Iqra’i

For all the hullabaloo about how 2008 is the new 1968 (a narrative that’s turned, conversationally at least, from “The Democrats will eat each other alive!” to “Generally Transformative Cultural Change and the Rise of Youth Movements”), it’s becoming impossible to notice that pop culture’s new mine for nostalgia is the period that 1968 destroyed: that of 1962-66, more or less.

Exhibit A: Mad Men. How do you produce a second season of a show so dominated by the aesthetics of the period that keeps the content fresh without sacrificing the self-absorption (not to mention those exquisitely lit costumes)? Move the action ahead from 1960 to 1962, of course! Incidentally, it’s my suspicion that the forward shift will mitigate what I perceive to be the actors’ biggest weakness, but I’ll explain that theory further once it’s had the chance to be proved or disproved by the new season.

Exhibit B: Schlitz Original 1960s Formula. Tragically, the ads I’m seeing in bus kiosks in Minneapolis don’t seem to be posted anywhere online (the official site for the beer only has ads up to the 1980s, which is probably better marketing). They’re nostalgia-soaked triptychs — “The Cars Were Cooler/The Girls Were Hotter/The Beer Was Better”, with accompanying illustrations — whose central image is a a perfectly vintage sex kitten, complete with flipped hair and heavily lined eyes. (The alternate version is a little more aggressively reactionary: “The Music Didn’t Suck/The Athletes Didn’t Cheat/The Beer Was Better”, also not available online.)

Exhibit C: The music video for Beck’s new single, which Adrian has been kind enough to embed in this post. It’s 1966, maybe: only the tiniest bit psychedelic and utterly mod-tastic. The palette! The Factory-esque cinematography! The dress-on-wall geometric action!

I only wish I could tell you why the period’s become so popular, or which of our own attributes we recognize in it. Is it the glorious artificiality and cult-of-celebrity that a worship of new media promotes? (Edie Sedgwick might have been the first celebutante.) The allure of a counterculture that was hedonistic but not nihilistic? The recognition that the traditional 20-year nostalgia cycle would bring us around to the late 1980s, which (as I understand it) was a very ugly time? Further evidence of alliance between the Boomers and Gen-Y against Gen-X?

Post theories, examples and counterexamples here.

_{I refuse to use the term “Millennials” on this blog. It may be chronologically true but the associated traits bear little to no resemblance to the reality of my generation.}