are sort of transcending that.

My son just grabs anything he hears that he likes and adds it to one of the millions of playlists he has on his phone that he's "curated". It might be something he has heard me or J' listen to, or something on the radio when we are in the car, or a song from a film soundtrack, or from a game. By the standard of most of his friends, he's really into music, and he has wide taste, although he tends to like music that's loud, with the exception of Billie Eilish.

So he has gone through phases when he has been obsessed by AC/DC, Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys, Beastie Boys, Wolf Alice, Billie Eilish, Bring Me the Horizon, etc. With only really the latter two really even remotely contemporary. The others are at least as likely to be listened to by me.

re: 44

My 11 year old has one.

Wasn't Buddy Holly, 1994, rife with the same kind of nostalgia-for-things-before-one-was-born?

Ha: there was a That 90's Show this year, but it was canceled after two seasons.

There are at least three bookstores in the Pittsburgh Airport.

I did get some smiles when I described a particular recording of "Bread and Roses" as "a banger."

I was trying to remember a version that I liked; but haven't been able to find it. That did lead me to this paper which looks like it could be interesting -- https://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-abstract/17/2/81/164302/Bread-and-Roses-The-Evolution-of-a-Song-Labor

the South FL BBS New Year's Eve 1993 or 1994 Party

I was recently thinking about this song which doesn't perfectly line up with my experiences; but is surprisingly close: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsEimEQcxgs

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Takeshi Kitano's Kikujiro is just the sweetest road movie I've ever seen. Just hits all the right happy/sad notes and hilarious to boot.

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It's weird aging into the point where the students could be my kids without it having been a crisis pregnancy.

The students are now wearing closer to what I wore in college and one little fashion anthropologist was very eagerly asking me if her fit was authentic. It was! The really funny thing is Pebbles, going from little-girl leggings and unicorn tops to swiping her brother's shirts*, cargo pants, and rainbow-stemmed glasses. Kiddo is oozing late 90s and her friends have those little plastic stretchy chokers.

*The Calabat is quite short, and she is average height, and we are hoping he has his next growth spurt before she has hers because he is not going to be OK with being shorter than his baby sister.

swiping her brother's shirts*

I barely get to wear my clothes any more. Apparently dadcore is a thing now?

Modern is actually quite old? There's a postmodern? Contemporary is maybe the same thing but also could be separate from postmodern?

In the tech world, I think I've come across multiple things where, when I looked up their names, there was some historical note about how they originally had "next generation" in the name.

One of my oldest friends and her wife each had kids (in previous marriages) a year or two after graduating from college, which is early for my circles but nothing crazy. Now four of those kids are in college.

19: Thanks! And no, I did not know that about "A Study in Scarlet."

54: The internal name of my company's newish product during its development phase was NextGen. Fortunately, we anticipated the problem and thought up a different name for it before trying to sell it to anyone.

My cousin, a couple of years older than me, got married right out of high school and now she's got two kids who have graduated college, one got a graduate degree, and gotten married. One very recently.

My cousin also died of more or less natural causes. Which made me feel really old.

Wilford Brimley being 50 during the filming of Cocoon is till an all-time WTF metric. (I guess almost all of the "geriatrics" were at least 70).

50.1: Looking forward to reading that; thanks! One of the clips I show my class is from the Irish "home to vote" abortion amendment campaign: https://youtu.be/cw_ylrOL_70

One of the clips I show my class is from the Irish "home to vote" abortion amendment campaign:

That is very nice.

I don't know if I've mentioned it here, but one of the most exciting stories about labor music that I've read this year was this biographical essay about Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock

Heading to New Orleans and the prospect of warmer weather, he found himself in the company of bums from all over the land, all of whom had the same idea. It was here that he first developed his strong sympathy for these individuals, later to be expressed in the tunes such as "Hallelujah I'm a Bum" and "The Bum Song." At 16, he began playing music on the streets for the promise of "spare change."

