Retromania: Pop culture's Addiction to its Own Past. (New Simon Reynolds book).

doh! onset of Alzheimer's.

It certainly was in the 70s - the 50s must have seemed idyllic from the vantage point of 1974. I wonder if one reason people are feeling fond of the 90s now is because it was such a relatively untroubled time to live. That bred shallowness and apathy to be sure but while taking in all the news this summer I've been wistful for a pre-9/11, pre-financial crisis world. Though maybe that only applies to people like me who remember the 90s - possibly the kids are just in it for the tunes.

― Now he's doing horse (DL), Wednesday, 24 August 2011 16:37 (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

Was it really such an untroubled time? The early '90s had its fair share of things to be troubled about, depending on who and where you were in life - AIDS, the Gulf War, the recession and the Major government are just four first-hand things I can remember people worrying about, and I was only 9 when the decade started. Seemed to be a lot more explicit agit-prop in music back then too - RATM, Manics, the Levellers, even Nirvana to an extent, all seemed to be railing against some sort of establishment ethos.

Not being sarcastic, by the way – just pointing out that necrophiliacs were having fun with the decade as soon as it ended

Yeah but that wasn't cool though was it? You know a revival's in full swing when bands can rip off a previous decade without looking cringeworthingly unfashionable in the process.

Well, of course, but I think thats part of the problem with rose-colored nostalgia. The 80s nostalgia always seemed weird to me, celebrating an era of supposed excess, ignoring the decimation of inner cities, crack, etc etc. I mean, there is always this sort of selective memory that kicks in when this kind of cultural nostalgia wave hits shore.

The 80s nostalgia always seemed weird to me, celebrating an era of supposed excess, ignoring the decimation of inner cities, crack, etc etc

you're mixing speculation and fact. I can argue convincingly the fifties, sixties, and seventies celebrated excess in their respective ways.

xxpost To me it was the 1998-2000 period that felt most shallow and apathetic, but then I was living around students with little-to-no interest in politics or current affairs. It's all subjective. This is why I think many people, particularly middle class people, fetishise the era they themselves spent their early childhoods in - they see it as a simpler, more appealing time. Also - the knock on effect of whatever music you listened to as an impressionable teen seeming very vital and meaningful while older, more cynical listeners believe they can see through the veneer.

xxp to jon ^^^there's always some weird blinders on what / who is reviving. i dont think there's a selective memory, really, just that the same ppl who ignored those things in the 80s continue to ignore them now, ppl who were forced to live through it still have nostalgia for the music & style of the time. I mean, air jordans are some of the most popular shoes out right now etc

Well sure, but that has always been part of the marketing hook of 80s nostalgia though, specifically mentioning the "era of excess". My point was really just that this nostalgia is really selective about what it chooses to celebrate and ignore.

(xpost)

Yeah, deej, that's true I suppose.

The key word is 'relatively' here. I get that if you were living in Yugoslavia or Rwanda the 90s were probably not a barrel of laughs but neither have or had much direct impact on British or American pop culture. In the UK, certainly, the 90s feel like a much more benign decade than the 80s and 00s, to say nothing of now.

^^^ which is why anyone saying the nineties were a Holiday From History (or Malkmus' glib remarks in Sunday's NYT) is an imbecile.

I don't think the nineties revival's got much to do with how benign or malign that decade might have been - comparatively or not. My generation was largely responsible for a lot of the music of the eighties revival and I think for the most part they weren't really concerning themselves with the effects of the miners' strikes, apartheid, the Falklands or any number of external issues happening in the world at the time etc, because these didn't play a big part in their childhood consciousness.

xp Of course I meant relative. Even when I was all rave-ahoy I was following Bosnia and Rwanda - Fukuyama was wrong and all that. No time in history is untroubled but in the west after 1992 there was prosperity, an absence of major wars and right-wing govts were either out of power or winding down - escapism was easy. The collapse in agit-pop coincided with this - more a last spasm of 80s dissent than a new kind. Musically 1988-92 feels like an interregnum to me - in terms of how we remember and stereotype the 80s and the 90s it's not quite either.

