Curiosities about the passage of time ... interesting discussion in the staff room!

[ImJustMadAboutSaffron]

Colleagues and I were chatting about Murder on the Dancefloor being No 2 in the charts following the film Saltburn (that I haven't seen) and remarking how shocked we were that it was 22 years ago that it was No 2 for the first time. I remember it like it was yesterday, I was a student and I liked the song then and I still do now.

One of our team is considering retirement this year, she is 66 in the summer and can get her state pension! She remembers being at the youth club in the 1970s and Rock around the Clock/Bill Haley being in the charts, and the re-release of that being actually newer than MOTDF is now (I think there were 19 years' difference). Yet she said it seemed like it was from another world, which of course it was, and it was history to her. It is to me, now.

It got us thinking about how time passes and how distorted our views are. I wondered why this was. I saw Sophie Ellis Bextor live last year, I've lived through her career and songs, I'm a similar age, her music is still current and fresh and it's part of our culture through the Kitchen Disco. Yet Bill Haley isn't, and wasn't for my 66 year old colleague either. Bill Haley seemed ancient to her then but a quick look on Google revealed he was 4 years older than SEB!

I'd love to see what you think about this weird distortion of time!

Hard to believe MOTD was out 22 years ago. But then it's also not at the same time. I was in secondary school then. It's like the saying, "The days are long but the years are short," in relation to child-rearing. But it could also relate to looking back at your life in this way.

Difficult to believe we're almost in March. Only just getting used to writing 2024 and I write a lot at work. I don't really mind though as things are hard atm and I'm wanting time to hurry up tbh.

Passage of time does confuse us. While it may have been played in a club in the 70s, Rock around the clock was a hit in 1954.

Time is like a nautilus shell, but we are all travelling into, not away from, the finite centre.

WW2 ended in 1945 - so 39 years before 1984 - when I was 14

40 years later from 1984, it's 2024.

1984 was a long time ago - but it doesn't feel that long ago. Just a few years later, I went to uni and travelled.

So I think what I am saying is that for 54 year olds in 1984, WW2 mustn't have felt that long ago - and they would have had memories of it.

As a Gen X’er I often think about the culture I consumed as a child, and how it felt like it came from an incomprehensibly long time ago! Not just the 50’s and 60’s era music that was still around (like 90’s today), but the fact that on TV after school so much of what I watched was black and white, old Tarzan series, Beverley Hillbillies, Adams Family, Munsters, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy…

Then I try and calculate what the equivalent programmes would be today, and my head explodes!

I do think fashions, music etc change more slowly now. I was watching a Top of the Pops from the very early 80s, and it was v obviously 80s. The fashion had changed completely from the late 70s, just a few years before, and so to a certain extent had the music. Now though I don't think what people wear changes that much, even in a decade or 15 years, let alone five years. So everything blurs together.

In the 80s, if I watched a film or TV show set in the 60s, it was incredibly obvious fashions and music had changed considerably. Now if I am watching something with the kids set in the noughties, and I say "does this seem a long time ago to you? Do the clothes look different?" they say no.

I have to resort to mobile phones to date things post 2000, whether they are using smart phones and how advanced they are.

I agree with SilverSimca.

The 20th century had massive changes, “pop culture”, pop music, television didn’t exist at the beginning of the century. By the end people dressed completely differently, wearing jeans and casual clothing that wasn’t really common, driving cars etc etc. It was a time of massive change where everything from the type of food we ate to what we wore, the way we worked, the way media was consumed etc changed.

Rock around the clock was written when rock music was in its infancy, pop music basically didn’t exist. Over 30-40 years there were enormous changes in music, whereas that’s settled and whilst there are new and fresh artists, there haven’t been the same major changes in style and types of music really. So music that is 20 years old sounds modern because there haven’t been the same changes in music style as there were between 1950 and 1970.

Thats funny I don't see it like that at all. But I think thats more about your age at the time and your perspective rather than how fashion has changed.
I was not alive in the 80s but I could date outfits for the last 20 years to within a 2 or 3 year window. 2012-2014 style clothes are completely different to now and I can spot 2004-2006 so well. It's usually clothing that will mean I can guess how old a show from the last 20 years is.
But I would be looking at the teens and people in their 20s and 30s, if you showed me people in their 60s who are more likely to have their clothes for longer and not wear the current trends then I would have no idea.

For shows from the 70s and 80s or things set in the 60s I could guess a decade but not that accurately. I mix up early 90s with late 80s and really I'm not sure when the shoulderpads all disappeared or exactly when everyones hair went all flat.
Same as how a person now, who isn't looking so much at teen trends and fashion probably doesn't know when galaxy legging, owl necklaces and oversized camo jackets went back out of style.

Like I know the years that massive waist belts were worn in the last 20 years but no idea what years they were worn in the 80s, even though I think they were- maybe with those blazers with the massive shoulder pads

Its the same with music though, to me there is a massive difference in the music that is popular now than 10 or 15 years ago. And it fits into distinct decades just like the stuff from the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Maybe all that stuff blurs when you stop focusing on it so much

Im a bit confused. How could Bill Haley be 4 years older than Sophie EB , He has born in the 1920s and was popular in my mother's teenage years in the 1950s

Time is a funny old thing. For example, Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than to the building of the pyramids. Oxford university is older than the Aztecs. I think about this a lot.

I remember as a teen in the 90’s buying 70’s vintage fashion and it felt like archaeological discovery. I have stuff at the back of cupboards that’s probably older now than my 70’s yellow flares were then. Of course there’s the sense that if you’re young and looking at something that existed before you did it’s going to seem more distant vs when you’re older recalling something that happened in your lifetime. There’s always the sense too that time seems to move faster as we get older. We’ve all been told by elders that it “feels just like yesterday that I was your age” but we ourselves don’t get struck by this until later in life. So, part of this (but not all) is just us getting older and being surprised by how quickly it does actually fly by.

