A Long Dark Night

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The music video channels on TV are choked with 80's retro (the 80's, I think, having been a brief period of forward looking cultural expansion). Much Music even launched "Much More Music," an entire channel devoted to retro. Radio stations are no better - here in my part of the world it's repetitive weeknight shows like "The 80's at Eight," and similar crap. So no, it's not just the baby-boomers that are responsible. My generation has fallen victim to the same creeping evil and now walks the night's grey shores in search of fresh brains to devour. What an undignified end.

Well, maybe I'm panicking; maybe I'm blowing this way out of proportion - maybe we've always kind of been like this and it doesn't represent any real threat to progress and evolution.

I'll bet that if Elvis were alive today he'd slap each one of us and tell us to snap out of it.

Nope, I can't trick myself into buying that. I know for a fact that we weren't always like this. In fact, there was a time when we were just the opposite. From the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, North America was all about the future, the space age. No one wanted anything that smacked of the past; they wanted sleek, ultra-modern products and appliances, space age cars and kitchens and sophisticated new music to go with it. People dreamed of life in the year 2000.

I'll bet those people wouldn't have guessed that we'd be sitting around the 2000's dreaming of the glorious past. I'll bet that if Elvis were alive today he'd slap each one of us and tell us to snap out of it. That pushy bastard.

So what the hell happened to us? Well, I think that what happened has happened before. This isn't the first time we've fallen into a morbid fascination with our past - there have been other eras like this one. One of the first great challenges of the industrial revolution was to convince fledgling consumers that all those machine-made products pouring out of factories were like the handmade crafts of old, by dressing new designs up to look like the products of the past. So I guess those people weren't exactly obsessed with the wonders of the future.

In fact, the more that I think about it, the more that it looks to me like a cycle of some sort, like a bad flu or pneumonia that needs time to mutate before it can come back to terrorise us once again. In fact, I'll bet that our attitude towards the future is like a giant cultural biorhythm chart, rising and falling over time in semi-predictable sine waves. Right now I'd say we're deep in the zombie-haunted depths of a trough on that curve - a place where our cultural growth and expression are stunted and repressed by popular demand for nostalgic goods. Until we can shake off our obsession with the past and get on with our lives, little good can happen.

It's a lot like dating, isn't it?

So that seems to be the way - periodically we get ourselves into one of these worried little funks. Greenhouse effect, depleting natural resources, frogs going extinct (God, frogs are cool), all of these things work us into a frenzy and we worry. We worry and fret about the world and spend our time pining like heartsick teenage boys for a shiny past full of smoky illusions, and we get just about nothing worthwhile done. Speaking as someone who finds stagnation terrifying in the same way that most people are afraid of infectious disease, I can't stand another minute of it.

So enough already! Come out, come out. Come out ye oppressed masses. Come out from your dark cellars, haunted houses and musty attics full of old records. Come out and be free of the eternally hungry, ever shuffling zombies of nostalgia. Come out and bask in the bright-fiery sun of a new day. Some of it sucks of course - you'll get a sunburn if you aren't careful, and gangster rap still hasn't really gone away, but play your cards right and you'll get a nice tan and a good time.