Lately, I've been feeling nostalgic. Not for the 70's and 80's, periods which I lived through, but for right now. What I mean to say is that I'm thinking a lot about how future nostalgia will be handled, about what we'll do when it comes time to remember and celebrate these times. Twenty years from now, what will a "00's Party" be like?
I listen to a lot of XM radio, and they're constantly running house ads for their 60's station. The spots promise four things: the British Invasion, Motown, girl groups and hippie music. There's the 60's in a nutshell for you. I haven't met anybody who can convince me that there was anything more to the decade from a cultural standpoint. If there was, it certainly wasn't important enough to impact the following generation.
The 80's, my own coming-of-age period, are much easier to encapsulate. Picture a ditzy, gum-snapping "Valley Girl" with fluffy blonde hair and a lime green tank top sitting beside Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko, who's snorting a huge line of coke with a rolled-up 100 dollar bill. I lived through that decade, and I can tell you this pretty much nails it.
Our current era suffers from a complete lack of focus. With 300 teevee channels, a new blockbuster film every weekend and an unlimited array of rotating musical subgenres, nobody's in agreement about what's poignant or important anymore. We think this is a good thing, a liberating thing, but we're going to look back on the everything-all-the-time 00's and wonder what these days were really about, man.
What's missing these days is quality control, that powerful unseen force ordering us what our shared experience is going to be. In the old days, popular culture was just plain old "Pops," that doting, caring father figure who gently nudged us towards certain consumption choices. The Internet and narrowcasting have rendered Pops doddering and feeble, and what's our revolution earned us? Disposable movies, irrelevant books, a million self-indulgent "weblogs" and a billion shitty MySpace bands.
This is why I have a soft spot for the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Sure, the MPAA and RIAA are made up of profit-mongering weasels, but I believe their collective heart is in the right place. All these people really want to do is limit and focus the amount of entertainment we consume, simply by making choice prohibitively expensive. If they were to succeed, they'd restore order to an increasingly chaotic age, a noble goal if there ever was one.
But let's go to that 00's party, circa 2027. The DJ will play a blend of rock songs full of Nirvana riffs and hip-hop sounds that will be virtually indistinguishable from the ones at the 90's party. Maybe he'll be asked to spin "Umbrella" multiple times. And the costumes: there's Harry Potter, a Hot Topic "goth kid," and a rubber-faced George W. Bush with a magnifying glass, still looking for his WMD's. And look, over there! It's Paris. Or is that Lindsay? Afterwards, everyone will put a couple of old Will Ferrell movies on in the background and try to remember how the Brad-Jen-Angelina timeline went down.
And I'll be standing by the doorway next to some earnest and wide-eyed teenager dressed up as a giant iPod Touch, mumbling sadly to myself. "I lived through that decade, and I can tell you this doesn't even come close to nailing it."
