The Nostalgia Pendulum: A rolling 30-year cycle of pop culture trends
thepatterning.com
thepatterning.com
Consider "Happy Days", made in the 1970s to celebrate the 1950s. The wave of mods and paisley jangle pop in the 1980s to celebrate the 1960s. All the "Big Star" sounding bands of the late eighties and early nineties celebrating Alex Chilton circa 1972.
I would guess the movies are a lagging trend, the real number is likely 20 years, approximately equating to mid childhood, early teens as being idealised and getting expressed in successful adulthood at 30 in pop culture by those who experienced those times in formative years.
That would put the first wave of 80s nostalgia in the 2000s[0]
Stranger things is more like nostalgia for early 2000s 80s nostalgia.
Edit: the twenty year rule? [1] [2]
[0] http://www.inthe00s.com/archive/inthe00s/smf/1342451842.shtm...
[1] https://decades.medium.com/how-1980s-nostalgia-ruled-the-200...
You don't say . . .
Vaporwave music and all the visual design around it embraces this pretty hard. If a clip isn't literally set to 80s commercials it's at least full of VHS distortion effects.
Half the comments on any video seem to be teenagers talking about nostalgia for a time they never experienced
I think something is very off about nostalgia these days and my best guess is that digital networks alter the way our collective memory works.
Nostalgia might be driving it in part, but I've also seen a lot of it driven by people who never experienced the era. Young adults fascinated by the era just before the one they were born into, just barely out of reach but still available to their casual awareness.
It's not always the 30 year olds driving the trends out of nostalgia, sometimes it's the 20 year olds pining for an idealized version of an era they never experienced themselves, but can easily intuit.
I don't know about the quantification. But there certainly is something about the pining for an idealized prior time period. One good example today is the retro appeal of film, vinyl, and even instant photography. You also see it in design and fashion. I'd say certain aspects of 60s style are seen as appealing today whereas in the 70s-80s, they'd just be seen as old-fashioned. You're really talking about the point where tired becomes retro-chic.
Best illustrated, perhaps, by international man of mystery Austin Powers. Is there a remake in the works? Would be about time considering how the age of the film will soon be approaching the age the time it referenced had while filming. That remake would be quite meta retro, almost reaching the complicated stack of nostalgia layers in 2077.
And while I watch some shows that are on the pop culture radar to a greater or lesser degree, I'm not necessarily watching them when they first hit streaming. Certainly there's very little that's the equivalent of Must See Thursday on NBC where most(?) people were aware of certain shows even if they didn't regularly watch them.
I wouldn't peg 30 years as the magic number, but roughly tech products have gone through a process of a slide into obsolescence in the first 15-20 years, followed by a resurgence in interest and price increase over the next 10+ years.
Back in the second part of the 90s we had already some 70-80s music revival nights. Plus groups like daft punk were already rediscovering 80s. Now it's 2020, how many 2000 and 2010 music revival nights are out there? just some 90s. Plus the usual 70 and 80.
Cars? nothing really new after the countach I am afraid. Even hypercars look like racing prototype class cars with a bit more refinement. The delta, the countach itself, the giulia gt, have been restomodded or redone. What modern cars are likely to deserve such treatment?
The Internet accelerated the existing fragmentations in pop culture that were really always there, but became prominent in the late 80's/early 90's.
The fact that music from anywhere, anytime was downloadable (despite the industry's attempts to stop it), combined with the fact you could chat with anyone from anywhere that had an Internet connection, was the beginning of the end of a mass pop culture. It was the beginning of "bottom up" control of the media. This morphed into streaming and social media, which continues.
So the 90's is it. The only cultural phenomenon comparable in the 00's and 10's are game-centered. So there may be a bit of mass nostalgia about that popping up after the oncoming 90's retro wave.
What would cause a return to pop culture is heavy regulation turning the Internet back into the TV of the 50's through 90's, which is not impossible. However I feel further saturation of current US political discourse into social channels is going to make what used to be pop culture and mainstream media an impossible thing for anything other than political discourse in the US. The countercultures and social bubbles are going to turn into essentially "Internet gated communities" that only come out into the mainstream to fight.
I stopped reading right there. The first signs of 80s-nostalgia went off in the electro nostalgia in electronic music circles around the year 2000, just a few years later we had 80s-shows on mainstream TV in germany, nonstop.
The 80s-Nostalgia-Trip itself is running for 20 years now and normal nostalgia cycles can't explain this phenomenon.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...
i.e. this is so plain to see that it'll somehow change its own dynamics.
this is specially accute due to political implications (e.g. campaing managers who understand this and thus instructed Trump to resemble Reagan's rhetoric until the point when people somehow start to catch on to this manipulations by means of, for example, this and similar articles)
...but maybe I'm too generous (or optimistic) about the capabilities of "the unwashed masses of people"?
I believe narcissism and hedonistic desire is likely relatively constant across generations. What differs is the technology each generation is raised in and has access to. I believe (opinion, I'd like to see studies about it actually) that the easy access to the narcissism reinforcing tech Gen-Z grew up with has made the expression of these desires more pronounced, and not at all in a positive way.
Personally, I've seen it in action (of course, this is anecdata, now, so not necessarily generalizable). I know a 20-something guy and am involved in his and his friends' lives to a certain extent. These young adults haven't had adversity much different from anything I faced growing up in the 80s with a deeply impoverished family living in the south, or that my wife faced when she was growing up in the same era, but they are far less resilient (in almost every aspect) and tend to treat every little setback as a major trauma. I'd say the outliers of my generation (in terms of emotional instability and lack of resilience) have become the norm in Gen-Z, and I hypothesize it is due largely to the prevalence of modern social media and how it facilitates and encourages this extreme-drama view.
The economic situation of young Americans has significantly declined over time. Failure to recognize that as, hard stop, the most important factor, means your perspective is way off.