The End of a Decade

Believe it or not, the end of this year will be the end of a decade known as the 2000s. Doesn't sound as catchy as the '70s, '80s or '90s, does it? While I realize that the millennium officially began in 2001, the decade that will be remembered as the 2000s, or the '00s, or ... whatever it ends up being called, began in 2000. 2010 will be the beginning of the 2010s, or the '10s or the twenty-teens ... or something.
Just like their name, the 2000s didn't seem to have much of an iconic ring either. There really were not many movies that defined them the same way that John Hughes' films captured the '80s, or that Richard Linklater's and Kevin Smith's films scream "'90s." Granted, Linklater's best movie (A Scanner Darkly) was made in 2006.
Musically, it's a slightly different story. With the advent of MP3's, downloading, file-sharing, MySpace and the death of the record store, bands have been able to go from local favorites to being nationally recognized thanks to these media that allow them to become more accessible to more people from farther away than venues in mid-sized cities. Due to this, independent music has almost become the mainstream in the 2000s. Any person's iPod or Zune playlist is different from the next person's. (In theory anyway.) And everyone has prided themselves on discovering new bands and sharing them with their friends.
The 2000s have showed us that there is a lot of good music out there and it's not being played on the radio or MTV. The M has been absent from MTV for sometime now. But everyone knows this.
Television has been a mixed bag of ups and downs. The major down being the contagion known as the reality show. Every major network has at least one and people are drawn like moths to fluorescent lamps to them. Most of these are mindless, tasteless, voyeuristic dramas. Not to mention, much of it is, to varying levels, scripted or plotted. Regardless of this tragic epidemic, a few great television shows have managed to dance their way around the demand for ratings and establish themselves as the shows people will remember when the 2000s are looked back upon as one more decade we lived through.
These and more I plan to write about in a series of blogs to commemorate and countdown to the end of the 2000's.