I remember talking to my dad about this before, while we were watching old home videos he'd taken from the late 80's/early 90's after Stranger Things kicked the 80's nostalgia into high gear. He was in college in the late 70's, grew up in the 60's, and he kind of had a moment where he was like, "You know, it feels like everything we associate with one decade really came around at the very tail end of it, and most of that decade felt a lot like the one that came before it." Like, we associate the 70's with Saturday Night Fever, but that came out in 1977, which is pretty late into the decade all things considered. Around that same time (I understand it, at least), KISS was at the zenith of their popularity, and that always kind of shocks me into realizing how close all those cultural moments were to one another despite being so vastly different.
Nov 2, 2023·edited Nov 2, 2023Liked by David V. Stewart
The most schizophrenic decade about this is definitely the 1990s. Every nostalgia piece (and I use that term VERY loosely) made by Hollywood is so incredible inaccurate in just about every way that it eventually gave me the motivation to write something like Y Signal. Every stereotype about the time is either misapplied, misunderstood, or reinterpreted incorrectly. I'm thinking things like The Simpsons '90s episode, the terrible failed Everything Sucks Netflix show, or that movie Mid-90s. It feels like these people heard about the 1990s third hand from an uncle during a drunken rant and were never actually there themselves.
I think that is the first real fracture point where we both clearly grew up and lived in different worlds. We now have separate mythologies.
I remember talking to my dad about this before, while we were watching old home videos he'd taken from the late 80's/early 90's after Stranger Things kicked the 80's nostalgia into high gear. He was in college in the late 70's, grew up in the 60's, and he kind of had a moment where he was like, "You know, it feels like everything we associate with one decade really came around at the very tail end of it, and most of that decade felt a lot like the one that came before it." Like, we associate the 70's with Saturday Night Fever, but that came out in 1977, which is pretty late into the decade all things considered. Around that same time (I understand it, at least), KISS was at the zenith of their popularity, and that always kind of shocks me into realizing how close all those cultural moments were to one another despite being so vastly different.
The most schizophrenic decade about this is definitely the 1990s. Every nostalgia piece (and I use that term VERY loosely) made by Hollywood is so incredible inaccurate in just about every way that it eventually gave me the motivation to write something like Y Signal. Every stereotype about the time is either misapplied, misunderstood, or reinterpreted incorrectly. I'm thinking things like The Simpsons '90s episode, the terrible failed Everything Sucks Netflix show, or that movie Mid-90s. It feels like these people heard about the 1990s third hand from an uncle during a drunken rant and were never actually there themselves.
I think that is the first real fracture point where we both clearly grew up and lived in different worlds. We now have separate mythologies.