DL I've been thinking the same thing for years! I took to calling 1990 through about fall 1991 'the nineties before "the nineties"' because it really was.

For me the eighties ran 1983-1992 really.

You need Clinton in the White House for the proper 90s.

True words DL For the record I assumed you meant circa '91, but yes, mid-90s did have a more positive collective spin in world affairs and pop culture I suppose. I guess the nineties revival we're seeing right now is more the era Ned just mentioned. Brother feel a little like a Britpop pre-cum - a premature attempt to revive something that's still too recent to get truly misty eyed about. But that '88-93 period feels much more like a foreign country these days.

the late 90s never ended

he is kidding himself if he thinks in 2021 there wont be 2oth anniversary remastered sets of white blood cells and is this it! everyone knows theyre coming. im surprised they arent already here for the 10th anniversary, seeing how quickly things get elevated to classic status (alicia keys' debut already has the multi-disc remaster treatment), but im sure oasis, and pulp (well theyve already had the deluxe edition releases) and blur etc will all get their 'THE MOMENT THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING' rereleases. it doesnt matter if it really did do that or not (nevermind has a better case than the others ive mentioned) but rock critics/label people etc will never shy away from good old hyperbole. im sure in 20 years SR wouldnt entirely baulk himself if he had to write about how ariel pink changed everything.

one of the interesting things about the mammoth archive of c20 media available to us now is that parents no longer are stuck with whatever's on TV at the moment. i.e. my son is watching old episodes of sesame street (because i like them) instead of the night garden or teletubbies (which i don't like at all)

I grew up in the late 70s and early 80s, but what I remember watching on TV was old episodes of the Three Stooges or sixties sitcoms like I Dream of Jeannie or My Favorite Martian, ie stuff made 10 or 20 years before, effectively from a different pop cultural period. A little too much is made of this idea that this is the first generation to be obsessed with its immediate past. Just because we have more choice about what in the past we can access doesn't necessarily mean that we're doing it more than before.

^ Yeah, the Retromania idea doesn't seem to apply to TV very well. As you say, the American TV menu has always been jam-packed with old material; I would argue even moreso in the 1970s/80s than now. And in some ways the programs of today are more radical, more boundary-pushing, than they've ever been before. However, I remember watching such shows as "Gilligan's Island" and "The Beverly Hillbillies" without having a clear sense of what period of the past they came from. TV was just a big fantasyland floating in timeless space. Whereas with music it was and is pretty easy to realize when you're listening to something old, and I think SR is onto something when he suggests that people nowadays are much less embarrassed about listening to 30-40 year old music and consequently less demanding of newness from the purveyors of popular music.

i hear what you guys are saying but those early sesame streets aren't the "immediate past", they're... 40 years old. !! when i was little the earliest stuff they showed on TV was "i love lucy", which was only half as far back

It's obvious when you're watching something that's more than 10yrs old, the clothes, haircuts and picture quality scream "old!"

There's a whole bunch of seventies haircuts occurring in real life right now.

normally i'd agree with you but i think TV shows/music videos/etc from the late 90s haven't become naff yet (though we may have had this discussion elsewhere)

xpost it's a comeback i've looked forward to!! those big feathered charlie's angels cuts

what i want to know is... when's this going to come back?

http://listverse.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/241183760-1e8b99b6bd.jpg

my mom refused to let me have one, but now i'm grown up! i can do whatever i want!

I'm shuddering with dread anticipating the undercut revival.

Oh God Tracer, haircut of nightmares ::shivers::

It was always the most annoying, bullying kids who had that tail hanging down their necks. Reptilians imho. Die.

