Why were the 70s such a tacky decade?

[LizzieMaine]

Who thought pastel tuxedos and ruffled shirts looked great??? :eusa_doh:

The Doctor will see you now.

 

[Big Man]

Who thought pastel tuxedos and ruffled shirts looked great??? :eusa_doh:

I thought my Carolina blue tux with a ruffled shirt and a velour bow tie looked pretty damn good at the senior prom. However, that was 40 some years ago. [huh]

 

[jamespowers]

Funny thing about the 70s - we thought we looked really good then. It wasn't till a few years later that it all looked so really bad. When I look back at our family photos, I shake my head and wonder what were we thinking back then. :eusa_doh:

I don't think we WERE thinking back then.

 

[jamespowers]

Who thought pastel tuxedos and ruffled shirts looked great??? :eusa_doh:

Not me. :doh:

 

[jamespowers]

The Doctor will see you now.

I'd turn around and get a new doctor.

 

[vitanola]

Whatever butters your parsnips. But I ain't having it in *my* house.

Oh, you "moderns"!

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'd turn around and get a new doctor.

It wasn't much of an improvement.

 

[Big Man]

I don't think we WERE thinking back then.

I must have been thinking, "I'll bet Kathy, Lisa, Stephanie, Elizabeth, Crystal ... will think this looks cool." Yep, now that I think of it, I'm sure that's what I was thinking.

 

[jamespowers]

I must have been thinking, "I'll bet Kathy, Lisa, Stephanie, Elizabeth, Crystal ... will think this looks cool." Yep, now that I think of it, I'm sure that's what I was thinking.

:rofl: Peer pressure makes you do strange things or should I say women make you do strange things.

 

[scotrace]

Funny thing about the 70s - we thought we looked really good then. It wasn't till a few years later that it all looked so really bad. When I look back at our family photos, I shake my head and wonder what were we thinking back then. :eusa_doh:

Exactly.And it was a tacky decade. Dreadful. So many homes and buildings and everything else we prize here were destroyed.

 

[Big Man]

... or should I say women make you do strange things.

You mean like driving your '62 Plymouth out to the end of a logging road and ... ?

 

[jamespowers]

You mean like driving your '62 Plymouth out to the end of a logging road and ... ?

Yeah, that too. Or driving a '57 Chevy way up on a hill in front of an early warning system (complete with Nike missile) but behind the local pound and.......

 

[jamespowers]

So many homes and buildings and everything else we prize here were destroyed.

Even worse is the fact that they were replaced with reprehensible 70s garbage homes and buildings! :doh:
For instance Castlemont High School 1948:

was knocked down for this prison looking building:


The old Castle had its revenge though. They said it was not earthquake safe. However it took the wrecking ball days to get through each section of the school. Not earthquake safe…..Riiiiggghhhttt.
Now the damned thing is just sight pollution. :doh:

 

[MikeKardec]

I think of it this way -- the sixties, seventies, and eighties were the Golden Age of American Hedonism. The seed was planted in the fifties by the explosion of postwar consumerism -- and in that respect, *the sixties weren't truly rebelling against the fifties at all.* They were, instead, the logical culmination of the fifties, and all they did was replace one kind of hedonism with another. And then the seventies introduced a new flavor, until it all culminated with the orgy of crassness and empty vulgarity that was the Eighties.

I like that idea. It's very similar to something that came up in one of the Strauss and Howe "Generations" books. These are a series of books that examines the theory that US and British History {and maybe the history of other, unexamined, countries} are made of four interlocking and cyclical generational "psychologies" They felt that the sort of counter-culture and spiritual movement in the 1960s wasn't over until it had penetrated the entire culture to be embraced by more conservative people in the wave of christian conservatives that occurred in the 1980s. Either way, you view, their view, or something, possibly closer to the actual truth which we have yet to become sensitive to, it seems that the longer vision may be more "human" and correct. Likely, it's all of the above.

Now that I think about it, when I made my initial comment I realize I was thinking that it has always seemed that (possibly from early Jazz - 1920s - onward) kids have always picked the music most likely to horrify their parents. Interestingly and ironically, the "teen fad" based music business was killed off by the great democracy that is Napster. Now, teenagers seem to have stopped trying to freak out their parents and create their separate identity with the culture of their music.

Maybe my generation has simply seen all the sex, drugs and rock and roll, there was to see and there is very little young people could do to shock us. Or maybe we've become such helicopter parents that we've succeeded in making our kids drink our cool aid. I'm not a parent so I'm not sure. But I work with a lot of young people and they seem MUCH more comfortable with their parents than most of the older generations I know. I'm sure MANY kids still have a problem with their parents but as a "movement" I wonder if the culmination was the wave of Umbilicoplasty (navel removals) we had in the 1990s. I doubt it was many teenagers doing it, because of the expense, and they must have mostly come from from well to do backgrounds but it seemed to be, well ... the ultimate rebellion against you parents. I never met such a kid but I heard about it from some of the students I mentored. For all too many of them the idea seemed to appeal even if they didn't have the cash or guts to go through with it.

Since then the young people I deal with have been quite civilized. One of them told me a few years ago that she became interested in listening to Frank Sinatra and Doris Day because it seemed to confuse her parents ... she's now in her late 20s and has become a jazz singer of some small renown!

