Wrong Again, NYT Style Section: No One’s Too Young For Nostalgia

It’s become something of a joke to note that The New York Times is always a little late to the party when it comes to broad cultural phenomenon. Today, the Styles section of  the paper of record notices that twenty-somethings are getting all nostalgic for their childhoods, and the attendant pop culture of the late ’90s and early 2000s.

No way!

Here’s the evidence compiled by the article’s author, David Browne:

– People in their twenties are flocking to see the Harry Potter movies, a decade or so after they first read the books as kids.

– Eminem, Blink-182, Limp Bizkit and Creed are all having comebacks, of sorts. (These bands are “classic rock for the next generation,” says a marketing exec at Live Nation. Lucky generation!)

– Britney Spears made a ton of money on her tour this summer.

– Jimmy Fallon is trying to unite the cast of “Saved By the Bell,” and lots of people are into the idea.

– Twentysomethings look back fondly on Austin Powers, the Backstreet Boys, “classic Nickelodeon” like “Clarissa Explains It All,” and classic Adam Sandler — as exemplified by Happy Gilmore.

– They also miss portable CD players (right, they were called Discmans) and VHS tapes.

“Even though nostalgia hits every generation, it seems awfully early for 28-year-olds to be looking back,” writes Browne, presumably with a furrowed brow. So he ropes in Neil Howe and Jeff Gordinier (“authors who focus on generational identity”) to help explain, which they do by way of September 11th. Apparently, the terrorist attacks marked the real end to the late ’90s, a time when everything was “as soothing as a Backstreet Boys ballad.” After that, members of Generation Y “grew up fast,” and now they long for a more innocent time.

I’m not denying that this generation’s relationship to 9/11 has something to do with how they understand their formative years. When the numbers add up just right, and a person can align his or her personal transformation with those events, it provides a tidy “before” and “after” that in itself is a reassuring way to understand where we stand in position to politics, the economy, and pop culture. But every generation gets nostalgic at some point (as Browne thankfully notes), and the cultural climate always shapes our relationship to the past. Are we really going to blame September 11th for Power Rangers nostalgia?

When I was in high school, someone found an anonymous little essay that began “From one ’80s child to another…”—it must have been circulating in emails or on a string of personal websites before we quite knew how to navigate the web. (Case in point, my friends and I passed around a print-out of the essay, never thinking to share it via e-mail.) Were we actually ’80s children? It’s debatable — born in 1982, we could technically claim it if we wanted to (and oh, we wanted to!), but we also knew we hadn’t been old enough then to really know what was going on. Regardless, we related to this random piece of writing really strongly, and so we retyped and formatted it and stuck it in the zine we were doing at the time so more people could be bowled over by its raw power, which felt entirely new to us.

The essay was a classic paean to childhood as a time of freedom and imagination and discovery, laced with thrilling references to Debbie Gibson, My Little Pony, He Man, Punky Brewster and the Electric Company. These were things we recognized, and it made us feel recognized, too. “We were the ones who played with Lego Building Blocks when they were just building blocks and gave Malibu Barbie crewcuts with safety scissors that never really cut,” the piece said. It recalled a time when “the backdoor was always open and Mom served only red Kool-Aid to the neighborhood kids…Entertainment was cheap and lasted for hours. All you needed to be a princess was high heels and an apron.” It characterized the ’80s much like any rose-colored childhood, making it sound a lot like the ’50s. Which is no accident.

So it bothers me that people treat Generation Y’s nostalgia as if it’s premature, as if it’s anything new, as if it’s silly because not enough time has passed to look back with any kind of perspective. It’s just an early perspective, and that doesn’t make it invalid. And it’s one that will continue to change. Nostalgia has never been about accuracy, or about waiting for the moment when your feelings are appropriate. No one should be surprised that a 21-year-old is nostalgic — it’s been happening as long as people have been growing up and looking back at their childhoods through different eyes. And with pop culture arguably more pervasive than ever before, we’re all complicit in recycling the past to satisfy an ever-increasing demand for “content.” It’s not just the twenty-somethings who are driving this lust for the 90’s.

When we look back on 9/11 from a more distant vantage point, it will undoubtedly figure into the map of our lives, and it’s tempting to use it as a dividing line or overarching theme. But every generation has one of those. As that “children of the ’80s” essay concluded, “We are the generation in between strife and facing strife and not turning our backs. The ’80s may have made us idealistic, but it’s that idealism that will push us and be passed on to our children — the first children of the twenty-first century.” We could try to disprove this, but what would be the point?

Photo by p x g.