The Guardian's Review of the Decade.

October 17, 2009 5:17 AM

The Guardian's Review of the Decade. "It all started 96 hours after 9/11".

Environment, Creativity, Communication, Science, Global politics, Celebrity, Sport, Lifestyle, Liberty.

posted by ClanvidHorse (38 comments total)

they'll regret this when the aliens come on nov 8 and give us flying cars, free energy and packages of hot dogs and hot dog buns that numerically match
posted by pyramid termite at 5:48 AM on October 17, 2009 [8 favorites]

The new millenium started January 1, 2001, so the next decade starts January 1, 2011. Right?

*ducks*
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:54 AM on October 17, 2009 [4 favorites]

OK. let's remember to pace ourselves. In a few years, they're going to have Ashton Kutcher and Khloe Kardashian joking about "Shock and Awe" on VH1's "I Love the Zeroes," and we'll need to have something left to scream when that comes on.
posted by PlusDistance at 6:03 AM on October 17, 2009

"It all started 96 hours after 9/11... Hey, said the Americans, Let's Look Away.".

If that's the case, the looking away probably started with voter fraud in Florida, back in 11/2000.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:05 AM on October 17, 2009 [1 favorite]

With all this talk of the millennium, I can't help but wonder: Where is out Millennium Falcon?

Oh, yeah. We got one, but it doesn't fly.
posted by Astro Zombie at 6:20 AM on October 17, 2009 [3 favorites]

It'll all be over by 2012 anyway. Don't see why they can't just wait a couple of years.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:40 AM on October 17, 2009

when it happened isn't as important as why it happened. the new mill was an opportunity seen by most nations and apparently a limited number of americans to raise a generation of offspring who might get through their lives without the sporting of bullet wounds, emotional scars and the guilt of collateral damage. when the new mill arrived, the american war machine was expensively on idle. an opportunity arose to put the machine in gear and off it went, sucking in the lives of anyone in it's path and spewing american dollars out the back. the new mill was downgraded to business as usual, while monsters called out the names of men. obama's campaign recaptured the new mill potential and optimism, but just 4 days after taking office he was directing rockets into pakistan, while give peace a chance was still echoing in convention halls across the country. political emotions are running a bit high at the moment and it's probably a bit premature to be looking back at the decade, my feeling, given the perspective of a few more years gone by is it will be the decade of everyone getting totally fucked and not doing a goddam thing about it. (hat tip to john lennon and t rex)
posted by kitchenrat at 7:08 AM on October 17, 2009 [4 favorites]

Surely this oh forget it.
posted by Ron Thanagar at 7:57 AM on October 17, 2009

I thought the Daily Mirror was the bad one. Why does the Guardian have to include "insight" from Paris Hilton? Is there any chance that she was just a horrid fluke that our children will mock us for? Or better yet, will she disappear on the eve of the new decade, never to return?
posted by Ghidorah at 8:05 AM on October 17, 2009

You will have new, better Paris Hiltons by then.
posted by Artw at 8:13 AM on October 17, 2009

While 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq are all huge events, the real impact that will be seen for decades to come will be the rise of social networking and always connected mediums (Twitter, et al). It is funny, graduating high school we were told that we'd never see our friends again, etc. etc. and maybe we'd see each other on breaks back with the family. Now not only do I see my friends all the time, I know what they had at Michael Mina's last night.
posted by geoff. at 8:13 AM on October 17, 2009 [6 favorites]

Artw--

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!
posted by Ghidorah at 8:19 AM on October 17, 2009

God, this decade has aged me about ten years.
posted by maxwelton at 8:21 AM on October 17, 2009 [19 favorites]

But ironically, it hasn't aged my Retirement Fund a single day!
posted by darkstar at 8:42 AM on October 17, 2009 [5 favorites]

2000-2010: We were tested - repeatedly - and found lacking.
posted by klarck at 8:43 AM on October 17, 2009 [5 favorites]

So, Balloon Boy- Greatest Weird News Story of the Decade, or just Great Weird News Story?
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:14 AM on October 17, 2009

In this sense, the epoch began as it meant to go on. In the first triple-zero date for a thousand years, the Royal Academy staged Apocalypse, in which pieces by the Chapman Brothers and others restarted the argument over what could and should be art. And Eminem, with The Marshall Mathers LP, took hip-hop into mainstream music, where radio stations and record stores (still popular shops back then) grappled with the question of whether rappers' lyrics, with their frequently violent and misogynist references, could be played and sold without restrictions.

