What a strange decade. The 2000s (I know it is common to refer to it as the ‘Noughties’ but given the recent history of decade names I’m sticking with my name) was the first decade in which I can remember many details of just about every year. The 90s was a blur to me up until 1996 when England suffered an agonising defeat to Germany on penalties in the semi-finals of the European Championship. At the time I blamed it on Gareth Southgate. In hindsight, it was the fault of Paul Gascoigne. In some respects, things haven’t changed…
However, it is pretty obvious that the world we used to live in ten years ago is a completely different one when compared to the world we live in now. Technology is a major reason for this. From broadband to wireless to e-mail to text messaging to smart phones, this has been the Information Age – growing at a rate that would scare any sane human being. And then there’s social networking, which has changed the way we interact with others completely. Facebook and Twitter have been instrumental in this new era, sometimes lazily dubbed Web 2.0, and media-sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube are as essential as Google (so essential that Google even purchased YouTube).
Entertainment has also changed. The video gaming industry has become the billion-dollar industry that is still cruelly shunned and misinterpreted by the mainstream media, the music and film industries have been losing a war to piracy that, despite the legal cases against The Pirate Bay and Mininova, is set to continue for years and may not even result in the victory that the big corporations so desire. CDs have given way to MP3s as people listen to music in a different way. I won’t care how people listen to music as long as the album format stays forever. The day the album is finished is the day a great art ceases to become art.
As for TV, I’ve steadily drifted away from drama and comedy and towards satire and various panel shows. That’s not to say we’ve had no good original TV (The Office, The Thick Of It, Peep Show, The Wire, Six Feet Under etc.), but if I didn’t have a TV in my house, I wouldn’t care to get a new one anytime soon. Especially if comedy continues to get dumbed down to a point where we’re going to be spoon-fed jokes like toddlers at primary school. This is why I look towards the US nowadays for comedy. There is no finer satirical political satire programming than The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the former covering three elections in this decade and exposing politics and the news media. For an example of these shows at their best, look no further than Jon Stewart’s dismantling of Jim Cramer earlier this year.
Speaking of the news media, how rubbish has that gotten? The integrity values have been forever diminishing for the last few years, reaching new lows that just seem unthinkable. Just look at recent examples – the BBC asking whether homosexuals should be executed, an attack on Stephen Gately by Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir that was so ill-judged and shocking the PCC might actually get off its backside and investigate it, and in the USA you have the continuing slimy tactics of Fox News featuring people like Glenn Beck, who is now starting to remind me of a conspiracy theorist-cross between Frank ‘Grimey’ Grimes Jr from The Simpsons and Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of The Joker in Batman.
Then again, you wouldn’t really blame them for running around like headless chickens when you have to report the most horrific and terrifying monstrosity of the decade – the attacks on the World Trade Centre on the 11th September 2001. It is fair to say that no one really was sure about how to react after watching repeated images of the demolition and destruction of not just those buildings, but the lives of the people in and around them. The rest of the decade would be spent in recovery but the fear and paranoia is still there, lurking in the dark corners and ready to strike.
Of course, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Well, aside from George W. Bush. On the other end of the scale, Barack Obama became the first African American to take charge of the United States in the history of the country. There are fewer moments in world history this decade that registered on that magnitude. Politics in the UK couldn’t be any more different. Corruption is rife, lying to the public has become the norm, and perhaps most important is the sudden realisation that no party in this country is one that I’d see becoming a competent government.
Throughout the decade, whilst I now enjoy having a good conversation on just about anything I find interesting with anyone, I remained a criminally shy young man who suffers from the tragic Short-Arse Syndrome. This is still the case, although not as bad as it once was. The funniest thing of my personal life? In 2005, I said to friends that I wasn’t fussed about finding romance and was happy to live out the rest of his life as a single man. As I type this, my relationship has been going strong for three years and three months.
In the latter years of the decade, I was experiencing new things. I was fulfilling what I’ve been wanting to do since I was 14 – writing reviews on music and interviewing bands. Even though it is volunteered work, I will keep doing it as long as I keep enjoying it, which I still do despite the pitfalls. Meeting people you recognised from still and moving images was a bizarre thing to get used to. Having Alex Kapranos sign my copy vinyl and CD single was strange and the encounters with Amanda Palmer (including a football match that remains the most unreal yet brilliant thing I’ve ever done) left me feeling giddy afterwards but they are still moments I cherish and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.
In 2007, I travelled to Finland in my first trip overseas that involved getting on a plane. My fear of heights remain, but my desire to see more places is burning brightly. I went back there in 2009 where it was warmer there than it was in the UK. Every day I was there I was thinking what a wonderful country it was and every day reminded me of just how terrible things are back home. It’s embarrassing. There are high points of living in the UK, especially near London, but there are some low points that I don’t see being rectified by any future government anytime soon, no matter what party. Hopefully it won’t be the BNP, but one can’t help but be scared at their increase in popularity, almost like zombies.
I have been unshaken in trying to achieve my goal of being a journalist. At present, I’m approaching the end of a Journalism course at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham and will soon be on the lookout for a job. I’ve now come to the realisation that getting a great job straight away is, whilst possible, not something to look for. The main focus is to get a job that, as well as allowing me to implement my skills that I’ve picked up over the last two and a half years, pays well enough for me to live.
Money. What a horrible word. Especially when it came to the recession, which is still on-going and still set to continue well into the next decade. It shows no signs of stopping. It shows no remorse for its victims. It shows no shame. Because of the incompetence of the banking system, people like me are about to leave university to do something that now presents itself to be one of the most difficult things anyone can do: get a job. I know people who have been driven to despair in the last few months because of it and seeing them suffer because of something that isn’t their fault is not only heartbreaking but something of great injustice.
What strikes out as the best moment of my decade? It’s a half difficult/half not-so difficult question – the former because there are quite a lot of highlights I could choose but the latter because what I have chosen is not only blindingly obvious but something that I was incredibly fortunate to be a part of. Radiohead’s intimate gig at 93 Feet East (pictured above) was announced on the morning of the show and should have been at Rough Trade East. The chaos that unfolded prompted a venue change and the rest, as they say in many documents and books, is history. I even found myself on Belgian radio the day after the gig. It’s going to be a very long time for anything to top that day.
At the start of the decade I was ending primary school and entering a brave new world of secondary school, where for seven years I worked hard to get through all the difficulties that school throws at any child, plus the failings of the education system, which today remains to be about competing in league tables for more money and nothing else. As this decade ends, I’m about to end my time of education when I graduate from the UCA in Farnham, and then desperately trying to find a new job. In a way, my life has come full circle. If the same thing happens when I reminisce about the 2010s, then something might have gone horribly wrong with my life.
Of course, this summary misses out a lot of things. I could forever go on about the rise of reality television, my shameful idolising of Charlie Brooker and Mark Kermode, sport, or about 95,000 other topics. However, if I did that, this would become almost unreadable and longer than my dissertation. Other people will touch upon/have already covered those topic. All I’ll say is that this decade has been emotional, inspirational, unbelievable, and, perhaps rather fittingly, left us all with a sense of ‘OMG’.
Happy New Year.
