This week a new survey titled Then is now: a study in modern nostalgia. The research was commissioned by Vevo (which apparently still exists) and examines the ways in which Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z experience cultural nostalgia. Its release was announced on the Vevo site along with the news that “Vevo (is launching) nostalgia-based purchasing power”; I’m sure the two pieces of news have no relation.
In any case, the survey, which is available in its entirety through this Google Drive link—It’s interesting in spite of itself. The framework, let’s say, isn’t academically rigorous: claims like “digital-native consumers crave collective, shared experiences that existed before content was immediately available on-demand” demand pretty strong support, and I’m not sure the report itself (a survey of 1,800 people that largely addresses how streams of older songs tend to increase after appearing in movies or TV shows) really provides that support. (In any case, I’d say that a lot of kids who discover Sade’s “No Ordinary Love” after its appearance in Love story in fact constitutes a collective and shared experience.
There are also some obvious methodological flaws: the claim that “nostalgia is now borrowed, not remembered” is based on asking respondents whether they “have ever felt nostalgia for content, styles or cultural moments before their birth or were too young to remember them.” It seems pretty obvious that the older you are, the less likely you are to answer “yes” to this, for the simple reason that you have more of your own life to remember. There is no indication that the survey controlled for this.
That being said, there are definitely something An interesting event with nostalgia in the 21st century, and has been throughout the 21st century. Almost 15 years ago (what, dear God), argument That chillwave, a genre so often described as “nostalgia for an imagined past” that it has become something of a cliché, was the sound of “a generation that has grown up in relative comfort, listening to its parents talk endlessly about (how) wonderful the ’60s were… (experiencing) a sense that the hitherto easy life is about to evaporate in a haze of unpaid internships and financial uncertainty.”
That kind of angst is basically normalized for Generation Z, who has never had reason to expect anything. but unpaid internships and financial uncertainty. This reminds me of a even older piecea review of Portishead that Andrew Harrison wrote for Q back in 1997. Harrison contrasted teenage loneliness with its adult counterpart, arguing that while the former “is a pillar of pop, her hidden consolation is that she always knows it’s a temporary phase”; the latter, for its part, is “terminal (and) desperate.” Similarly, while millennials have largely recovered from the financial hand dealt to them by the subprime mortgage crisis, there’s no sense that Generation Z will be as lucky, and that’s before we mention the planet-sized shit sandwich that’s happening to them in the form of climate change.
With this in mind, is it any surprise that they find themselves looking back wistfully at an era that preceded them? And that that era is not some endless summer of Kodachrome that never existed, but simply a real, normal time when you could pursue a tertiary education without burying yourself under several thousand fucking metric tons of debt, when you could emerge from your time at university with a reasonable expectation of getting a job, when buying a house seemed like a realistic aspiration rather than a pipe dream, and politics didn’t feel so much like a big kid in red pissing on your head while several adults in blue dressed you. they punish Not by urinating on yourself, of course, but by doing it in a way they consider too vulgar?
So, yes, shout, ahem, “digital natives”, not because of your notable moderation for not drinking too much in the face of all this, but for the fact that they haven’t simply burned everything to the ground. Still.
