I'm not going to talk about politics tonight, believe it or not. Rather, I'm going to talk about taste. A woman who, I think, has a disproportionately large measure of taste: Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan. As is my wont these days, I'm unwinding with an hour or two of YouTube. I noticed that footage of McLachlan's Afterglow Tour, recorded in August 2004, could have been shot yesterday, it seems. It's remarkable for a pop culture artefact to go eight years without seeming dated. Pop music time isn't quite like Internet time, but eight years is a long time in pop culture. Only a select few television shows make it that long. The Beatles were huge for fewer than eight years before the breakup.
I'm not the world's most astute judge of pop culture, but the clothing, hairstyles and general aesthetic of McLachlan's Afterglow concert seem to have withstood the test of time. Things have stayed a bit more stable than they did, say, between 1975 and 1983. Here are couple of pictures of another of my favorite acts, Genesis, in 1975 and 1983 (the three guys on the left are the same in each picture):
Even after applying the discount for aging and the loss of two band members, it is clear that the photos come from two different eras. An especially lasting cultural influence of the last decade or more has been the "hot mom", at the heart just an appeal to female consumers between the ages of 30 and 49. I was intrigued by the similarity betweeen McLachlan's touring outfit this summer (though I didn't see the concerts in person) and the outfit Amy Grant wore at the concert I did attend a week ago.