 

[Dan Allen]

You mean like driving your '62 Plymouth out to the end of a logging road and ... ?

I lived in Florida in the early 70's and we were always going to the submarine races.

 

[MikeKardec]

The more I've been thinking about my earlier post the more it seems that if you have to break American history down into decades the 10 year stretches that seem to have the most coherence are 1945 - 1955, 1955 - 1965, 1965 - 1975, 1975 - 1985 ... after that I get a bit lost. WWII was a big cultural reset. I'm experimenting with the idea that there was a "post war decade" then what we call the '50s which lasted into the 1960s at least as far as the aftermath of the Kennedy shooting, then the hypothetical "'60s" lasted until the end of the Vietnam and the utter commercialization of counter culture. I'm not entirely sure what would call an end to my '75 to '85 decade but it feels more appropriate than ending it in 1979 or 80 ... and I graduated from high school in '79 so that is a line of demarcation for me.

Before WWII the "decades" seem more decade-like, the '30s ending with the onset of the war, the '20s ending with the onset of the depression and the '10s ending with the conclusion of WWI.

I don't know. I do think a lot of tacky stuff showed up in the 1970s, even if they ended in 1985. I thought so then (as a kid) and I think so now, as an adult but there was plenty that was more important than style that was beyond tacky in the decades prior. I like where our world is heading I just wish we could all get along better while we are on the journey.

 

[rocketeer]

I think we tend to 'Cherry pick' the best bits of what we like about the past and mentally shape era's many of us were to young to have real knowledge of.
I loved the 1970s, mainly because it was the era I grew up in, that is to say that being born in 1959 I knew nothing of the 1950s and only really understood things happening in the world during the latter part of the 1960s.
Sure some things were not that great. In the UK we had problems with workers unions and maybe fashion was not great. But back in the 1950s we still had things on ration and you could have your daughter committed to a mental institution for wanting a baby before marriage, marital rape was relatively ignored.
Great things during the 1970s? Sports. Our footballers were not the pansy's they are now they played hard and took hard knocks. We had quality TV programs, not time wasting programs such as those Storage war type things where someone buys someone else's rubbish.
The thing is every era has its good stuff and it bad things going for it. Were the 1940s really that great? Sure clothes looked cool and jobs were a plenty but try telling how great WWII was to someone who lost a relative or friend. Not all those into the 1940s do the war thing but most people I know do but tend to ignore the bit where the B17 looked cool but killed people also.
If we did not live the era all we know is what we read or knowledge passed on by those that did. I like to quote another member but I have long forgotten who said it, describing WWII in particular, though it could apply to any era. He/she sad: "I dont know anyone who lived in the era who would want to live it again"

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm experimenting with the idea that there was a "post war decade" then what we call the '50s which lasted into the 1960s at least as far as the aftermath of the Kennedy shooting, then the hypothetical "'60s" lasted until the end of the Vietnam and the utter commercialization of counter culture. I'm not entirely sure what would call an end to my '75 to '85 decade but it feels more appropriate than ending it in 1979 or 80 ... and I graduated from high school in '79 so that is a line of demarcation for me.

I'd suggest the immediate postwar period ended with the 1948 election. 1945-48 was much different in its tone and its attitude from what people generally think of as the "postwar era." The years between V-J Day and "Dewey Defeats Truman" were frustrating and unsettled for a lot of people -- the country was in a state of political and social flux, shortages were still severe in many areas, there was a serious nationwide housing crisis, and many returning veterans were drifting aimlessly as they tried to readjust to civilian life. The "Fifty-Two-Twenty Club" was in full swing -- hundreds of thousands of veterans taking advantage of the twenty-dollars-a-week-for-fifty-two-weeks unemployment benefit for returning servicement by just sitting around until they got their feet back on the ground. And no sooner did this period finally end than Korea flared up.

All this being the case you can make a strong argument that "The Postwar Era" as it's commonly viewed didn't begin until the middle of 1953. That was also the year television finally became a national proposition, with the lifting of the FCC moratorium on new licenses in late 1952, and that was the year the "postwar prosperity" really kicked into gear.

As for the Seventies, I don't think they really began psychologically until the resignation of Nixon. And I think they ended, psychologically, with the release of the Iranian hostages. Even more than the inauguration of Reagan -- which happened on the same day -- when the hostages were released it felt like the curtain on that particular act had come down, even though we now know it was really just the end of a prologue.

I think it's common to define eras by the memories of people looking back on how the world looked to them as kids -- but I think the flaw in that is a focus on superficialities like style and popular music, or on how the world looked in just their own particular bubble of it. Sometimes this is useful, but I think we learn more by looking at what was driving the adults of any particular period.

 

[MikeKardec]

But ... But ... But Lizzie ... that screws up the whole ten year thing! I can't stand it if eras aren't separated into exactly equal decades that I can give simple names to! I don't want my peas and corn to even touch and DON'T remind me that it all goes to the same place! You're going to give me a complex!

Actually, I always learn a lot from you, whether it's information or opening my eyes to a different point of view. Thanks!

By the way, is "give me a complex" a term that has disappeared? I can't remember having heard that since the '60s.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think "complex" went out of style when Freudianism became passe, about the same time people stopped calling psychologists "headshrinkers," and started talking about "neuroses" instead.