Is this the author not knowing what the fuck he's talking about, or is the prevailing British opinion seriously 20 years behind America's?
posted by codacorolla at 9:51 AM on October 17, 2009 [2 favorites]

The more I consider the statement that Eminem brought Hiphop into the mainstream in 2000...

Did Britain seriously not have the moral panic of gangster rap in the early nineties?

Did it miss b-boys, and boomboxes, and Run DMC in the late eighties?

I've either grossly misunderstood Britain's cultural climate, or the dude that they have wrapping up culture for the past decade should be immediately fired.
posted by codacorolla at 10:10 AM on October 17, 2009 [1 favorite]

Hmm, pretty sure most of the fuss about Eminem was from Americans. But, yes, there is always some kind of fuss going on about someone or other corrupting the kids.

Though, come to think of it, wasn't most of the fuss about eminem during the Slim Shady period?
posted by Artw at 10:13 AM on October 17, 2009

But yes, that Eninem took rap mainstream is kind of bullocks.
posted by Artw at 10:14 AM on October 17, 2009

I've either grossly misunderstood Britain's cultural climate, or the dude that they have wrapping up culture for the past decade should be immediately fired.


Possibly more the latter than the former, but hip-hop, and the attendant moral panics, were certainly never as big in the UK as the US. The first UK no.1 hip-hop album was the Wu-Tang Clan's "Enter the Wu-Tang" in 1997, I think. We certainly had an awareness, though - the brilliant Chris Morris comedy vehicle The Day Today tricked Paul Boateng, a member of Parliament, to condemn the rapping of "Herman the Tosser", and featured a parodic gangster rapper called Fur Q. However, the blue rinses in the UK at the time were mainly still panicking about raves (ecstasy being much bigger in the UK than the US, I think - I get the impression that "ravers" are a distinct subset in the US, whereas for a time everyone seemed to be necking E and dancing to repetitive beats in the UK). Dance music, in the sense of house and garage, I think was much bigger over here. And, of course, we have home-grown forms of music like grime which draw from American hip-hop. The US, on the other hand, seems to be growing into its persecution of raves by the police more recently, and the UK is, conversely, getting more fearful of young men gathering to listen to hip-hop.

Eminem was certainly a breakout artist, and probably appeared more so because we didn't have the same relationship with Dre himself, and with many others who would have put him into more context.
posted by DNye at 11:14 AM on October 17, 2009 [2 favorites]

"It's hard to remember a time when things that really mattered received so little attention. Climate change, the social consequences of the growing gap between rich and poor, the ridiculous size of the prison population and the essential corruption of politics – its slide from representing the public interest merely to representing itself – were all held to be nothing next to the immediacy of the threat from the mujahideen."

He may not get is hip hop facts right but the above statement pretty much nails it.
posted by gigbutt at 11:23 AM on October 17, 2009 [1 favorite]

The entire readership of the guardian bought that Tricky album back in the 90s. Just sayin'.

Anyway, everyone knows the best hiphop of the last ten years is French.
posted by Artw at 11:52 AM on October 17, 2009

@gigbutt: Different contributers to different sections of The Guardian wrote each of these articles, so the guy that I'm taking umbrage with, and the one who wrote what you quoted, are different people. Taking a look at the Creative article's writer, it appears that he's mostly a Theatre, film, and television critic, so maybe it's not entirely his fault for being a little out of touch WRT rap. That leads me to wonder why they tried to shoe-horn pop music into that - especially since it's seen such dramatic changes in the past 10 years.
posted by codacorolla at 12:04 PM on October 17, 2009

Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got something to say
But nothin comes out when they move they lips just a bunch of gibberish
posted by mannequito at 12:32 PM on October 17, 2009 [1 favorite]

Have we figured out what to call this decade yet? Seriously, did anyone come up with anything better than the "naughties"?
posted by crossoverman at 3:51 PM on October 17, 2009

Not than I am aware of. Possibly we need to get through this and the teens as quickly as possible so we can get to the more respectable sounding twenties.
posted by Artw at 4:23 PM on October 17, 2009

The Bobs, back in 2000, asserted that this decade would be the "ooo's."

