The Seventies Are Crap

I remember when my parents bought their brand new house in 1970 the inside of the house was an eyesore. Their livingroom carpet was a deep olive green that was awful to look at, but fun to crawl around on. Just off the front door to the house there was a closet. Inside that closet hanging on the wall there was a rake. The rake was for our livingroom carpet, and a while later I heard people refer to our carpet as "shag." Whatever it was called, I didn't like it. One of my first chores my parents assigned to me was to rake the carpet a couple times a week. No sooner would I finish raking it, one of my family members would walk through it leaving a trail of footprints behind them like they had just tromped through fresh snow.

My bedroom was an abomination of interior design and a true example of bad taste. The wallpaper was a pattern of various width stripes that resembled a UPC bar code, only the stripes on my walls were colored worm-gut yellow, booger green, and baby poop brown. A light off white, cream color lay underneath those hideous bar code stripes. The carpet was a sickeningly bright orange shag weave. My room had a sliding glass door that opened out to the backyard of my parent's house. That side of our house got the most sunlight throughout the day and the curtains that covered my sliding glass door were also bright orange. After noontime, sunlight flooded my bedroom until evening. If my curtains were closed, the entire room glowed an evil orange that gave me headaches. If my curtains were open, blinding sunlight engulfed my room and I got headaches. In the center of the ceiling there was a single light fixture that had slivers of plastic jutting from the circular frame. At night when the light was turned on, those plastic slivers glowed bright yellow. It reminded me of a certain saucer-shaped ship from the television show "Lost In Space." It was entirely tacky, entirely useless. I didn't like my bedroom and I tried to stay out of it as much as I could during the day.

As a child, I didn't understand what was happening back then. I couldn't put my finger on why everything in the world seemed to be pure ass. Clothing fashions were retarded, cars flimsy and disgusting, music awful, houses bad. There was nowhere to escape any of it. Years later, I finally figured out what was wrong the whole time I was growing up. I had the misfortune of being born and raised in a time period people refer to as The Seventies, the worst decade of the entire 20th century. I know now that my woe and suffering then was no fault of my own. Somehow I managed to survive this bleak period, however I'm not sure how demented I became as a result of living through it.

Years later, The Seventies came back like a bad skin rash. It began in the UK, hit the east coast of the United States, and from there spread like a cancerous disease across the nation to California. I had some advance warning it was coming. In the late 80s I read a magazine from England called i-D. i-D was filled with stylish graphic design, photography, music articles, and fashion. It seemed to be on the cutting edge of whatever was hip and cool at the time. I bought issue after issue for a long time until one day I picked up the latest copy and thumbed through it's pages to discover the horror of a retro-Seventies movement emerging from fucking nowhere. I stopped buying i-D magazine.

Trendy hipsters instantly began raiding the nearest thrift stores for any and every item of vintage 1970s disco-dork clothing. College age kids tromped down the streets looking like they were always headed for a costume party dressed up in hideous polyester shirts and bellbottom pants. When the available supplies of Seventies crap clothing dried up at the Salvation Army, department stores started to carry "new" clothing that looked to me like it belonged on a rack at a Goodwill store and charged top dollar for it. Interestingly, I noticed that throughout the entire San Francisco Bay Area, kids in the East Bay were the most susceptible to Seventies crap than anywhere else. I still haven't figured out why. Perhaps they happen to be too young to remember that decade, or they are simply fiends for the worst trash known to mankind. Frequently I find myself wondering who is more stupid, the clueless drugged-out individuals who pioneered those substandard trends in fashion, design, art, and music back in the Seventies, or the fools who attempt to emulate it now.

The Seventies Plague has lasted years longer than I ever would have guessed. I wrongly anticipated that people would quickly realize how stupid the 1970s retro look is and abandon it. Recently I made a comment to someone that I couldn't wait for the Seventies to die back then during the decade itself, and I keep waiting for them to die... again. The sooner the better. No more retro 1970s bullshit, please.