Movie remakes might not be quite enough to make the 30 year number work. I feel like there is some confirmation bias here.
Consider "Happy Days", made in the 1970s to celebrate the 1950s. The wave of mods and paisley jangle pop in the 1980s to celebrate the 1960s. All the "Big Star" sounding bands of the late eighties and early nineties celebrating Alex Chilton circa 1972.
I would guess the movies are a lagging trend, the real number is likely 20 years, approximately equating to mid childhood, early teens as being idealised and getting expressed in successful adulthood at 30 in pop culture by those who experienced those times in formative years.
That would put the first wave of 80s nostalgia in the 2000s[0]
Stranger things is more like nostalgia for early 2000s 80s nostalgia.
>Stranger things is more like nostalgia for early 2000s 80s nostalgia.
Vaporwave music and all the visual design around it embraces this pretty hard. If a clip isn't literally set to 80s commercials it's at least full of VHS distortion effects.
Half the comments on any video seem to be teenagers talking about nostalgia for a time they never experienced
Yes, so much this. And one of your links mentions 1998s movie "The Wedding Singer" with Adam Sandler, a soundtrack full of 80s-hits and a very old Billy Idol in a guest role at the end. This was about the start of the 80s-nostalgia that never really faded until this day.
I think something is very off about nostalgia these days and my best guess is that digital networks alter the way our collective memory works.
The remake dates is a clever approach to quantifying the trend.
Nostalgia might be driving it in part, but I've also seen a lot of it driven by people who never experienced the era. Young adults fascinated by the era just before the one they were born into, just barely out of reach but still available to their casual awareness.
It's not always the 30 year olds driving the trends out of nostalgia, sometimes it's the 20 year olds pining for an idealized version of an era they never experienced themselves, but can easily intuit.
“pining for an idealized version of an era they never experienced“
Best illustrated, perhaps, by international man of mystery Austin Powers. Is there a remake in the works? Would be about time considering how the age of the film will soon be approaching the age the time it referenced had while filming. That remake would be quite meta retro, almost reaching the complicated stack of nostalgia layers in 2077.
Midnight in Paris is a fun take on this phenomenon among other things.
I don't know about the quantification. But there certainly is something about the pining for an idealized prior time period. One good example today is the retro appeal of film, vinyl, and even instant photography. You also see it in design and fashion. I'd say certain aspects of 60s style are seen as appealing today whereas in the 70s-80s, they'd just be seen as old-fashioned. You're really talking about the point where tired becomes retro-chic.
While I definitely recognize there’s a cycle, I also can’t but feel that old media is regurgitated because the state of what we are creating now. I don’t think we’ll be doing the same 20-30 years now with Marvel movies.
The public appetite for genres comes and goes — superhero movies were big in the 90s, too — but I do think you're right that the recent development of "everything (mostly), all the time (mostly), on-demand (mostly)" availability of content at least partially confounds this cultural rhythm. My kids are nearly teens and have never intentionally listened to radio, which drove and reflected popular music tastes when I was a kid.
Although there are still certain broad pop culture phenomena, it is certainly a much more fragmented landscape than it used to be. I'm very aware that I'm pretty ignorant of the current music scene for the most part. When I was still going to large tech events pre-COVID, I definitely started seeing bands at parties that I had never heard of (and mostly wouldn't listen to by choice).
And while I watch some shows that are on the pop culture radar to a greater or lesser degree, I'm not necessarily watching them when they first hit streaming. Certainly there's very little that's the equivalent of Must See Thursday on NBC where most(?) people were aware of certain shows even if they didn't regularly watch them.
I've see this in ebay prices for vintage tech. Strong uplift in demand in the last 5 years for early Macintosh computers, as everyone starts to have nostalgia for their childhood and now has enough income to engage in the hobby.
I wouldn't peg 30 years as the magic number, but roughly tech products have gone through a process of a slide into obsolescence in the first 15-20 years, followed by a resurgence in interest and price increase over the next 10+ years.
The nostalgia pendulum is real, but, but, in music and cars it seems there is no momentum after the 90s and the 90s fare worse than 80s and 70s and even 60s.
Back in the second part of the 90s we had already some 70-80s music revival nights. Plus groups like daft punk were already rediscovering 80s. Now it's 2020, how many 2000 and 2010 music revival nights are out there? just some 90s. Plus the usual 70 and 80.
Cars? nothing really new after the countach I am afraid. Even hypercars look like racing prototype class cars with a bit more refinement. The delta, the countach itself, the giulia gt, have been restomodded or redone. What modern cars are likely to deserve such treatment?
Pop culture has only been a thing since mass media.
The Internet accelerated the existing fragmentations in pop culture that were really always there, but became prominent in the late 80's/early 90's.
