Geez. Anything over 2 or 3 years old is referred to as retro now, it seems. C and C Music Factory...that's gonna be fun.

Everybody DANCE now!

You'll be pumping up the jams in a buffalo stance.

"Gonna Make You Sweat" came out in 1991, 16 years ago.

"The Big Chill" came out in 1983 and was a nostalgic look at the music and college memories of the early 70s.

Anything over 10 years is fair game for retro, it would seem.

Er... isn't one of those "C"s dead?

Yep... :( You should complain and ask for half your money back. :D

Yeah, I was going to point that out--'90s nostalgia is mostly nostalgia for the early '90s. Nobody's getting all misty-eyed about Moby's Play album, let alone Limp Bizkit or Creed.

Oh, also: You better work it, girl!

On preview: Please, like anybody went to see C&C Music Factory because they want to see Cole or Civilles (or whatever their names were). They want to see a shirtless dude rhyming about how he's a squirrel trying to get a nut, and a skinny girl lip-synching words sung by a more talented fat girl.

C&C and dance music of that ilk belonged to a very short and specific time period (at least, in the States), right at the turn of the decades. Think of Snap! and Crystal Waters - they don't really belong in the 80's or the 90's - just that liminal space in between.

1990 was about half my life ago

Stuff from 1991 is stuff that high school students can't really remember very well at all.

Stuff from 1996--1998 is stuff that high school students remember from when they were 8 or 9.

See, now you've got me all early-90s mindset, and I'm thinking I should get a group together to dress as Michael Allig-style club kids (you know, without the murder).

"Stuff from 1991 is stuff that high school students can't really remember very well at all."

The art of sound recording is only about 120 years old, and the commercial capability for high fidelity, stereophonic sound recordings has only existed since 1959. It wasn't until about 1966 that the default medium for issuing commercial recordings was the stereo LP, and monophonic 45 rpm singles of pop and rock recordings were still selling in volume, in many markets, until 1970.

To a lesser extent, movies have a similar history, with the full color feature film print, with stereophonic high fidelity sound, only becoming popular in the early '60s, too.

So, there's a big opportunity for people under 40, to decide how recorded media, especially of older types, is going to be viewed in the long run. And unlike the slow change that the printing press and the system of university, and later, public, libraries had on the re-valuing of the written word as a medium, the whole burden of this decision is falling on one or two current generations. And I, for one, am not sanguine about this.

In the main, as far as I can tell, the average under-30 American middle class person could care less about '20s flappers, or Storyville jazz, or silent movies, or the beautiful suits Cary Grant wore. Nobody is sampling Duke Ellington, for mashups, or hip hop. The human paucity of spirit that was TuPac Shakur is fresher in their consciousness, than is Charlie Parker's vibrant yet tragic spirit, or, even worse, McCoy Tyner's living layered depth and cool modernity. How in the hell people recognize a dead TuPac sample, and are ignorant of the latest living McCoy Tyner music, I just f*cking don't get^TM (patent pending). Worst of all, there's an anti-cultural ethic that's developed, around the idea that what's "fresh" is best. So, people that look for "new," even if the new is crap, are somehow inherently cooler than the people who look back, to learn about the classic.

Occasionally I ask kids who stock for the local Winn-Dixie "Who was [insert some celebrity from '20s, '30s, '40s, or '50s]?" and it's not like they heard of a lot of them, but forgot the details. Nope, they never, really, heard of them. Like they never heard of polio, or measles epidemics. Or the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

They don't who the hell John Lewis is, but they want me to vote for Obama.

A cultural Grand Canyon is opening. Not just with high school Winn-Dixie checkers and stock boys, but with their fathers and mothers, now, too.

Nobody plays Ella Fitzgerald any more. And even people who remember Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to Jack Kennedy, don't know that there were 40 other acts on the Madison Square Garden bill that night, and that Ella Fitzgerald was one of the headliners.

Mark my words: In 40 more years, we, as a society, are going to have forgotten Duke Ellington, sure as we've already put away, too damn early, Billy Strayhorn, and 500 other people, who knew things about being human, worth remembering always, in deference to people, like Alicia Keyes, who'd like to know something about being human, worth remembering until next week.

Oh come on, paulsc, you can do better than a little bitty "kids these days just don't know what good music is" screed.

"Oh come on, paulsc, you can do better than a little bitty "kids these days just don't know what good music is" screed."
posted by muddgirl 11 December

As I say, I'd be grateful, I'd be hopeful, if they just knew who John Lewis is.

retro... 90s??

cool. with the grunge revival, my clothes will be fashionable again.

1991 is retro now? That's the year I graduated high school! *feels ancient*

It's the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

/quibble

Now I'm gonna go listen to the Andrews Sisters and shoo those kids off my lawn.

*passes BOP a rum and Coca-Cola*

RETRO 90S HOLIDAY DANCE PARTY FEATURING C AND C MUSIC FACTORY

Fuck me. That sounds about as fun as getting a root canal. I'm not sure I could survive that 'party'.