Gen-Z Nostalgia and The State of Western Pop Culture

In the past few years as the world attempts to regain normalcy after Covid, it’s clear life will never be the same as it was in 2019, regardless of whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing. As more time passes, it becomes clear that the year 2020 is an enormous dividing line between before and after, certainly the biggest since 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Post-Lockdown 2020s youth culture has seen a significant upheaval in what’s trendy and what’s not. Mullets are in, as everyone wasn’t able to get a haircut while in lockdown and some people decided to keep it afterwards. In fashion, baggy is back in style, and the ultra-skinny/fitted look that typified millennials in the 2010s is now out. 

Gen-Z are the current youth generation whom we would expect to be creating the next styles, music and art, that we would eventually look back on as the distinctive features of their generation and the 2020s, but one of the striking things about them is that they don’t so much have their own style, instead being based predominantly on nostalgia and throwback. The two main eras that Gen-Z appear to be most nostalgic for at present are the 80s and the early 00s, with the 80s being a decade they did not live in at all, and the 00s a decade where if they were born, they were most likely only a few years old. 

TikTok is the best measure we have for what is currently trendy, and a key driver of those trends as well. In 2023, the majority of number-one singles in the UK and US were connected to TikTok engagement, so the platform’s power as a driver of pop culture is significant. According to TikTok’s annual music report, 13 of the 16 UK Number Ones, and 13 of the 18 songs on the US’s Billboard Hot 100 were driven in part by trends on TikTok.

TikTok is filled with pages of people entirely living their lives in a previous decade, with the 80s being the most popular among these, and early 00s/Y2K experiencing its own revival of interest as it crosses the 20-year mark to become far away enough to become interesting again.

Among the top-streamed TV series in 2023, none were newly released, all were series that are at least a decade old, with 6/10 having premiered in the 00s. Among the list were ‘The Gilmore Girls’ & ‘Friends’, 2 shows which have become iconic TV representations of the 00s and 90s respectively. On Youtube, a growing trend among young vloggers is using a filter to make your footage look like it is playing a TV from the 80s, with a fuzzier picture and worse frame-rate giving it a “vintage” look even when it is new footage.

Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ exploded in popularity in 2022 for a generation who had never heard of her after the song appeared in ‘Stranger Things’, a TV series that is itself set in the 80s. As a result, Spotify streams of the song increased by 9,900% in the United States, and the song went to the top of many National charts, even beating out its previous best from 1985 in the case of the Hot 100 ranking in the US. TikTok furthered the song’s reach with continued use on the platform and it had regular radio play for well over a year afterwards.

‘Stranger Things’ is thought to have been part of the reason for a revival in 80s nostalgia, and many other shows have followed suit in being set in this beloved decade, such as ‘Sex Education’ and It.

The most popular movies of the last few years for a mainstream audience have been ‘Top Gun’, ‘Barbie’, and ‘Oppenheimer’, two of these being explicitly based on their nostalgia appeal. ‘Top Gun’ is a straight-forward White Man Action-Hero movie, where America saves the day by defeating the enemy, who is never even named. A story this meathead and un-subversive would have never been greenlit by Hollywood had it not been a sequel to an iconic 80s movie.

The fondness for these eras seems to be a yearning for a time of experimentation, idealism, extravagance & a certain flamboyance - both the 80s and 00s being eras with radical & eye-catching fashion styles. Think the 80s with Mullets, bright colourful clothing, shoulder pads, leg-warmers, and “Hair Metal”. Think the 00s with skater fashion, spikey hair, 3/4 length shorts, and overlayering clothes. 

The 80s were a very optimistic and idealistic decade, while the early 00s had many rebellious-themed, anti-conformity music genres such as Pop-Punk & Nu Metal. Both stand in stark contrast to the 2010s with their minimalistic decor, hyper-fitted fashion (think super-skinny fit for pants), postmodern politics, and overproduced, formulaic generic pop & EDM that dominated the music charts. 

There is a certain irony in the fact that a lot of the 80s themes involved an eagerness for “the future” and what life would be like radically altered due to technology. Now, we are almost a century on with a far more technologically advanced society, and today’s youth desire to go back to the 80s. Any depictions of the future in current media are almost always dystopian, with the 80s view of “Futuristic-Optimism” feeling like a thematic relic of the past. Among ordinary people, the dramatic advancements in AI seem to generate more anxiety and fear than excitement about the change technology is bringing to people’s lives.

A Time You Have Never Known

The most peculiar thing about Gen-Z nostalgia is that it is nostalgia for eras that they did not experience. Millennials are somewhat of a nostalgic generation too, but theirs is nostalgia for their golden age childhood in the 90s. With Gen-Z it is different. There is a word for nostalgia for a time you have never known: anemoia.

