The other night my kid was fiddling around with my iPhone as it perched on a stereo dock, and settled on the Talking Heads’ iconic 1980s album Remain in Light. As I listened while doing the dishes, I thought about how strangely contemporary that album sounded. If it came out today, it would sound as fresh as it did 31 years ago. And that’s very strange. It occurred to me that Remain in Light was a very forward-sounding album when it was released, so maybe it’s not the best example. Yet listening to my kids go through my music collection, and settle on Eighties bands like New Order, or the Clash (late Seventies/early Eighties), and then on more contemporary groups like the White Stripes, it has occurred to me that it’s much harder to classify that stuff by era based on the sound alone.

We listen to a fairly eclectic range of music in this house, so the kids are exposed to a lot. I doubt they could say, “That comes from the Thirties” or “that comes from the Fifties,” but just as they can tell a difference between jazz and folk, they can tell a difference among eras of popular music. But sometime around the end of the 1980s, perhaps with the fading of radio as a tastemaker, that kind of thing went away. That seminal Talking Heads album is as far away from us today as chart-toppers by Dinah Shore, Bing Crosby, and Perry Como were from the pop culture that first heard Remain in Light. Yet it sounds far, far closer to us in time.

I almost never listen to pop radio, but on the occasion that I do, it’s startling to me how derivative, how unoriginal, the music sounds. Aside from a few sonic tweaks, most of this stuff wouldn’t be out of place at any moment over the last 20 years. Nobody listening to the radio in 1987 would have mistaken any of that music for 1977’s, much less 1967’s. What’s that about?

It’s not just music. When Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X came out in 1991, it hit like a bombshell among me and my friends. Finally, someone had written a novel that spoke to our sensibilities and experiences! We couldn’t stop talking about it, and the ideas in it. The other day, as I was going through my bookshelves preparing to pack things away for the upcoming move, I came across my three copies of the book (I was forever lending it out, then having to buy a new copy; sometimes people returned them) and thought, “It’s about time for me to let Matthew read this.” He’s deeply ironic (already, at 12!) and will probably understand the book. Which is awfully strange, if you think about it.

And to me, strangest of all: Happy Days. It was the most popular TV show of the late ’70s, when I was in my prime-time kid years. It was set in a world in the far-off past, or so it seemed to us. Today, if there were a Happy Days on TV set in that same far-off past, measured as equidistant from today as the ’70s were from the ’50s, it would be set in or around 1991. Fonzie would be some grunge hipster. You can walk into any coffee shop today and see grunge hipsters whose look hasn’t changed much since the first Nirvana album. In 1977, the only place to see modern people dressed like Fonzie was on the syndicated nostalgia show Sha Na Na.

Kurt Andersen explores this phenomenon in a Vanity Fair essay.  I had hoped to quote from it, but I find it doesn’t offer any satisfactory explanations for why we’re in this Groundhog Day cultural cycle. (One thing he does point out that I’d overlooked: how much better, overall, people and things look today than they did in the 1970s.) Maybe it’s too hard to get a handle on. Anderson suggests that it may be that history is moving so fast that we hold on to more recent cultural forms because they offer us comfort. That might be part of it, but it doesn’t feel right. He also suggests, even less plausibly, that it’s about economic insecurity. I think it’s rather the case that the democratization of taste has done this to us (or rather for us; I don’t think it’s such a bad thing). My childhood and teenage years were pretty much the last time the ordinary person didn’t have a lot of choice in the pop culture he consumed. It was always possible, I suppose, to cultivate and serve non-mainstream musical tastes, but you really had to work at it. Most of us listened to what was on the radio, and that was about it. Remain In Light wasn’t on the radio; I discovered it when I was schooled in musical taste by an extraordinary classmate, A. Marc Caplan, who introduced kids like me to Elvis Costello, the Clash, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and suchlike (and look what happened to him — an eclectic genius, this Caplan, who opened so many musical doors for me). The early-Eighties advent of MTV radically expanded the kind of music we listened to by bringing the best of the British pop charts into our living rooms. Plus, “college radio” was on the rise then, creating markets for music that couldn’t be found on commercial radio. And so forth.

It’s kind of obvious what’s happened, isn’t it? It’s like a river that has jumped its channel, and rolls downhill to the sea in a thousand lazy bayous instead of a rushing, concentrated force. Popular taste is far more difficult to concentrate and to direct, given the revolutionary change in distribution technologies (I believe it’s impossible to overstate the influence of early MTV in breaking the hegemony of Top 40 radio). I find this impossible to complain about. To be sure, my usual stance is to object to cultural fragmentation, but maybe you would have had to have lived, as I did, through the era where the only thing to listen to on the radio was REO Speedwagon and Air Supply, and the only place to buy clothes you could afford was off the rack at Sears or JCPenney, to grasp how much better we have it today. As I write this, I have another window open on my browser, to an Amazon.com page for E.M. Cioran. I can have that book in the mail to me today with a keystroke. Twenty, thirty years ago, I probably wouldn’t have known who he was, or have any way to get his books. I would have looked to the bestseller list to define my taste, or listened to friends, whose tastes wouldn’t have diverged too far from the bestseller lists.

Even if we’re not making cultural progress in the way it was defined in the past, this, to me, is real and welcome progress.