Our life on this planet is constructed around contrasting yet unavoidable opposites; from day/night, male/female, hot/cold, happy/sad, we cannot have one without the other. People are the same, roughly half of us will enjoy a certain event or period of time, whereas the other half will completely hate it. Decades also seem to follow this yin-yang pattern (give or take a few years) for instance; if you enjoyed the late eighties and early nineties, when everything was bright and emblazoned with Peace signs. If you hark back to the Golden Age of Hip-Hop or the early days of Rave, House, and Jungle music; you will probably enjoy this coming decade. If however, you revelled in the money-centric, red braces wearing, Filofax carrying suited early-to-mid-eighties, then you probably loved the noughties.
For me, the last decade or so (around 1998 to last year) was one of the most excruciating, most ghastly, and most depressing times in history. With the War On Terror controlling almost everything we did, it seemed that you couldn’t go a few minutes without somebody mentioning “9/11” or “Terrorism”. You couldn’t have an Anti-war, Anti-Military, or Anti-West opinion without some cocksucker calling you a traitor or un-Patriotic. You couldn’t even walk two fucking feet without some twat sucking the proverbial dick of an Iraq Vet or a Fire-fighter.
It was also a decade when Film, Television, and Music took a nosedive into entertainment hell. Reality Television took off big time, and Simon “Gynecomastia” Cowell was on almost every fucking channel. Endless repeats of “Pimp My Ride” and “MTV Cribs” were shown, and just as Television became unwatchable, we all went out and bought widescreen TV’s.
Film and cinema took a turn for the worst as Multiplexes popped up everywhere, only to be filled with green screen, dark, moody shitfests with overused flashbacks. We had to contend with an onslaught of “found-footage” flicks and M. Night Shyamalan twists.
Music became some lame, kiddy-friendly shite filled with arse-kissers and posers, and every music video had some idiot gyrating their gluteus maximus into a fisheye lens. Hip-Hop became all about “bling and bitches” and almost every god-forsaken lyric was about “being in a club” or “sipping Cristal”.
The people themselves became addicted to GHD hair straighteners, either that or they gelled their hair into some spiky crop cockatoo bullshit. It was also the decade when every Tom, Dick, and Harry became overly obsessed with designer labels, Botox, and boob jobs. This plastic generation were at home in this gaudy, tacky, subservient time, when every motherfucklette waved their flags like sheep as long as the money kept coming in and their chrome rims kept spinning.
Time, like every other constant in our reality, seems to obey the laws of Dualism. And I guess that, if it were not for these completely dull, depressing, and downright disastrous times in our life, we wouldn’t know what was truly satisfying, beautiful, and worth living for. The noughties was definitely the decade that made me realise how much I enjoyed the time from ’88-’96. Hopefully this period of time we’re in right now can be as great as the early nineties.
For me, the noughties will forever be remembered as the decade that was guilty of many crimes; crimes against fashion, crimes against music, crimes against film and television, and worse of all… crimes against humanity.
Categories: Artwork, Life, Style And Fashion
WHAT WENT WRONG WITH...? 
Great article, I cannot agree with you more. We didn’t realize how great we truly had it in the 90’s and 80’s until the 2000’s emerged. We are living in dark times, a nation of psychopaths bred in America alone.
As far as entertainment goes, I think they ran out of ideas a long time ago. Someone could have foreseen reality TV dating back to the 70’s when consumerism was really taking off. It was only a matter of time until they had TV shows about rich narcissists spending money and talking about themselves.
Every music genre has been corrupted by the love of money. Weather it be Hip Hop, Rap, Dance, etc etc. All of a sudden it’s no longer about the music, it’s all about owning something and looking cool to sell an image. It started a long time ago but over the years it became the picture that defined the music as the decades went by. I’d say in the 80’s with music videos taking off, that’s when it all started. Today it’s overkill, the record companies had no problem back then promoting the use of negative things to sell, there is no coming back now. Every music genre has been ruined by this one way or another.
When it comes to movies this is the worst part. They started running out of ideas probably in the late 70’s and 80’s. When we started seeing films that were entirely reliant on special effects and all about making money, that’s when it became apparent that Hollywood was dead. Flash forward to the 2000’s and at least 80% of everything coming out of Hollywood is either a remake or a sequel/prequel to something over 10 years old, it’s all about the money. I didn’t even get into product placement in films, which was bad years ago, but off the charts ridiculous today.
They know people hate how everything has saturated down to crap in this last decade, and that’s why they profit off the “flashback” type stuff. They constantly throw back at you the horrible glam glam fashion of the 80’s to make it relevant again while every adult is screaming how much better their youth was than the current youth.
All the “terrorism” watch has been taken to a whole new level. While propaganda was bad in the 80’s, there’s no way possible to compare it to the whole propaganda campaign launched for promoting an endless war on terrorism that is an entire joke once you strip down the whole red, white and blue nonsense and start to see things as they truly are. What president tells their people to “go shopping” after such a horrible incident?
2000s were not as bad as many say they were. Sure the noughties were not perfect, but the period 1988-96 was not that great either.
There isn’t any time or decade that’s perfect, I just said that ’88-’96 was better for me than ’98-’10 (although looking back it was more like ’89-’92).
As a whole, the eighties and nineties were shite too, read “What Went Wrong With… The 90’s”… https://whatwentwrongwith.com/2015/07/22/what-went-wrong-with-the-nineties-1990s/
1988-96 wasn’t great? Those years were awesome. It was the second summer of love, with raves and Madchester, bleeding into the comedown of grunge, and then the fresh Monday morning of Britpop. Now all of these might not be your personal cup of tea, but they were genuine vibrant grassroot youth movements. The last gasp of a youth culture that would be increasingly sterile and processed going forward. Objectively, that period had attitude and energy. It was interesting on just about every level.
well one industry that only got better in the 00s was the video game industry. Sony released the PS2, Microsoft released the Xbox, Nintendo the Gamecube. Cool games like GTA: San Andreas, Call of Duty, Metroid Prime 1 & 2, etc was made. Shit games were rare and some became cheaper. The 00s were horrible for music and tv/cinema fans but not for us gamers!
The 2000s feel more like a vague fever dream than a decade. Early 2000s was basically an add on to the 90s. Later parts of the 2000s were defined mainly through the advancement of the technology. Of course, you can add more things on top of that.
For me, that particular fever dream was far from vague. It still haunts me to this day. It heavily featured war, torture, overt sexism and racism, and awful hair and fashion. All the paracetamol and fluids in the world couldn’t help alleviate that shit.
Good things that came out of the 2000s: Xbox, GameCube,PS2,Shrek, The best of Pixar, flat screen HDTV’s
Worst: Jingoism, mass hysteria, y2k(no not the album m8, that was lit)Bill Clinton, Eminem, puff daddy, gangsta pop(I’m looking at u nelly)the list could go on for millennia….