Different Histories

This morning, while on the bus into the city, I was listening to a "Hit of the 70s" compilation album. Nothing incredibly unusual there - although retro-music is not something I listen to often.

Nor was it unusual that the passengers who gradually filled the bus were from a wide variety of international and ethnic backgrounds.

But what did occur to me as a young asian woman found herself a seat was this: what are the chances that any of us have a shared memory of a "hit single" from the past? At that moment I was hearing "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne - would anyone on my bus remember it, would anyone on my bus have heard it (in 1971) at all?

I've become quite used to the idea that there are now plenty of things that I remember being current but of which a younger generation simply has no awareness. It's a slightly different and perhaps perplexing issue to wonder how many of my comtemporaries are similarly unaware, not because of time but because of place.

Quite apart from needing to map the geographical spread of people that have come into my vicinity, it is even harder to try mapping which cultural trends were globally spread. I'm sure both extremes will exist: a) that there were trends that I didn't realise were actually local, and b) that some trends really were global but with significant time shifts in different places and hence known to a different generation.

Certainly the world of music exhibits this effect. If we look at pop music there have been major worldwide successes of their time - e.g. The Beatles. And there have been curious sets of acts that have been "really big" in just one or two isolated countries. A country like Australia is probably well disposed to sit in the middle of all this, and this is a rich field for making lists of such mini-successes.

A wider question might be whether this shared history or lack thereof has any consequences. I suspect there isn't much consequence at all. Maybe in the future there won't be anything like the current splurge as the baby boomers spend their property wealth on aging rock/pop star tours. If culture has become terminally diverse then indeed it may come to pass that nostalgia won't be like it used to be.