Anemoia can also be seen in the more niche and political online trends and subcultures. The ‘TradWife’ / ‘Cottagecore’ / ‘Homesteading’ / ‘Milk Maid’  trends are all urban dwellers experiencing anemoia for a rural life they have never known, not coincidentally taking off right as the lockdowns came to a close and the secluded, urban, medicalised and mostly online life spent during Covid driving some people to seek out the extreme opposite. 

The Radical Right’s “Reject Modernity, Return to Tradition” meme and its variants are anemoia for the time in history before the Cultural Left had conquered the culture & political institutions of Western Countries. The massive rise in popularity of colourised videos of late-19th Century/early-Twentieth Century footage is also anemoia for much of the same reason.

This feeling is not an entirely new phenomenon in history, as can be seen with things like 19th Century Romanticism, a literary and artistic movement which reacted negatively to the societal changes brought about by industrialisation, urbanisation and enlightenment rationalism, lamenting the loss of a simpler, purer and more pastoral way of life which was seen as more authentic. They disliked the Enlightenment desire to rationalise nature, instead placing a greater importance on emotion and beauty over reason.

Romantic artists celebrated beautiful natural landscapes, unharmed by the environmental damage that can accompany industrialisation and urbanisation. There was a much greater interest in the Middle Ages, such as Walter Scott’s novel ‘Ivanhoe’, set in Medieval England which celebrated the culture of chivalry and heroism that he found missing in his own time. Critics of Romanticism would say it was because they had not actually lived in these types of societies that they were able to idealise them, detached from the harsh realities of living in them. 

Covid 2020

One reason for Gen-Z having a massive interest in nostalgia/anemoia is the COVID-19 pandemic/Lockdown, which living through created a brutally clear before/after dividing line in time that many people of all generations have found jarring. Covid was not a world war, but it did have some psychological similarities to living through one. 

Throughout the period, most news each day was exclusively dedicated to the great cause of “slowing the spread”. There were continuous references to the fact we were living through a massive historical event, crushing any fantasy about living in some Liberal paradise at the End of History. Every country on earth was fighting against the same scourge, with almost no country outside of some backwater escaping the chaos and dysfunction.

Western States employed many elements of psychological manipulation to compel behaviour for the Cause - “Stay Home Save Lives” or some variation of this phrase was seared into each person’s brain by the state for 10-15 months. The only time the news significantly deviated in 2020 was the BLM Summer of Love, and the fallout of Trump’s 2020 election, both also dystopian and discordant events that would make one feel like they are not exactly living in the good years of history.

No other generation born after World War 2 has experienced the mass mobilisation of society to a single cause through their youth to such an extent. Many also lost their job as a result of the lockdown. Time spent at home in lockdown could blur, and most people admit it was not exactly the most productive or fruitful time spent in their lives. Coming out of this and back to normal society would feel dislocating for many, with a sense of lost time, insecurity and urgency. 

I went into Covid in my mid-twenties, and came out of it in my late twenties, with a feeling that time just doesn’t move as slowly as it once did. Old habits and traditions among friend groups were destroyed. It must have been even harder going through the pandemic while being right at the cusp of adulthood and having some of your most important years of maturity interrupted by it. For someone who spent his first year of college entirely on Zoom, this was undoubtedly a more severe and disorienting experience.

All this can create a feeling of missed opportunities and unfulfilled dreams for many, which would explain a general desire among younger generations to reclaim a lost world. Many people made drastic life decisions once the lockdowns ended, like spontaneously proposing to their girlfriend, or quitting their job and moving country.

Technology, Friction & Permanence

Technological changes can have big changes on society downstream. The rise in popularity in recent years of “slowed” versions of songs can be traced to the fact that TikTok can silence a video for copyrighted music, but slowed versions of the same songs tend not to violate copyright, so it has seen an enormous increase in use in videos as a result. This has then led to some songs becoming far more popular with the “slowed” version than the original ever was. Sped-up songs have also seen a similar rise in popularity.

It should also be noted that digital and social media technology allows us to relive previous eras in a way that was never possible when most consumption was driven by TV, radio and print magazines, which are organised in a more “top-down” way, with major decisions on content set by companies, managers and executives, with a limited and set amount of programming, whereas social media is more “bottom-up”, allowing anyone to create a personally-curated news-feed entirely for nostalgia, to whatever level of niche the person wants. 

