Instant Nostagia

Jim Morrison’s face is to my direct left, John Lennon’s to my right, and “Baba O‘Riley” plays in the background. If this was 1975, everything would seem normal. But this is 2007, and I should have posters of Britney Spears and Brad Pitt on my wall, while I listen to the Black Eyed Peas out of my stereo ipod and read gossip magazines, instead of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. When my mother introduces people to my room, she always says the same thing. “Look! It looks just like the 60’s and 70’s!” When she talks about me, she always says the same thing. “Danielle would have fit into my generation better than I did!” I always find this amusing, and other people always find me charmingly nostalgic instead of weird and bizarre. I just don’t understand why.
If we think about it, our entire generation is based off of the past. What goes around comes back around, and around, and around again. The late 90’s saw a burst of sudden interest in swing music of the 1940’s. We also saw a fashion revival of kitschy 1970’s bell-bottomed jeans, yellow smiley faces, yin-yang signs, and loud colors. In fact, my favorite dress of my adolescence was an electric blue spandex ensemble with long sleeves, a pleated skirt, and a yellow etching of “far out” on the front. And this was purchased new in 1996. I guess it’s no wonder why I’m such a nostalgic teenager now, after all, I grew up listening to my parents music like most people my age, and realized that the 1960’s and 1970’s had far better songs and songwriters than we do now. I opt for Q 104.3’s classic rock playlist rather than the pop assortment on Z 100. Owens Lee Pomeroy once said, “Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect!” When people ask me why I don’t like this generation much, I have a simple answer. It’s just not as good as the past.
My stepfather was born in 1966, making him a teenager during the 1980’s, a time which he remembers fondly. “The 80’s definitely had the best music, the best clothes, the best movies and TV shows. Back to the Future and The Wonder Years were great. And Bruce Springsteen is still my favorite singer of all time.” Interestingly enough, Back to the Future focused mostly on time travel back to the 1950’s, and The Wonder Years were a retro look into the 1960’s. And isn’t it safe to say that Bruce Springsteen is the 1980’s rock version of Bob Dylan, the singer-songwriter who spoke to a middle class generation? Every generation has its fair share of nostalgia, whether we’d like to admit to it or not.
Turn on the television and you’ll notice a lot of reruns of TV shows from the 1980’s and 1990’s. Notice the feeling you get when you watch something like Home Improvement or Full House or even something more recent like Friends. I tend to feel safe, secure, and long for a past that includes having nothing better to do than stay home on a Friday night watching TGIF in footy pajamas with my parents. Nostalgia makes us all feel homesick for a time when we felt safer, more secure and like things were better. In this generation, with times as fast paced and turbulent as they are, we need nostalgia to keep that sense of security and safeness. We use nostalgia to make ourselves feel better when we’re stressed out, to calm ourselves down, and to look back on a not-so-recent past and sigh, knowing the good old days are merely a memory now.
Beginning in 2002, VH1 launched a 10 part series called I Love the 80s which featured popular figures providing comedic commentary on things like Chia Pets and Glow Worms, movies like Pretty In Pink, and singers like Tiffany and George Michael. If something like this had premiered any earlier in the brand new decade, or waited any longer, it may not have worked. In 2002, however, just after the September 11th crisis that effected our nation greatly and made everyone feel unsafe on US soil, nostalgia was just what we needed to feel secure again. VH1 realized that the I Love the 80s series was a huge success, and seized the opportunity to create more shows about decade nostalgia like it. They soon after launched I Love the 70s and I love the 90s, the former something many thought would be too dated for most young adults to find humorous, and the latter something many thought would be too recent to reflect on. However, both series worked perfectly with our retro-obsessed generation, and each got their own retrospective sequels, as well as the I love the 80s installment, which even got a third show, I love the 80s 3D. When I love the 90s premiered in 2004, my friends and I had a party, dressing up in our favorite 90’s ensembles, many of us raiding our parents closets, and some of us raiding our own for our outdated N’sync and Spice Girls t-shirts. None of us found it strange that we were reminiscing about a decade that had ended a mere four years earlier. All we saw was an opportunity to wear flannel and fanny-packs and not be ridiculed. Finally, the 90s, the culture of our youth, was getting its proper respect! Kind of.
I asked my best friend why our generation is so obsessed with the past. She told me,“ I think it's because our lives aren't nearly as exciting. People had more fun back then and less responsibility.” It seems that way to us now, but that’s probably not true at all. In fact, it’s almost entirely the opposite. The early 1960’s were a dangerous time, with civil rights issues and everyone scared of nuclear war. The 1980’s were filled with greed and a terrible drug epidemic of crack cocaine. Almost every generation before us had it rougher than we did, and without our current technologies, everything took longer to do and took much more effort. Responsibility as a teenager and even child was often much greater than the youth of this generation ever will receive. However, she’s also right, because that’s what we view the past as; a safer time for us to reminisce about, a time when things were classic and simple like in the 1950’s, or carefree and campy like in the 1970’s. We view the past in the way we wish it was, in the way that makes us feel the most comfortable, however distorted it might seem.
In the near future, what will we have left to reminisce about? Surely we will have squeezed out every last bit of nostalgia for the previous five decades, and no one wants to muse over the 1940’s, as exciting as they were. Eventually our generation will have no choice but to live in the present, having exhausted every last resource of nostalgia we have. There’s only so many old songs you can listen to, so many old movies you can watch, only so many old episodes of Family Matters one human being can take. Eventually we will have to become nostalgic for this generation, for things like American Idol, the Bush administration, Eminem, and Paris Hilton. Until that day comes, we can all plug in our lava lamps and listen to “Livin’ La Vida Loca” on our walkmans feeling as safe as ever.