Once upon a time there was movement, a movement against ‘The Man’, a strange deity worshipped by the baby boomers. It demanded two core devotions, mediocrity and normality and in return you would receive ever-increasing personal security. But the Cultural Revolution freed the minds of the young and wicked and counter culture was born. Hippies, rockers, teddy boys, punks, mods, metal heads, were all a reactionary move against the status quo, two fingers up to the establishment. With every generation, counter culture grew, expanded, eventually seeping into the norm, the everyday and then, one-day, counter culture without ever even releasing became culture and the world was a happier place, right?
* The following was written on Tuesday 8th of January 2019 and consists of sweeping generalizations based on absolutely nothing more than an inept, intolerable and idle world view…
It is a rather strange sensation to pine after an era long dead before your were born, yet we inevitably romanticise the past, our ability to see bygone eras through rose tinted glasses is rather uncanny. To think back to the good ol days, in all its sepia wonder. The golden age of Hollywood, the jazz age, for some even the 80’s brings a heartfelt tear to the eye. Oh what a time it would have been to be alive, apart from the general lack of indoor plumbing, horrific lack of variety in food, oh and sweeping sexism and rampant racism, and that’s just the 80’s. Yet we will always endeavour to remember the good things, tossing a tablecloth over the bad bits defending it ‘as different time’, and so we continue with our blind admiration of yester year.
But it seems right now our obsession with the past has never been more prevalent. Evidence to this is our current cultural climate, take television for example; period dramas now extend from the first crumbling’s of the British Empire all the way through to the 1990’s, the fecking 90’s. With shows like Stranger Things, Derry Girls and Black Mirror’s latest romp filling our small screens with the crack cocaine of nostalgia. It is clear that our devotion to yesterday is now harking to the days of Dreamcast and (first generation) PlayStations not just debutants and prohibition.
Fashion, of course has swallowed this neon aesthetic like an out of date cyanide pill, with the return of monstrosities long thought dead, buried and forgotten. The likes of tiny tinted glasses, puffer jackets and double blooming denim. I think the problem is that at first it was ironic, an in-joke, a strange game of cultural one-upmanship into the bowels of poor choice. Who can look the most foolish? But instead of it being laughed out, it simply grew from a joke to a statement, a statement to a wardrobe staple. Old crap, which had long sat in charity shops given a second chance re-appearing in high street stores, under the umbrella of ‘vintage’. But the problem is, this isn’t a movement like it was the first time around, it’s just a fling, therefor fleeting.
But the greatest irony is that our virtual reality reality, is the nightmarish future predicted in the fears of the past, if perhaps on a good day. Hal 9000, The Terminator, Replicants and Furbies, each generation before the current had their own hard wired terror that beeped in the dark, and now the very generation reliving there music, cinema and fashion are fully embracing it.
Worse still, is that culture has not only ceased to create or even re-imagine: it has unapologetically copied, pinched and robbed it. All without taking any of the soul. Fashion and culture is a reflection of the time, its reaction of the day, a rebellion against those who have by those who have not. But it doesn’t work if it means nothing. And then like a teenager with a sequin gun they’ve glued awful modern mutations to it things like sour gluten free beer, giant knitting, flexitarianism and not wearing socks, all with an ironic Instagram filter.
So I choose to say no, I choose to stand up and walk against the crowd, if counter culture is culture then in the words of Huey Lewis it’s cool to be square, but wait that’s an obscure 80’s reference, oh good god no, it’s happened. I had avocado on toast for breakfast, I’m re-watching twin peaks and I’ve got a beard. I’m one of them. But I wont give in, not yet, I will drink instant coffee, I will got to Benidorm on holiday, I will fight the good fight, I will abstain from abstinence and drink non organic larger through January!
Yes, this whole over indulgent farce into the psyche of the zeitgeist was simply an excuse for falling off the wagon seven days into dry January. And no the superior half didn’t find it big or clever either, hence why I’m currently doing Feb-dry-vegan-running-smiling, not moaning-uary. I miss 2018. No scrap that, I miss 1918.
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