Yeah, I guess that plays a dominant role. Certain sounds, certain aspects, means of production etc. at one point become synonymous with an era.
There seems to be a fine line between dated sounds and nostalgia at times, though.
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Awesome stuff, thanks! Iām glad I asked about the 2003 sound. Iām checking out the rest of that Funkstƶrung album.
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So itās all, technicallyā¦DATED 
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Itās mostly production that places an album in time IMHO. Thereās a cool sound, it gets stale, in 15-20 years itās the nadir of taste and most people canāt even listen to it because they canāt stand the production.
Then comes a generation who maybe remember the sound vaguely from their childhood. They find, for example, the sound of Ace of Base naively charming, and as a bonus it absolutely infuriates people a little older than them, which is funny. So some jive kids start a band which sounds like Ace of Base, and the kids slightly younger than them who donāt remember the original at all love it. Three years later this genre is played out, only to be heard on car ads. So it goes.
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I wonder how Sophie will hold up might be blasphemy to some but it sounds very 5 years ago to me.
Entroducing was crafted from crate-digging, it was meant to sound from times past.
Since ātrip hopā has passed its newness, younger persons so disconnected from sampling culture when all culture is jammed up every orifice all the time, Iām sure the excitement of discovery and recontextualization comes off as quaint.
The World of Wonder sort of business-industrial complex has ripped the hell off of āhyperpopā for disposable party circuit music for many years now.
Iād say her music still holds up even with all the fracking and strip-mining of queer / trans underground electro.
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Did Bjork invent hyperpop with Hyperballad?
To be honest I was late to the party and only really got into the music which she sang on which their isnāt enough of sadlyā¦
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I assume the reductivity of the genre was forced by music media on similar artists working in a similar glitchy digital / chiptune eletronic pop vibe, but not so directly anime-aesthetic inspired ala Anamanaguchi and non-arena āEDMā music like idk, Glitch Mob.
I really donāt know much about her peers similarly categorized tho. Do any other artists get lumped together with SOPHIE?
In a similar ādatedā sense, queer ballroom music has always been rife for gentrification (RIP Legendary on HBO, they at least used houses and party luminaries/legends) and I guess Tiktok has brought a lot of ānogueingā, business loves to strangle the life out of anything fun. I think Beyonce has brought back a bunch of late 80s early 90s house on her recent album, not super interesting but inoffensive.
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With all that said SADEās music will never sound dated and she apparently will never look old you can say the former about Steely Dan but the latter not so much.
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Letās stop faffing. Post some music thatās dated brutally to define this thread.
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These were released pre-dated with a 2 year expiration date:
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Interesting that I feel the opposite about those two Massive Attack albumsā¦I thoroughly enjoy āBlue Linesā, but to me āMezzanineā is the timeless classic. Agree about Ae, howeverā¦
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Every one of them a timeless classic.
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Nausea is the timeless classic.
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Propaganda - A Secret Wish
The forever album 
I think there is just sort of what is closer seems more dated kinda thing going with people in generally. 5-10 years ago stuff looks/sounds bad but then when it is 20 years old it is suddenly cool again to general audience.
Entroducing is def a product of its time and since I lived my teenage years in the 90s I am right at home with that record. It is great but if some youngster now hears it first time I would not be surprised if they would say it sounds dated and/or grandpa music. And that is cool to me! It is sort of silly that young people are dressed to like Gremlins shirts or some shit and are expected to only like old stuff. Break the cycle, do new shit, like new shit! As a 40+ old dude I have given up to be cool about anything but I really really hope kids would not be fed with so much retro everything.
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On the topic of āDatednessā, Trip-hop, and associated scenes, this year Iāve gone back and checked out old Wild Bunch and videos from collaborators.
Itās been fascinating to see whatās changed, what hasnāt held up, but the delicious studio as an instrument production techniques from people like Tim Simenon still delight me.
Yes, fuck the Stranger Things-brand* all old āIPā revival nostalgia porn, punk into the new!
*S U R V I V E is still cool
IMO a lot of times, things that actually are old feel that way because of the impact that the medium had, like tape hiss, samplers with high noise floors, low bitrate audio because the producerās computer had like a thimbleful of RAM, et cetera. Now that CD quality digital is the norm and weāre past the final frontier of human perception, sounding dated is becoming much more about how closely something follows the trends of its time. I hear tracks that sound dated as soon as they drop (Iām looking at you, āvibey lo-fi hip hop beatsā) and 15 year old tracks that are still fresh. In general it helps if the sounds in a track are unadulterated and clean, like theyāve been newly fabricated specifically for THAT track. I think if a track depends on a sound that has already been made and passed around, the whole thing starts to sound old. Of course that might not have been true 20 or 30 years ago when sampling was a much newer art form, but here we are.
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Oh I dig Stranger Things and Survive totally for what they are and there is a place for that too. No hating. But the feeding your childhood cool things to your kids is kinda weird. And all that comes of course from that our age ppl are now the ones who have money, can influence their kids etc so the big companies bet on that. It is what it is, but I have tried to vote with my wallet and look elsewhere when possible. But I guess this is sort of off topic already
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Yeah, Seattle has an all ages space for kids to engage and Iād be nudging any fictional children towards connections there https://theveraproject.org/ and building something new in physical spaces over harassing them to enjoy what struck me as a teen