Since then I've concluded that the proper spelling is "Ooze."
posted by tspae at 6:54 PM on October 17, 2009

Artw: Anyway, everyone knows the best hiphop of the last ten years is French.

While I broadly agree I have to mention that Japanese hip hop is no slouch, both poppy stuff and arty.
posted by Kattullus at 8:48 PM on October 17, 2009

Generally, the 00's zeitgeist gets pretty well nailed. And while there may be no consensus on an easy shorthand for this decade (a good thing in my opinion because maybe it helps just a bit in keeping us from the habit of too neatly labeling history into convenient ten year chunks), a good title would be, to borrow a line from one of the essays, "and the band played on." Can't put it much better than that.

And yeah, the essay on culture was kind of a miss, but whatever.
posted by blue shadows at 4:58 AM on October 18, 2009

I thought it was rather a disappointing review: too much repeating what happened - which I don't frankly need again - and too little real insight. But then it's always difficult with events just passed.

Rapper's Delight got to No 3 in the UK charts in 1979 which seems pretty mainstream to me.
posted by kerplunk at 7:38 AM on October 18, 2009

Well, in the same year Buggle's "Video Killed the Radio Star" reached number 1, but I don't know if we could say it was the era of producer-driven comedy rock (even though Mike Batt was also storming the charts with the Wombles at around the same time.

Looking at the charts, what people were primarily buying in 1979 was the fag-end of punk (The Boomtown Rats) and post-punk (Tubeway Army, Blondie, the Police), with bits of prog, disco and classic rock kicking around. Certainly, there wasn't any sort of embargo on hip-hop - I remember a road safety campaign that used "The Message" as a basis (don't step out when you're close to the edge, or you may find that you lose your head).

Plus, of course, you had UK Hip Hop - bands like the Ruthless Rap Assassins, MCs like Derek B and MC Buzz B, who may not have attained the commercial success they might have wanted but were certainly around, along with trip-hop/crossover artists like Massive Attack and the aforementioned Tricky, who popularised the hip-hop they loved.

That said... by 2000 Puff Daddy (as he was then) had had a bunch of hits, whether or not you accept him as "hip-hop". "Missing You", awful though it may have been, was number one absolutely interminably in '97. The idea that Eminem was the first prominent hip-hop artist is bollocks - but I think you could maybe defend the idea that he was the first one in the UK who combined selling absolute shedloads with the kind of lyrical content that lead to the sort of panic that the 2 Live Crew occasioned in the US (there were certainly attempts to create this kind of moral panic in the UK, but since not many people were listening to "As Nasty as they Wanna Be", it didn't seem to get very far. You're right, though, that hip-hop didn't arrive fully-formed on these shores in 2000 in the form of "Hi! My Name is..."
posted by DNye at 9:27 AM on October 18, 2009

So, Balloon Boy- Greatest Weird News Story of the Decade, or just Great Weird News Story?

ah no, we have the Shannon Matthews case over here.
posted by mippy at 5:47 AM on October 19, 2009

featured a parodic gangster rapper called Fur Q.

Fur Q was Eminem, wasn't it?
posted by mippy at 5:48 AM on October 19, 2009

No, that was JLB-8, in an episode of Brass Eye. Fur Q was a composite of Ice T and Ice Cube, roughly, but more broadly a parody of the idea of the gun-obsessed, murderous gangsta rapper.

(I would post links, but I don't think either skit is wholly successful, and since they are dealing with a white man in make-up pretending to be a gangsta rapper and a paedophile rapper, respectively, I feel a bit squeamish, frankly. They'll both be on YouTube, if required.)
posted by DNye at 6:12 AM on October 19, 2009

> Why does the Guardian have to include "insight" from Paris Hilton? Is there any chance that she was just a horrid fluke that our children will mock us for?

I hope not, she was awesome in the latest episode of Supernatural. Very meta. Also her head got chopped off.
posted by cj_ at 3:59 PM on October 19, 2009

As an actress has she ever not had a role which required some form of traumatic head injury?
posted by Artw at 4:12 PM on October 19, 2009

Oh of course, JLB-8! That was really uncannily like Eminem's delivery, though.
posted by mippy at 3:20 AM on October 20, 2009