"It was in New Orleans that I found singing in saloons could be profitable," said McClintock. "A bunch of Limey sailors were having a bit of a sing-song and I ventured in and shared in one of the choruses. I was immediately asked to grab a glass and sit it. Someone called on me for a song and I obliged. I scored a hit. I sang, it seemed, for hours. I'll never know how I got back to the boat, but in the morning I shook something like three bucks in nickles, dimes and quarters out of my pockets. I had made a discovery that shaped my life. No one who can sing need ever go hungry. They kept dropping coins in my pockets."

...

When he returned to Tennessee briefly, Mac was already singing an early version of his classic, "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" for recruits for the Spanish-American War in early 1898--but he soon found himself in the Philippines, working as a mule driver hauling supplies to the American troops. The following year he was in China, helping American reporters escape harm during the Boxer Rebellion. After a brief sojourn in Australia, he was off to Africa, where he worked on a British railroad supplying troops during the Boer War. In 1901, he was in London to witness the coronation of Edward VII. Then he was in South America. By the time he was 20, Harry McClintock had lived and worked on every continent except Antarctica.

"Army teamsters and packers were civilian employees in the Army of that day," said McClintock [Sam Eskin interview]. "I was fascinated by the packers, a bunch of tough, competent westerners, and I hung out with them until I was a pretty good hand myself. It was claimed that Army chow killed hundreds of soldiers that summer but I thrived on it. And in the autumn of 1898 I was hired as a full fledged buck packer for the quartermaster corps and shipped to the Philippines. For two years I helped freight ammunition and rations to the troops beyond reach of the wagon trains. The going was rugged at times; we were frequently under fire and we carried Colt 45's for defense. But we figured that we were far better off than the soldiers; we always ate and we drew fifty bucks a month instead of the $15.60 of the buck private."

...

My (somewhat orthogonal) take on these discussions is that the aging of pop culture is not in fact linear. Yes, each new generation is attached to the songs of its age 15 to 24 years, but

(1) Music made after the Dylan/Stones/Beatles/Motown albums of 1965 will always have contemporary echoes in the way music before it won't

(2) Music after 1995 / the internet ceased to be really periodized; we're just going to have trends remixing elements of post-1965 music forevermore

You can still hear Tear for Fears in a lot of contemporary music.

Re OP, 4 & 32. To whose credit does the 3 months redound?

Show your work.

If I have committed an embarrassing thinko on this one I will spend the next 4 years feeling bad about things in general...

54- This is a recurring joke in the DNA sequencing field, where a particular technique was dubbed NextGen over a decade ago and that's just the generic term for sequencing now so no one knows what newer technologies should be called.

I recently pointed out to my dad that his birth was closer to the Civil War than the present. He was nonplussed but the numbers don't lie.

I did have my first student-who-is-the-kid-of-a-student-I-taught.

We had an amazing story here where a faculty member and student spent the evening together in jail after being arrested (student was protesting, professor was there to try to stop the students from being arrested) and then when they got out and the student's mom came to pick her up the professor realized that the mom was a former student and she'd brought the current student to class as a baby.

So the police arrested the mom too.

69: And that's the sort of heartwarming story we can look forward to many more of. Thanks, Republicans! (Not that Democrats are any picnic on the Israel Can Do No Wrong exception to the First Amendment, but that's only a modest subset of the arrests to come.)

Real-time update: Elke and her two friends (8th grade) are in the "music room" in our house playing guitar and singing Nirvana songs in shy little voices: "I... need an easy friend..."

Stromcrow! Use VE Day!

Turn it Up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRkMQF6D0tg

73: That make it worse for my take.

Ah wait, your trying to help me actually not feel so bad about the precise timing of a Tears for Fears album, not win a stupid point from heebie. You must be new here.

I did have my first student-who-is-the-kid-of-a-student-I-taught.

y'all need to change jobs more often. solves that problem.

