How much would you say has changed around this same time of the year 2 years ago? As far as pop-culture, trends, technology, political/social climate, or your personal life?

For pop-culture, not much has changed. Other threads have mentioned how hip-hop has declined since '05, but I think the decline reversed in 2007 since artists like T.I., Kanye West, and 50 Cent all released albums this year. The latest billboard charts have been dominated by rap/snap hits.

Technology wise, 2006 became more High Def with the first releases of HD DVD and Blu Ray, and the Nintendo Wii's motion control was a new style of gaming. In 2007, Windows Vista and the iPhone came out. Other than that, we haven't really seen a huge advance in technology.

As far as fashion trends go, I'm not too sure since I don't really pay much attention. I still wear clothes I had in the early 00's or even late 90's, though I did buy a pair of plaid shorts this past summer. I did notice retro 80's styles becoming big, especially with girls.

Politically and socially - and increase in pessimism and less hope for our future, especially with the war in Iraq and the weakening U.S. economy. 

I forgot to mention about movies and TV shows as part of pop-culture, since I tend to focus on music trends. The type of movies that have been released are about the same as '05, a lot of remakes, sequels, and reboots, a lot of Judd Apatow comedies, and comic book movies which have been the trend of this decade, and oh yeah, penguin movies. For TV shows, a lot of the shows that premiered in '05 have already been cancelled, like Stacked and The War At Home. Those are shows that I really like too. Other shows from then are still around and popular, like The Office, Prison Break, Gray's Anatomy, and Mind of Mencia. There haven't been too many good new shows since then, other than Heroes. Some new series premiering in the upcoming weeks look interesting though, especially Journeyman.

I agree with all of your list, actually. I know what you mean about '80ish fashions. I started noticing the return of Izod style shirts around late 2005 or early last year too. Technology like the iPhone is sorta just improvements or extensions of early-mid '00s stuff, like the original cameraphones or ipods.

P.S. I liked The War at Home from the few episodes I saw myself. It does seem like alot of those shows don't last as long now. The '90s were much more sitcom-oriented, as opposed to hourlong dramas and reality shows.

Some things have changed from 2005, others haven't.

As far as music, goes, I've noticed that dance-ish music, like Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, and Nelly Furtado has in many ways outclassed Rap on the charts, so much so that Rap is now borrowing from the genre, such as Kanye West's "Stronger" sampling Daft Punk and 50 Cent's latest single being Timbaland produced and featuring Justin Timberlake.  I think that while Hip-Hop's decline has somewhat reversed in 2007, it is nowhere near as popular as it was in 2005.  One look at the charts, as well as the amount of Rap songs hitting number one, show that.  Also keep in mind the 30% (I believe thats the number) decline in rap album sales while sales of other albums have only declined about 15%.  Also, at the latest MTV Video Music Awards, not a single rapper won an award and there were more Rock performances than Rap performances (half of the Rap performances were Kanye West anyway).  Rap is losing popularity to dance music and is starting to take influences from it, a trend I think will continue into the next two years.

Rock music, I definitely think Emo is on the downslope.  Heck, "Pop-Emo" like Fall Out Boy seems to be more popular than actual Emo right now and even then, its position of the Rock charts isn't as dominant as a lot of people like to think it is.  Rock music seems to have changed the least though, because a lot of older rock bands like Incubus and Foo Fighters are still maintaining their popularity.

Movie-wise, I don't notice much of a change at all, to be honest.  Tv shows haven't changed too much either, although Heroes is defintely a great new show that has become a favorite of mine, especially after 24's latest season, which was atrocious.  Reality tv is experiencing a decline in popularity, but this decline started in 2005 anyway.  Technology-wise, not much has really changed to be honest, as everything is just improvements on 2005-esque technology and even stuff like the iphone is lacking some basic functions that other phones have (http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone.  Warning: language).  Blu-ray and HD-DVD are out, but both are just niches at this point.  Honestly, the only big shift in technology has been in video games, with the Nintendo Wii's motion sensing controller being completely different than any controller before it.

Funny I was think of posting something like this but somebody beat me to the punch but isn't funny how artists like T-Pain, Akon, The Pussycatt Dolls and Rihanna all came out within 1-2 months of each other in mid 2005. I mean Akon was featured on "Locked Up"
by rapper Styles(formely of the late 90's rap group "The Lox") but Akon didn;t really get popular until he released "Lonely" in mid 2005.

