This week saw the release of a new survey entitled Then is Now: A Study on Modern Nostalgia. The research was commissioned by Vevo—which apparently still exists—and examines the ways in which Generation X, Millennials and Gen Z experience cultural nostalgia. Its release was announced on Vevo’s site alongside the news that “Vevo [is launching] nostalgia-based buying capability”—the two pieces of news, I’m sure, being entirely unrelated.
Anyway, the survey—which is available in full via this Google Drive link—is interesting despite itself. The framing is, let’s say, not academically rigorous: claims like the one that “digitally native consumers yearn for collective, shared experiences that existed before content was available immediately on demand” demand pretty robust support, and I’m not sure that the report itself—a survey of 1,800 people that deals largely with how streams of old songs tend to increase after they’re featured in films or TV shows—really provides such support. (If anything, I’d argue that a whole bunch of kids discovering Sade’s “No Ordinary Love” after it was featured in Love Story actually constitutes a collective, 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 nostalgic for content, styles, or cultural moments from before you were born or were too young to remember?” 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’s no indication that the survey controlled for this.
With that said, there’s definitely something interesting happening with nostalgia in the 21st century, and has been throughout the 21st century. Nearly 15 years ago—which, dear god—I argued that chillwave, a genre described so often as “nostalgia for an imagined past” that it’s become kinda a cliché, was the sound of “a generation that’s grown up in relative comfort, all the while listening to their parents talk endlessly about [how] wonderful the ’60s were… [experiencing] a sense that one’s hitherto easy life is about to evaporate into a haze of unpaid internships and financial uncertainty.”
That sort of angst is basically normalized for Gen Z, who’ve never had any reason to expect anything but unpaid internships and financial uncertainty. This reminds me of an even older piece, a Portishead review that Andrew Harrison wrote for Q way back in 1997. Harrison contrasted teenage loneliness with its adult counterpart, arguing that while the former “is a mainstay of pop, but its hidden comfort is that it always knows it’s a temporary stage”; the latter meanwhile, is “terminal [and] hopeless.” Similarly, while millennials have largely recovered from the financial hand dealt to them by the sub-prime crisis, there’s no sense that Gen Z will be so lucky—and that’s before we even mention the planet-sized shit sandwich they’re being handed in the form of climate change.
With that in mind, is it any surprise that they find themselves casting wistful eyes at an era that pre-dated them? And that that era isn’t a Kodachrome endless summer that never was, but just an actual normal time when you could pursue tertiary education without burying yourself under several thousand metric fucktons of debt, when you could emerge from your time at college with a reasonable expectation of getting a job, when buying a house felt like a realistic aspiration rather than a pipe dream, and politics didn’t feel quite so much like a large red-clad toddler pissing on your head while several blue-clad adults chastize him—not for pissing on you, mind, but for doing so in a manner that they consider somehow overly vulgar?
So, yes, shout out, ahem, “digital natives”—not for their remarkable restraint in failing to drink heavily in the face of all this, but for the fact that they haven’t just burned the whole thing to the ground. Yet.
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