45: "Also, I think kids today have much less sense of what's current and what's not, leaving aside massive viral sensations like Taylor Swift, who are sort of transcending that."

I think this was a bit true even in the 90s. When I was at university I remember that the music you heard - in people's rooms, at dances etc - was from a pretty broad swathe of time. The cliche CDs to have in your collection - to the point that it was a running joke - were the White Album (1960s), London Calling (1980s) and the soundtracks to The Blues Brothers (1980s, but artists and tunes from the 60s and 70s) and to Pulp Fiction (50s and 60s).

Even at the time I remember thinking how odd this was - when my parents were at university, it's not like they were listening to Chubby Checker and Al Jolson. But I think, now, that they were an exception - sitting just on the near side of the great popular culture schism that was the lead-induced Invention of the Teenager.

re: 78

Yeah. Although I think the internet has had a flattening effect, there were also always subcultures that listened to a lot of older music. Metal fans still listened to Sabbath, people into jazz still listened to Miles Davis,* Bowie was still current for generations of kids, etc. I was lucky enough to have some friends when I was at university in the mid 90s who were really into soul and RnB music, which is very much the home of a certain kind of niche collector mentality, so I was exposed to a lot of music that was genuinely very hard to get hold of until quite recently.

My own parents are both born in the early 50s, and I think for them even the Beatles were quite passé. When they were 18 they were into more progressive, psychedelic or heavy music and more "pop" 60s music wasn't their thing.

* although I think there was a cut off with jazz, as very few people I knew who were really into jazz--and I was quite obsessively into jazz for a good while myself--listened to much before 1944/1945 until quite recently. I think there's been more interest in swing and associated styles in the past 10-20 years or so.

Although I think the internet has had a flattening effect, there were also always subcultures that listened to a lot of older music.

But I'm not saying "when I was at university in the mid-90s there were a few small groups of people who listened to non-90s music, for example the Weirdo Antique Jazz Society and the League for the Perpetuation of Skiffle", though. This wasn't a subculture, it was the actual culture. College dances, local radio, stuff people listened to in their rooms: sure, there was definitely quite a lot of 90s music being played but also a huge chunk of it was from earlier decades, mostly the 1960s.

Now that I've had a good night's sleep and am no longer traveling with kids climbing all over: JPS is totally correct and I am wrong!

I was relishing my Ralph Wiggum "I beat the smart kids!!" moment. :(

That's OK. I had my best morning in several weeks (not sure what's been eating me) watching you digging your hole a little deeper. (although per 65, when no one else validated I got a little paranoid that I was committing some mental blunder; another feature of aging, which has otherwise been all upside.)

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Does anyone have any recommendations for reasonably affordable bed linens that aren't too expensive and aren't scratchy. I've bought LL Bean percale on wirecutter, but they are not cheap. I want to shop before the Trump tariffs.

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45, 78: It does jar me how specific you can time things from my youth by when you were all listening to x (or even more so saw y on TV*). Sometimes half the neighborhood would be in our backyard with transistor radios tuned to one of the half dozen or so AM "pop" stations* we could get and announcing when a favorite song came on. Like Little Black Egg. (Which I thought was a bigger hit--maybe it was more of a local hit since I recall it being *the* song for about a week and a half.)

TV even more so. Half or more of the school would come in mornings after popular shows with a big shared experience from the previous evening or weekend.

*The two small city Am stations were the favorites, but we also got Cleveland and were also able to get KCLW from Windsor which was akey player in marshalling hits.

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Tár is not remotely as good as I was led to expect. I liked the last shot though.
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84 I know that song because of reasons ttaM outlined in 79. Getting into punk in my teen years led me to proto-punk and garage music and I think I heard it and still have it on one of the many garage rock compilation albums, either the original Nuggets album (where Patti Smith guitarist and DJ Lenny Kaye coined the term "punk rock") or one of its many imitators like the various Pebbles compilations.

