“Alexa, play ’80s music.”  If Alexa told my secrets, she would tell you I eat ice cream in my sweatpants watching The Biggest Loser crying as the contestants come to realize the connection their personal turmoil has to their abuse of food.  I eat ice cream for the irony.  Also, I’m from Wisconsin.  I like ice cream.  She would also tell you that my request to play ’80s music is the number one thing I ask of her.  I occasionally ask her to play pop music.  Sometimes even the ’90s.  What I have never asked her to play is: “Music from the aughts.”

I have nothing against the music from the early part of this century.  It just doesn’t fit into an easy descriptor:  the aughts.  Doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue.  It also doesn’t evoke a feeling of time.  I remember the first time I heard the term aughts.  I had to Google it.  I also had to walk to my laptop to Google it, because our phones couldn’t Google things in the early days of the century.  There are adults in college that never experienced this.

The last decade wasn’t any better.  I’ve heard people awkwardly try to label that decade the ’10s.  If I could roll my eyes any harder on that label, I’d give myself vertigo.  The teens doesn’t work because, well, it’s not a decade, and try asking Alexa to play teens music.  You will not get what you are asking for.

Welcome to the ’20s. 

Finally, we exist at a time that will evoke a strong sense of pop culture and history.  Think about it.  What was happening 100 years ago?  The Roaring ’20s!  A decade long party.  Big Band music, Louis Armstrong and the Charleston.  Women still dress up in the ’20s ‘flapper’ style for theme parties and Halloween. What was happening in the first decade of the 20^th century?  I don’t know either.

Perhaps it is just me, and my evolving understanding of my middle age reality, but I’ve begun to develop a theory on the preceding 20 years.  Without being able to box in each decade with an identity and a label, they are lost in our understanding within the time/space continuum.  Each year in the past 20 feels like it was just a couple years ago.  Janet Jackson’s nipple, the financial crisis, Bridesmaids, they all happened a few years ago in my mind’s eye. Exactly which decade? Hmm. Umm. Don’t know.

I know, I know.  It’s all part of getting older.  But, let’s face it.  We just finished a 20 year stretch whose only identity will be that it didn’t have one.  Do you think kids will be having dress up day for the aughts in the future?  The ’10s?  Unlikely.  The ’80s?  Absolutely.