Undercuts: Where did these come from? I don't remember any actual celebrities or tastemakers rocking this haircut and yet every boy - EVERY BOY at my school had one, like a uniform. We've lost something, etc....

That rat-tail thing is still de rigeur in rural towns in Southern France.

Undercuts: Where did these come from? I don't remember any actual celebrities or tastemakers rocking this haircut and yet every boy - EVERY BOY at my school had one, like a uniform. We've lost something, etc....

Dude, footballers.

ah good point. i always underrate the sartorial power these people have.

I had an undercut :(

It's obvious when you're watching something that's more than 10yrs old, the clothes, haircuts and picture quality scream "old!"

― Matt DC, Thursday, 25 August 2011

Is this true? Picture quality is a big thing in making something look old, but thats dependant on the quality used at the time

Friends looks "old!"
I don't think X-Files looks much different than now

Stuff from 88-94 looks old right now, generally. Those early Friends credits look very old fashioned but are now moving into the kitsch/retro realm.

I wonder if we don't unconsciously edit out the retro aspects of periods when we look back at them. A bit like, if you see a movie set in 1981 for example, the soundtrack will all be 1981 songs, when in the actual 1981 there were oldies radio stations and the like and you'd probably be hearing as much old music as new. I can think of plenty of retro stuff from my late 70s childhood that would never get any play in a modern recreation of that era. And that editing process means we're more likely to consider our era as being more retro than previous ones.

Yeah, films set in London in 1977 will more likely 'accidentally' have fashions and soundtrack based around 1978-1980 than 1975.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG5JNFjlup4

I wonder if we don't unconsciously edit out the retro aspects of periods when we look back at them. A bit like, if you see a movie set in 1981 for example, the soundtrack will all be 1981 songs, when in the actual 1981 there were oldies radio stations and the like and you'd probably be hearing as much old music as new. I can think of plenty of retro stuff from my late 70s childhood that would never get any play in a modern recreation of that era. And that editing process means we're more likely to consider our era as being more retro than previous ones.

― Zelda Zonk, Thursday, 25 August 2011 11:32 (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

Shane Meadows said he was conscious of this when filming This Is England '86 and deliberately threw in songs from before that year - particularly things from a couple of years before and twenty years before (the character role are all ageing/ex mods and skinheads so '60s Northern Soul and rocksteady obviously feature here).

If you watch the old quiz shows on Challenge TV on freeview, seeing contestants in clothes that scream "80s!" is a pretty sure sign that the show was filmed in the 90s.

What screams "old" about the scene from the deer hunter? the car?

http://www.rrr.org.au/assets/man_who_fell.jpg

I think a lot of films, or TV, that were intended to be contemporary or futuristic date quickly, anything historical less so. But there are production details that can affect that obviously. But "retro" strikes me as a weird and slippery concept in drama, even more so than in music.

Something like House Of Cards from circa early '90s strikes me as incredibly quaint (the drama is still brilliant though).

I think a lot of films, or TV, that were intended to be contemporary or futuristic date quickly

retrofuturism! we all know about the odd '70s ideas about UFOs and aliens that seem retro because that's not really how it panned out, i was just thinking the other day how the digital computer voices and r&b videos set in spaceships that were plentiful around the turn of the century might become the new updated retrofuturism

Yeah, films set in London in 1977 will more likely 'accidentally' have fashions and soundtrack based around 1978-1980 than 1975.
Spike Lee's Summer of Sam is a US equivalent of this syndrome. They usually don't get the cars right in this type of movie. One of the things I miss most about the 1970s is all the cool cars from the 1960s that were still on the road.

This is why the TV show "Look Around You" works so well in its mashing together of 60s, 70s and 80s British TV imagery - they never tell you exactly when the show is supposedly set.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR8qtxts1jY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgAp5aqUhXw&feature=related

one more, only cos i like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNzHwP9qcOU&feature=related

Was there ever a video for "Mackadaynuu" or whatever it was called?