I would say rap has changed since late 2005 because snap-rap wasn't around in early 2005.

As far as Tv shows go is it just me or has the genre of game shows increased a whole lot in the last year or so and reality TV is on the steep decilne(but has been for since 2004 I think) and getting replaced by game shows.

Some things have changed from 2005, others haven't.

As far as music, goes, I've noticed that dance-ish music, like Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, and Nelly Furtado has in many ways outclassed Rap on the charts, so much so that Rap is now borrowing from the genre, such as Kanye West's "Stronger" sampling Daft Punk and 50 Cent's latest single being Timbaland produced and featuring Justin Timberlake.  I think that while Hip-Hop's decline has somewhat reversed in 2007, it is nowhere near as popular as it was in 2005.  One look at the charts, as well as the amount of Rap songs hitting number one, show that.  Also keep in mind the 30% (I believe thats the number) decline in rap album sales while sales of other albums have only declined about 15%.  Also, at the latest MTV Video Music Awards, not a single rapper won an award and there were more Rock performances than Rap performances (half of the Rap performances were Kanye West anyway).  Rap is losing popularity to dance music and is starting to take influences from it, a trend I think will continue into the next two years.

Rock music, I definitely think Emo is on the downslope.  Heck, "Pop-Emo" like Fall Out Boy seems to be more popular than actual Emo right now and even then, its position of the Rock charts isn't as dominant as a lot of people like to think it is.  Rock music seems to have changed the least though, because a lot of older rock bands like Incubus and Foo Fighters are still maintaining their popularity.

Movie-wise, I don't notice much of a change at all, to be honest.  Tv shows haven't changed too much either, although Heroes is defintely a great new show that has become a favorite of mine, especially after 24's latest season, which was atrocious.  Reality tv is experiencing a decline in popularity, but this decline started in 2005 anyway.  Technology-wise, not much has really changed to be honest, as everything is just improvements on 2005-esque technology and even stuff like the iphone is lacking some basic functions that other phones have (http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone.  Warning: language).  Blu-ray and HD-DVD are out, but both are just niches at this point.  Honestly, the only big shift in technology has been in video games, with the Nintendo Wii's motion sensing controller being completely different than any controller before it.
Ah rock music hasn't changed much since 2002 except for the EMO trend but EMO seems more pop than actual rock to me.

Wow MTV had more rock music performances than rap performances! I'm surprised MTV even knows what rock music is anymore since every time I turn on MTV 2 they are showing stupid rap videos(with the exception of Kanye West and Common.)

Your saying rap music is taking influences from dance music wasn't it the other way around in the early 90's in that dance music was taking influences from rap music?

Is it just me or did hip-hop's dip in popularity get reversed in March of this year when "This Is Why I;m Hot" and "Buy U A Drank" came out?

Ah rock music hasn't changed much since 2002 except for the EMO trend but EMO seems more pop than actual rock to me.

Wow MTV had more rock music performances than rap performances! I'm surprised MTV even knows what rock music is anymore since every time I turn on MTV 2 they are showing stupid rap videos(with the exception of Kanye West and Common.)

Your saying rap music is taking influences from dance music wasn't it the other way around in the early 90's in that dance music was taking influences from rap music?

Is it just me or did hip-hop's dip in popularity get reversed in March of this year when "This Is Why I;m Hot" and "Buy U A Drank" came out?




The VMAs had more Rock performances than Rap performances this year as well as last year, at least on the initial broadcast.  On subsequent broadcasts of this year's awards, they've been mixing things up, showing performances in the suites (which made up the bulk of the performances) that they didn't show the first time around, so I have no clue what the ratio is on the re-broadcasts.  Also, MTV2 I think places a large emphasis on Rap because they have that Sucker Free Sunday thing where the whole day is all Hip Hop.  Remember when MTV2 was good?

About the dance music thing...I suppose its sort of a two way street.  Rap music is taking influences from dance music, but modern dance music also took influences from Rap music, as Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous" and Timbaland's "The Way I Are" will attest.  However, it was clearly a different style of music.  Rap music is taking dance influences, but is still remaining clearly Rap.

