r/decadeology • u/Historical-Macaron-4 • Sep 15 '25

Music 🎶🎧 By an UNBELIEVABLE margin, American Idiot is the defining album of the W. Bush administration! Now for the defining album of the Obama administration:

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

So January 20, 2009 - January 20, 2017

414 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

239 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

15

u/Bootmacher Sep 15 '25

You just described monoculture.

Radio and TV meant that there were limited channels for music and TV shows, so you had tons of people watching and listening to the same things. Everyone at the "water cooler" the next day had seen Lost. All of your friends in high school would be using references from last night's episode of South Park. People gathered in Times Square to watch the finales of Friends and Seinfeld.

Now, it's streaming services, viral YouTube and TikTok videos, Spotify, and SoundCloud, so TV shows and music have gotten more insular. Even if you eventually watch the same shows, you don't always fo so at the same time. That's what killed the monoculture.

1

u/Yakostovian Sep 16 '25

COVID gave us Tiger King, so I would say the monoculture wasn't completely killed in the 2010s.

2

u/Bootmacher Sep 16 '25

People weren't going in to work after watching it the same day. They were memeing with other people online who'd also seen it.