“We are more like a moment than this moment right now”
This lyric is from a song — Starry Night by Peggy Lou — which is two years old now but new to me. It’s insubstantial but strangely satisfying; and worthy of comment, I think, because it sounds like it could have been made any time in the last 40 years.
Culture seems to have got stuck at some point. Think how different 1962 besuited pop was from ’68 Sargeant Pepper psychadelia, from ’76 disco and fusion, from ’79 punk, from ’83 George Michael on a yacht, from ’88 second summer of love, from ’93 Seattle plaid, from ’95 Metalheadz, from speed garage in the new millenium. How did art and literature change in those decades? How different was 2000 from 1980 from 1960 from 1940?
How different is 2020 from 2000? How can Nathan Barley still be current?
Maybe it isn’t. Maybe I’m just too out of touch. Maybe it is the curse of middle age to feel this way.
But it seems to me that the great flowering the internet should have brought has instead splintered culture into a thousand genres that now just repeat and refine what went before. I’m not the only one to have noticed this. We mark time by tiny alterations in the cut of jeans and the marketing cycles of white trainers:
Dunks < Vejas < Airforce Ones < Reebok Classics < Stan Smiths < Converse All Stars < Air Max Ones < Dunks.
New music samples the sample, not the original. It’s all the same stuff but with added pretense to irony. Sometimes its even better than the original.
The only thing that seems at all new — that makes me feel part of a different generation — is gender fluidity.
Whither the next twenty?
