What are the milestones of our pop culture?

I’m really, really tired, but the first thing that popped into my head was the video for Thriller.

@augustlan The 80s were awesome :)

All of the popular hits you’ve ever heard of. Music by the Beatles, Michael Jackson, etc etc.

Oliver Twist, for one

Star Wars

When you say “our”, do you mean American?

The Beatles first appearence on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Indiana Jones.

The technological advancements that have led up to the internet, FM radio, digitally recorded sound and access to all the information on the internet (when it was first invented, they never dreamed of the stuff that it is used for now, even pron) Of course the biggest, most important person to affect popular culture would be the mighty Chuck Norris.

Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
You don’t want to analyze the elements separately; the cheesy plot, stilted acting, lousy dialog but somehow it all worked together and became something iconic.

If you mean western culture, surely Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G minor are up there as milestones.

Roots, at least in the US, was a great milestone in pop culture. Everyone saw that show, it was discussed from academia to media, people started looking into their family trees.

MTV for sure! Add in Face Book and Fluther!

Music: Nat King Cole, Elvis, Beatles & Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Abba, Michael Jackson, Eurythmics and Culture Club, American Idol. The end of music.

Michael Jackson was my first thought.

Yeah, I think Thriller, thanks to the originality and finesse of Quincy Jones’ production and whoever wrote and directed that video, represents – not least in the public imagination – the beginning of a new era of popular music, ‘engineered’ on a whole new level.

I do think it (not Thriller alone, but the change that it represents) pushed music, coming from heart and soul, rather out of the mainstream, and, what with funk turning into dance/disco pop (not to belittle the great disco artists of the earlier 70s), and soul to ‘modern’ RnB, and reggae just literally dying at the hands of the cheese-machine, I never really found much inspiration in black music of the 80s, until hip-hop came along of course, which I see as playing a similar role in black music, as punk did in ‘white music’ (rock, at least) in the 70s.

Of course, both hip-hop and punk have now long been absorbed into the mass-produced, pre-packaged, highly-polished world of the mainstream….

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ah, sorry, little opinion-piece there…