Modern Social Media platforms are designed to eradicate all barriers, to promote the easiest and most efficient transmission of content across the world. In theory, this was thought to be a boon for cultural development, as seen by Mark Zuckerberg’s somewhat forgotten campaign to ‘connect the world’. In practice, it appears to have done the opposite. To understand why, we must understand the concept of friction. To do this I will use an extreme example.

Imagine a young, socially awkward software engineer who is allowed to work from home full-time. His only hobby is gaming and he’s rich enough and lazy enough to always get his shopping delivered with an app. If he ever goes to the nearby shop, it’s self-check-out. All his banking is done via app, as are pharmacy needs and any doctor's appointments are video calls. His close friends stay in mostly on weekends and he is not involved in any local community groups. Most of his free time interacting with other people is online. He has no girlfriend, but internet porn means he does not feel much need to try for one.

Technology has made this person's life so efficient, that it has removed all friction. It has removed any of the small ways he would have had human interaction in the past, any of the things that may delay instant gratification, and while in isolation these are in theory an improvement, in its totality this has actually had big negative consequences for his social life as a result. In this, we can see a lack of any friction whatsoever in social life actually stifles culture, by circumventing any of the minor and accidental things that lead to meaningful human interaction with strangers and those beyond our close friend groups. 

Angela Nagle, citing the British Art Historian Kenneth Clarke in his iconic BBC Series “Civilisation”, says that “geographic permanence is the precondition for great culture and today we have neither”. Clarke, while speaking on the Vikings, says that the decisive feature of Civilisation and great culture was the end of migrations and the beginning of geographic permanence. Nagle goes on to give the example “cosmopolitan writers of the past, like James Joyce for example, were directly inspired by and deeply psychically rooted in their home city which they imagined living on far into the future. Today there is no such permanence. We are not rooted anywhere and everything is temporary. There is no continuity with the future to which a love letter can be written. Maybe as a result we just can’t create anymore”.

The Death of Music Scenes and Tribes

This lack of geographic permanence appears to have led to the death of “Music Scenes” as distinctive identities with their own particular fashion styles, music tastes, lifestyles, and crucially, tribalism. In the past, being fully enmeshed in one music scene meant a certain exclusivity, where you were tied to that scene and had a certain level of animosity towards other music scenes and their fans. Some of the most iconic identities include: Mods, rockers, punks, skinheads, goths, metalheads, & psychobillies. 

Take the “Mods” & “Rockers” of the 1960s. Mods were typically middle class, listened to Jazz and R&B, wore sharp suits and rode scooters. Rockers, typically working class, loved motorcycles, leather jackets, and rock 'n' roll. These two groups hated each other, and there were frequent clashes between the two groups that could become quite violent. A riot between the two tribes at Brighton Beach in 1964 was so bad, that the media called it “The Second Battle of Hastings”. The clashes became so notable that they even made it into MP’s speeches in the House of Commons.

Max Décharné, a former musician & music magazine writer, comments on the death of these scene identities in an Unherd article, where he describes an effectively sectarian nature to the clashes between Punks and Teddy Boys, reading his account would remind you of early-Twentieth Century Irish Green/Orange sectarianism in British Cities such as Liverpool and Glasgow.

Not all music tribes were violent, but at the very least, being a part of one usually meant a dislike of some of the others. If you were a Metalhead, you hated pop music, and were very eager to tell other people you do. Disco was the ultimate punching bag for everyone who was a part of any other music scene than disco. Gatekeeping was frequently employed to police a certain level of purity. “Oh, you like The Ramones? Name 5 of their songs.”

These identities blossomed because of the people of the time needing to meet physically to interact, usually at specific pubs or clubs which could become a nexus for a budding scene, whereas today the fact that people are always connected negates this. These identities also cannot remain an elusive niche because modern tech mainstreams things far too quickly compared to previous decades. 

Something that goes viral on Social Media can be made into a T-shirt sold by your local Tescos or Target the next week, and your Mom can have heard about it and be wearing one by the second week, at which point it is obviously not cool anymore, and any sense of mystique is gone. A lack of friction prevents the emergence of any distinct and rooted identity. A lack of any centralisation in specific locations prevents particular styles from forming and perpetuating for a long enough period to constitute a “scene”.

The author of this article was part of the last type of musical tribe, the Emos (I didn’t leave the emos, the emos left me), which came about just as the Smartphone Revolution was about to kick in in the late 00s, and it is no coincidence that this appears to be where musical tribes seem to die off. 

Max Décharné, in the same article above, tells a story of a DJ friend performing at a venue, when a young woman requests some “Rock” music. When he asks her to be more specific, she is unable to name a single group or song she would prefer. Quite the change. Nowadays, any identity can be found out about from watching 10 TikToks in an evening, and the fashions adopted in a single afternoon’s shopping, making it a costume you can put on or take off at a whim, rather than a real way of life. 

