Did everyone feel the earthquake yesterday? I felt it here in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Not knowing how earthquakes work or what to do when they come, our supervisors quickly evacuated the building and I walked onto Flatbush Avenue to see thousands of people milling around in the street, excited and chatting about what had just taken place. I was a little shaken up by the experience (da-dum-chh!), but I couldn't help but feel happy about the immediate result. Strangers were talking. And maybe more importantly, they had something to talk about. Like when Obama won the presidency, like being in Hartford after UConn won the national championship, like the few times when everyone seems to have something in common. It's rare now and I was happy to see it taking place. But it also made me think about how our experience of the world now is so shaped by a lack of shared experience. Life without a cultural touchstone is to me one that lacks a wholeness, that is isolating and lonely. And this brings nostalgia for a time when, even if we weren't all holding hands singing Kumbaya, there was at least a greater ability for shared experience through shared cultural focus.
Posted yesterday on Slate, Simon Reynolds
has a fantastic peice discussing the psychology around nostalgia, specifically for the grunge period of the early 1990s. As someone weaned on the music of the time, including grunge, its later, softer and mostly more annoying iterations, as well as the disparate popular movements that followed (ska comes to mind), I took a particular interest in its themes. I am, admittedly, a 90s nostalgiac. Reynolds discusses the longing for a defined culture, the feeling of living in "an era," and for the 90s in particular, an era of rebellious authenticity. Thom York sang on
The Bends in 1995, "I wish it was the sixties," a line that seems, in a way, to define the 90s. Youthful earnestness, but with a tinge of depression and hopelessness, yearning for a more authentic, powerful life, believing that things
should change, but lacking the belief that anything could. This at least, is one analysis, not exactly of the 90s as a whole, but for how early-mid 90s culture was and is conceived. For more, google "Metamodernism." Reynolds moves from the specifics of the 1990s into a discussion of how we define this time in a particular way through a particular lens, deconstructing the concept of "era" itself and the ways in which central, mainstream cultural media are necessary for the creation of our definition of not only this era, but any era, be it the 1990s, the 1920s, or the middle ages. He writes,
When people—fans, critics, industry, whoever—look back to grunge, then, what they feel wistful for is not just the particulars of that moment (flannel, shaggy hair, down-tuned guitar sounds, Tabitha Soren) or even qualities that music seemed to have then and since lost (anger, rebellion, spontaneity, anti-gloss realness, etc). It is for the concept of period vibe in itself, for "aura of era" in the abstract. It is a nostalgia for a time when the Zeit actually possessed a Geist.
The nostalgia here is not for the 90s per se, but for the escape from cultural isolation. In the age of the internet, of a million new stories from a million sources that register barely beyond the feeling of momentary sensation, I wonder where such cohesive perceptions of the world can arise. What can define us together? We're all staring at
different screens...quite literally. Collective viewership, collective listenership (is that a word?) and collective cultural understanding have been dissipating for years now, with nothing to fill the void. The best we can do to define our time, to give identity to our culture in this collection of years, is to point to its infinite divergences; we define it mainly by its lack of a defining feature. And while in many ways this can be good, I wonder if the five thousand or so MP3s on my computer are worth all the cultural loneliness and isolation. I wish it was the 90s.
Image from Taringa.net