The fact that music from anywhere, anytime was downloadable (despite the industry's attempts to stop it), combined with the fact you could chat with anyone from anywhere that had an Internet connection, was the beginning of the end of a mass pop culture. It was the beginning of "bottom up" control of the media. This morphed into streaming and social media, which continues.
So the 90's is it. The only cultural phenomenon comparable in the 00's and 10's are game-centered. So there may be a bit of mass nostalgia about that popping up after the oncoming 90's retro wave.
What would cause a return to pop culture is heavy regulation turning the Internet back into the TV of the 50's through 90's, which is not impossible. However I feel further saturation of current US political discourse into social channels is going to make what used to be pop culture and mainstream media an impossible thing for anything other than political discourse in the US. The countercultures and social bubbles are going to turn into essentially "Internet gated communities" that only come out into the mainstream to fight.
>There’s a reason that the culture of the 1980’s is experiencing a resurgence right now.
I stopped reading right there. The first signs of 80s-nostalgia went off in the electro nostalgia in electronic music circles around the year 2000, just a few years later we had 80s-shows on mainstream TV in germany, nonstop.
The 80s-Nostalgia-Trip itself is running for 20 years now and normal nostalgia cycles can't explain this phenomenon.
The problem with talking about N-year cycles is that every decade or other period is an amalgam of various styles/culture/films/tech/etc. that are more or less relevant to different age groups and subcultures. I'm guessing you can pick and choose to support just about any theory although is probably is generational to a certain degree.
I put that such a clear awareness of this phenomenon will alter the way it continues to happen going forwards.
i.e. this is so plain to see that it'll somehow change its own dynamics.
this is specially accute due to political implications (e.g. campaing managers who understand this and thus instructed Trump to resemble Reagan's rhetoric until the point when people somehow start to catch on to this manipulations by means of, for example, this and similar articles)
...but maybe I'm too generous (or optimistic) about the capabilities of "the unwashed masses of people"?
I don't think that it is that complex. People are becoming increasingly hedonistic (my own opinion in life, comparing older generations and newer generations in how they reward themselves, saving habits etc). So that leads to people not really interested in the "smarts side of trends".
You don't attribute savings trends to anything but the hedonistic desires of an entire generation? Really, you can't think of anything else at all? Try hard now.
Not quite the desires, but the access and availability of confirmation of those desires, through technology from MySpace to Facebook, and now TikTok and Instagram, almost certainly plays a role.
I believe narcissism and hedonistic desire is likely relatively constant across generations. What differs is the technology each generation is raised in and has access to. I believe (opinion, I'd like to see studies about it actually) that the easy access to the narcissism reinforcing tech Gen-Z grew up with has made the expression of these desires more pronounced, and not at all in a positive way.
Personally, I've seen it in action (of course, this is anecdata, now, so not necessarily generalizable). I know a 20-something guy and am involved in his and his friends' lives to a certain extent. These young adults haven't had adversity much different from anything I faced growing up in the 80s with a deeply impoverished family living in the south, or that my wife faced when she was growing up in the same era, but they are far less resilient (in almost every aspect) and tend to treat every little setback as a major trauma. I'd say the outliers of my generation (in terms of emotional instability and lack of resilience) have become the norm in Gen-Z, and I hypothesize it is due largely to the prevalence of modern social media and how it facilitates and encourages this extreme-drama view.
I guess that settles it. You know a 20 something guy. Why even bother mentioning falling real wages, increased housing prices, rising student debts, etc. it’s TikTok’s fault.
HN used to be a place where comments were considered charitably, and at least a passing attempt at replying to the actual comment and not a made-up version to score a cheap rhetorical point was more common.
That is my charitable response. Your anecdata is worthless.
The economic situation of young Americans has significantly declined over time. Failure to recognize that as, hard stop, the most important factor, means your perspective is way off.
Consider "Happy Days", made in the 1970s to celebrate the 1950s. The wave of mods and paisley jangle pop in the 1980s to celebrate the 1960s. All the "Big Star" sounding bands of the late eighties and early nineties celebrating Alex Chilton circa 1972.
I would guess the movies are a lagging trend, the real number is likely 20 years, approximately equating to mid childhood, early teens as being idealised and getting expressed in successful adulthood at 30 in pop culture by those who experienced those times in formative years.
That would put the first wave of 80s nostalgia in the 2000s[0]
Stranger things is more like nostalgia for early 2000s 80s nostalgia.
Edit: the twenty year rule? [1] [2]
[0] http://www.inthe00s.com/archive/inthe00s/smf/1342451842.shtm...
[1] https://decades.medium.com/how-1980s-nostalgia-ruled-the-200...
[2] https://www.furious.com/perfect/culturecycles.html