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As someone who came of age in the 80s (I was 15 when they started, and 25 when they ended), I'm pretty sure I can say that the 90s aren't the 80s. :) (It's actually sort of amazing - that decade was separated by life events that lined up with chronological boundaries, in a way that no other decade has ever been for me. I entered high school three months before 1980 started (my high school was just 10-12; 9th grade was part of our middle school), and I got married, moved to a new state, and started grad school in 1990. So the 80s actually WERE a decade, bookended by actual life events for me. :) )

Music is something that doesn't always line up so chronologically to me I guess. The 80's had a sound, and the 90's had a sound, and while they were pretty distinct, some acts ran past their sell-by date to me, while others started in the 80's but never really belonged to them. Maybe it's time that has melted down those demarcating bookends to me, or maybe just the order I heard things in. Soundgarden started in the 80's but I've always thought of them as a 90's group (probably because most of their hits were in the 90's); Meatloaf is a 70's guy, who released Anything for Love in 93, yet the song seems to wholly belong to the 80's, at least to me. Music is just one of those weird timeless things; but yes, I should certainly have clarified. 80's music in particular didn't belong to 1980-1989. It belongs to their spirit.

Does any of that make sense?

I've long thought that culturally, a new decade takes a few years to find its groove and the past decade takes a few years to finally recede.

As someone who came of age in the 80s (I was 15 when they started, and 25 when they ended)

That makes you… exactly 20 years older than I am? Suddenly you don't seem as old as all the jokes would suggest.

Ditto. Exactly what I was thinking when I did that math :)

Heh... disagree. (I know I said I understood what Dr. B said... but understanding and agreeing are different. For me, music has always been rooted in chronological time; when I hear a song, one of the first pieces of information that comes to mind is "where I was when I first heard this" - and that is almost ALWAYS linked to a specific place/time. It's a skill (? maybe trait?) that has faded as I've gotten older, mostly because my memory is not as sharp as it used to be... but it's still mostly true.

Pretty much the same with me. I hear a song and it brings back memories of what book I was reading at the time or where I was working. It is really strange what memories get linked with music. The Cranberries are linked to installing a file server running IBM's OS/2, go figure.

That's really interesting - because for me, those are epitomes of 90s music. :)

Rarely do we mean "music created in the 1980's" when we say "80's music".

Heh... disagree. (I know I said I understood what Dr. B said... but understanding and agreeing are different. For me, music has always been rooted in chronological time; when I hear a song, one of the first pieces of information that comes to mind is "where I was when I first heard this" - and that is almost ALWAYS linked to a specific place/time. It's a skill (? maybe trait?)

That only works if
1. You lived through the entire decade in question.
2. You listened to the song/artist in question.

If either one of those isn't true, than you are left without a personal memory association, and are simply left with the sound of the music, and how music sounds is what really defines a genera. "80's music" may not be a widely recognized genera, or even one that has some of the most clear boundries, but I was talking about how music sounds.

For me personally, I wasn't recording too many memories in the 80s, and wasn't alive at the beginning of it, so most of my hardcore memories of music come from the 90s. To me, MC Hammer sounds nothing like "80's music", if only because it doesn't sound like 90's music.

But I'll be the first to admit that what we're talking about are the "sounds of the decade", which is really just a theme that a lot of popular music adopted. The themes that are adopted may or may not last 10 years, and they certainly aren't adopted by all bands at the same time, right on the turn of the decade. This is why, to me, MC Hammer sounds like 80s, because the last of that artists music stemmed from 80's themes, while a band like Nirvana were among those that were creating themes that would be adopted in the 90s. Nirvana to me "sounds" more modern than they really are, only because their sound is associated with a decade of music that came after them.

And of course, some bands can get associated with a decade not because of how they sound, but because of how they looked. See Big Hair Bands (hair/glam rock) as an example. They certainly wouldn't be confused with 80's folk, but I also couldn't mistake a concert of theirs for being 90's :)

Sorry if I went too academic/philosophic when we really just wanted to reminisce :)

As an aside, I spent a months in Guatemala in the late 90s, right before the country really hit the shitter. Sadly, I don't think I'd go back there today as I don't have enough contacts to feel safe :(