As for Hip Hop's popularity, it is more popular now than it was in the second half of 2006, but it still does not come close to its 2003-2005 popularity, where whole weeks could go by with the top ten songs being nothing but Rap.  I think R&B is actually more popular than Hip-Hop right now.  T-Pain seems more R&B than Hip Hop to me, Beyonce had a big hit this year with "Irreplaceable", and Akon has definitely hit it big and with the exception of "Smack That", all his hit singles have been R&B style ballads like "Don't Matter" and "I Wanna Love You".  R&B takes a lot of influence from Rap these days though, so they can sometimes be confused, especially since they tend to play on the same stations.

why 2005 though ?  Wouldn't a better debate be how much has changed in the last 10 or 20 years ?

2 years isn't really enough of a time to really debate how things have changed

I agree with everythings that's been said. There have been some changes since 2005, but certainly nothing dramatic. Obviously there have been some technological changes since then, but as others have said, those changes are mostly just updates of things that were already around back in '05.

Rap's popularity may have made a slight comeback this year, but overall It's still in a decline, and not nearly as popular as it was in 2005.

I know pop music well and I don't really think hip-hop ever really dipped in popularity, except for maybe a very short period centering around the spring of 2005 when you had Green Day and Kelly Clarkson really making a huge splash, however that was very short lived by the fall of 05 it was the same and hip-hop probably got more popular and also got worse. Now keep in mind I'm talking about pop music in the United States, I know it's very different in Europe where hip-hop is not even close to as popular as here. Album sales are down, but nobody cares, you think the kids that like rap are out buying albums, no way, they're downloading the songs off limewire or itunes if they feel guilty downloading for free. Pop charts and itunes top downloads or even say myspace top artists are mostly hip-hop style stuff. "Emo" and any kind of rock (except for some of your typical lame bands like Nickelback) is barely visible really, it clearly is just a small minority from what I can see looking at all the statistics. Pop music is clearly a hip-hop dominated world...that's just the facts.

Well is it only me or did Rihanna's latest style sound more like pop than R&B? Personaly, I prefer her latest songs to her first album. For me, music, movies and fashion are starting changing. Why? Maybe, because from 2003 to 2006 the trends were almost the same and now it's time for change. For example, I've noticed a decline in R&B, hip-hop and rap, in favor of pop and teen pop. Emo, hardcore and drum abd bass are also declining slowly, but constantly. I am very happy that things are changing, since I became fed up with rap and R&B. Movies are quite the same, but some of them are better. Reality TV seems losing popularity (is it only me?) and cars are becoming more beautiful. Fashion is changing, but on a very slow pace, it's almost the same as 2005-2006.

Well is it only me or did Rihanna's latest style sound more like pop than R&B? Personaly, I prefer her latest songs to her first album. For me, music, movies and fashion are starting changing. Why? Maybe, because from 2003 to 2006 the trends were almost the same and now it's time for change. For example, I've noticed a decline in R&B, hip-hop and rap, in favor of pop and teen pop. Emo, hardcore and drum abd bass are also declining slowly, but constantly. I am very happy that things are changing, since I became fed up with rap and R&B. Movies are quite the same, but some of them are better. Reality TV seems losing popularity (is it only me?) and cars are becoming more beautiful. Fashion is changing, but on a very slow pace, it's almost the same as 2005-2006.


Rihanna is a pop artist thats why, Rihanna and R&B shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence (keep in mind I actually like Rihanna to a certain extent, she's just not R&B at all), Rihanna is slightly hip-hop influenced pop.

I know pop music well and I don't really think hip-hop ever really dipped in popularity, except for maybe a very short period centering around the spring of 2005 when you had Green Day and Kelly Clarkson really making a huge splash, however that was very short lived by the fall of 05 it was the same and hip-hop probably got more popular and also got worse. Now keep in mind I'm talking about pop music in the United States, I know it's very different in Europe where hip-hop is not even close to as popular as here. Album sales are down, but nobody cares, you think the kids that like rap are out buying albums, no way, they're downloading the songs off limewire or itunes if they feel guilty downloading for free. Pop charts and itunes top downloads or even say myspace top artists are mostly hip-hop style stuff. "Emo" and any kind of rock (except for some of your typical lame bands like Nickelback) is barely visible really, it clearly is just a small minority from what I can see looking at all the statistics. Pop music is clearly a hip-hop dominated world...that's just the facts.
Hip-Hop was invisible in mid 2006 the only hip-hop song that I heard on Top 40 radio in summer of 2006 was that T-Pain and E-40 song. As for album sales Hip-Hop sales of albums have declined double the industry average so I don't think Hip-Hop is as popular as it was from 2003-early 2006 but its more popular currently than it was from maybe April 2006-Feburary 2007.