The original Mean Girls film came out 20 years ago in 2004. It doesn’t really seem dated at all. Movies like Splash and Ghostbusters came out 20 years before that, which does feel like a huge bump culturally. Fashion and pop music went through an astonishing series of changes in the 20th century and that appears to have slowed down. If you think about it there were huge changes every decade, so much so that it’s pretty easy to identify something (a movie, fashion, pop music) from the 80’s vs the 70’s etc but there were fewer changes in such close succession in previous centuries. There were changes of course, but you’d need to be very well versed in order to identify 1890 from 1880 in terms of fashion, music, general popular culture.

In the previous century we went through a concentrated series of simultaneous cultural revolutions in the various cultural forms, triggered largely by rapid technological and industrial advances. For example; advances and inventions in recording technology, music production/distribution, and the radio giving rise to popular music. The invention of motion picture photography triggering a century of cinema which had a direct effect on fashion, music, pop culture generally. Most of the people alive today only experienced life in this period of great change. We expected this rapid cultural evolution to continue forever, hence the aesthetic future we we all imagined as children, flying cars and futuristic fashion, but it’s slowed down. Perhaps we are back as we were pre 20th century where in a thousand years laymen will easily be able to tell the difference between this century and the one coming, but not so much the decades in between.

I don't even know what galaxy leggings are!
It just seems to me like there is a much greater difference between the mini skirts of the 60s flares, long dresses and long hair of the 70s the perms and power suits of the 80s, and the grunge if the early 9Os, than whether someone is wearing an owl necklace or not. Not to say that you can't date an outfit to 2015 (although I can't!) but it feels like in the past fashion changed more dramatically, so even oldies like me would notice!
I suppose what I'm saying is wearing flares in 1984 would have looked weird. But I've been wearing the same jeans from NYDJ, tunic tops, leggings and boots for the last 14 years and while I know they are not fashionable there are enough others wearing similar that it doesnt look.like I am cosplaying another decade

I'm not sure ... exactly when everyone's hair went all flat.
Don't we blame that on Jennifer Anniston and the hairstyle that was called the 'Rachel'. Friends started in 1994.

Exactly and that's the point, that my colleague said it felt like mediaeval history when MOTDF is even older than that comparatively speaking and doesn't feel that way at all.

@SilverSimca That's so true, as I still wear things I bought in the early 00s when I was in my early 20s (born 1981) and they don't look out of place - well maybe my Mel Blatt look might, but that has come back hasn't it?! I think the rise of vintage fairs and retro has shaped this too. Not the women who dress like Rosie the Riveter or Vera Lynn c.1945 complete with Victory Roll, but the more subtle mixing and styling of vintage items with contemporary.

When I was a university student in the 1990s we went to 70s nights regularly. We dressed up and danced to music that felt like it came from history! The music was only 20 years old
It's the equivalent of dancing to 2000s music now.

Thats really interesting and yeah it makes sense.
But I think its also because the fashion is changing more now, not less. But because its all miving so fast, none of those changes are as long lasting and as 'statementy' as something like the massive pointy collars and flares that lasted ages.
So there isn't a look that defines a whole decade because in that time its changed so many times.

Like if you google '2014 tumblr clothes' you get a very specific look, that was incredibly popular and looks quite a bit like 90s grunge. But it lasted for 2 years not 10, so it gets lost.
In the early 2010s people wore a lot of coral and teal, accessories with mustaches on, bright coloured skinny jeans with converse and had dip dyed hair, its a really specific look but it was gone by 2014 and would have been absurd in 2017 let alone 2024.
Wheras your outfits won't look out of place because they were never tied too much to a time period, even though if you put a 14 year old in them they would look really out of place.

@LakeTiticaca I was speaking comparatively but my mate made a mistake with her maths now I checked. Sophie is 43 when she was back in the charts with her track, Bill was 49, she'd thought he was 39.

Rick Around The Clock wouldn't have been played in a club in the 70s. It would've been Bowie, Queen, TRex, Mud, Showaddywaddy, etc etc. RATC was ancient history then people knew about it, but you wouldn't hear it on the radio. Same with early Beatles like Love Me Do or She Loves you - big hits at the time but dated very quickly as people moved on to 'cool' stuff like The Jam, or rock (like Deep Purple) or teen idols (Osmonds, Michael Jackson, Slade etc. ).

Bill Haley's music is still popular at the rock'n'roll clubs, always fills the dancefloor.
Not Bill Haley but you get the idea ...

Interesting thread. I definitely think the decades of the twentieth century had stronger identities. I don’t think there’s a noughties ‘look’ that’s massively different from the 2010s, that’s as different again from the 2020s. Certainly not the huge and very distinctive differences between the 60s, 70s and 80s, say.

Really interesting to hear a pp say otherwise, and that she can easily spot the difference. Owl necklaces though? I don’t remember those. Or those other markers. Are they really as distinctive as mini skirts v flares v power suits?

And then there was JiveBunny...

Yip, this is me! My parents were young when they had us, and I remember listening to 'their' music and thinking wow, these old records are brilliant! The Beach Boys were my absolute favourite.

The equivalent of that for my teenage son would be Insomnia by Faithless. Which I basically consider to be a current hit.

There were clubs playing Bill Haley in the 1970's just as there are now.

I've read hundreds of those posts that are like "Lion King was closer in time to the moon landing than it is to today" and every time it freaks me out! (That one is true - 1969 - 1994 is 25 years and 1994 to 2024 is 30!

All the ones about the Beatles and the 90s being closer together than whatever I thought was fairly recent, as well...