Most people are not as attached to one specific genre, and a common response to the question “What music do you listen to?” is “Everything really.”, if people even bother to ask the question. This is even my answer to that question, as Spotify gives me unlimited access to all the music I could ever want to listen to for a monthly subscription fee, whereas before a single album would cost more in today’s money, which would necessitate a certain level of choosiness with how much music you are consuming. 

There is a paradox where technology has made music so abundantly available and easy to access for each individual, yet has bred a certain uniformity and shallowness of taste in the average person. Whereas before, with much more limited access and more collectivist musical identities, this fostered far more diversity of scenes & styles. Effectively the musical version of how Globalisation erodes National Identity.

So it is easy to see why Gen-Z may see a certain aura around these decades, which are just out of reach of their lives, but still seem like a kind of lost world, that is gone forever, even when many of the people who participated in these eras are still alive.

Endless Progress?

Much time has been spent in counter-cultural outlets talking about the notion that continuous, guaranteed and unending material progress is a delusion. But at some point, it must be asked, whether we are guaranteed unending decades of truly high-quality popular culture, or if that was just a particular period in history. 

Of a number of generations born in between two worlds; A generation born to a society rich enough, advanced enough and open enough to give them the freedom and opportunity to do and create whatever they wanted, born to parents either were or at least seemed conservative, and gave them a childhood that was safe, stable and well-rounded, exposing them to something approximating a “classical education”, even if only in making sure to expose children to the artistic greats of the past. 

Many major bands from the 60s-80s would reference great poets, novelists & historical figures in their work, people who would be completely unheard of by today's youth. For example, the band Iron Maiden wrote songs about such topics as The Crimean War, The Battle of Passchendaele, the persecution of the Cathars in the Albigensian Crusade, the Greek Legend of Icarus & a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is quite hard to imagine an artist today with a similar level of fame with such a well-rounded knowledge of history and classical works.

The current ideologies and worldviews that dominate mainly seek to debunk, quantify, deconstruct or give a deterministic analysis, and these will never produce great art and culture, only serve as a rot that prevents its production. In the current era of calling everything outdated/racist/sexist/homophobic or any other buzzword, this just becomes a de-facto “you’re not allowed to have fun anymore.”, stifling all creativity and killing any sense of wonder and experimentation.

By reliving older eras such as the 80s and 00s, it feels like today's young yearn for a time when idealism & optimism were allowed and at least bought into, and there was a sense that there was still an endless amount left to discover and to innovate with. Here we see a parallel with 19th Century Romanticism’s desire to rebel against a stifling rationalism and embrace things such as emotion, beauty and adventure.

One of the powers of nostalgia and rehashing the old is the ability to tap into and say & do things that you cannot now. So if you are born into a culture where white men are the butt of every joke and source of all evil, you may not be able to find much to inspire or look up to in what’s current if you are a white man. But you can easily look back on previous decades where this wasn’t a problem, and re-live a previous generations’ stories and music. Postmodernism may kill off all grand narratives in the age you live in, but at least you can relive the old stories from decades past, before that sort of thing had poisoned the well.

Kate Bush said the lyrics of ‘Running Up That Hill’ “address the inability of men and women to understand each other… by making "a deal with God", they could exchange places and reach a greater understanding”. This theme obviously has real relevance in our current era of gender wars, and it is interesting to note that a song with this message took off again right at this time, 38 years after its original release.

At the very least it feels like we are in an era of creative stagnation. Media technology gives us effectively infinite access to share and consume content, but this has not resulted in some cultural golden age, only a culture of permanent re-runs and sequels and throwbacks. So we can reproduce but cannot produce, imitate but not create, and this can only be a bad sign for the health of current Western culture.

Angela Nagle, writing in the same article mentioned above, has a very bleak outlook on the West’s current creative ability:

“I never thought I would live to see the total death of culture. I don’t mean high culture or great culture but even the level of good popular culture I took for granted in my teens and early twenties, which I thought would just continue to reinvent itself indefinitely. I thought that there would always be a steady flow of cinema, music, fashion and fiction, which were absolutely central to life until a decade or two ago. It was what people talked about. It was what ambitious young people dreamed of creating. Every weekend the culture supplements would have something or somebody in the arts to be excited about. There was always a great music act to hear live or a new book by a favourite living author to anticipate. Talking about politics was for a small joyless niche only. 

The afterglow of what ever it was that made us create culture seems to have been finally extinguished.”