74: I got a Medicare ad preceding that. Seems about right.

I get so many calls about Medicare enrollment and I am very much too young. I think it's because I used my address to do some minor business for my mom or because the guy whose mail I sometimes get is doing a fraud.

86: The compilation in 74 amply displays the urgent need for something like punk rock. I forgot what a mishmash it was, and really it is mostly the funk and disco stuff that holds up at all to my ears.

I avoided most of this as I was by the early 70s deep into prog and other "album-oriented rock"... which also see "punk rock, urgent need for".

87 is probably specific to me. I've been looking up Medicare lately. Apparently you need to enroll even if you are still employed and have insurance, but I don't need to figure that out for another five months or so.

88: I once stupidly used my phone helping my son with ACA enrollment, so now I get both Medicare *and* ACA calls. (And actually now that I think of it I was on ACA for 2 months between a COBRA/Medicare gap, but the calls for ACA were co ming from inside the house well before that.)

I was so sure that Bernie Madoff happened in the early 2000s. I have a false memory of being in a specific apartment and everything. But nope, right after Lehman Bros.

92: you are probably confusing it with Enron and/or WorldCom?

re: 80

Yes, I knew that. I was also pointing to those subcultures (which I also think were bigger then as music subcultures were more of a thing) as an "in addition to" rather than an "instead of", iyswim.

We listened to half of the Frederik Bachmann book, and half of the book by the guy who busted Bernie Madoff.

94: ah, sorry. Fair enough.

re: 74

The number one takeaway watching that video is that backing vocals and harmonies were totally a thing that aren't really a thing anymore. So many songs in there, even the "bunch of white dudes with guitars" songs have tight harmony vocals.

93: Maybe! It's all right around when I started making better sense of the news, so it's all a bit blurry.

I am impressed because I have still not managed to make much sense of the news and things are, if anything, becoming more blurry rather than less

re: 89

Compilation albums are underrated, I think. There was a whole series covering the British "freakbeat" scene, which is very similar to the whole "Nuggets" / garage rock sound. https://www.discogs.com/release/532491-Various-The-Freakbeat-Scene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDfR9I14-_o

99: It helps to have a blog where you can express dumb wrong shit every day, and have people gently set you straight in the comments.

101: Let us know if you get one.

See, you're doing it already. Such a natural.

72: That is adorable and the thought of them singing "About a Girl" has brightened my day.

89: the urgent need for something like punk rock

So much Bee Gees in 1978-79!

The Knack weren't exactly punk, but they were more stripped down and raw than anything else on the 1979 list. Blondie's leaning closer to disco, despite the group's origins.

The great thing about being culturally clueless is you can discover a whole world of new stuff at any time. We recently saw &Juliet and were like "huh this Max Martin guy wrote some catchy pop songs."

90: you enroll in part A which has no premiums. Part B has premiums and you don't need to enroll if you have employer-provided insurance. If you don't have employer provided insurance, there's a penalty for not enrolling in Medicare.

107: Thanks! Does being in Part A do anything to screw up employer-provided insurance?

There's a policy issue here that's interesting to me: Why do they need me to sign up for Part A?

A comes before B.

89 I don't feel that at all. What strikes me is how much I apparently noped out of top 40 music when I went off to college. I know pretty much all the songs, even if I wasn't the biggest fan of the band, though August 1976. Then, it's like I fell off a cliff. I was listening to ELP/Yes etc in 75/76, yes, but that other stuff was ambient, and I heard it. Then college and it's mostly Grateful Dead, other local music, and post-65 Beatles. Zep. Floyd. No radio at all.

My then-girlfriend insisted we go to a Hall & Oates concert. In Winterland! I knew that was where the world was going, and where I wasn't going.

But I never for a moment thought that punk was the answer.

31: In the chess world, "Hypermodernism" refers to a school of masters who were prominent largely between the first and second world wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermodernism_(chess) .