About fifteen years ago I started noticing a curious phenomenon–a sort of jump-cutting in time. The effect wasn’t internally consistent, like when I sit down to write at 7 PM, get into a groove, and suddenly it’s midnight. The temporal anomaly I’m referring to is oddly selective. What happens is that the years continue their orderly march, but out of nowhere some piece of pop culture that I still think of as new has become a dusty old artifact.
“What’s the big deal?” I can hear many of you protesting. “That’s nothing new. It happened to Boomers with the Beatles, Jonesers with disco, and Xers with Star Wars. Time sneaks up on you. It’s just a normal part of getting old.”
To which I would reply that I agree. However, I contend that this pop culture time-slippage effect has been accelerated and amplified by the explosive growth of consumerism that didn’t really kick into high gear until the 80s. I further posit that the subsequent exhaustion of the West’s cultural capital has locked in this trend.
My first experience of a selective time shift came while watching a Homestar Runner cartoon. For those who are unfamiliar with homestarrunner.com, it was a flash site spun off from an unpublished children’s book by a couple of hipster brothers. The site caused something of a sensation during W’s reign for being among the first to capitalize on nostalgia for saner times–think of a less pandering, animated Ready Player One, and you’ve got the general tone.
The point is, Homestar Runner made its bones by lampooning 70s, 80s, and 90s pop culture. The site followed the adventures of a weird gang of muppets living in a time warp where 8 track tapes, the Commodore 64, and Saturday morning cartoons were contemporaneous with emo bands and dead-end call center jobs. The creators’ nostalgia fueled the whole enterprise, and new content became fewer and farther between as real life forced them to contemporize.
A brief aside: I grew up on Nintendo until high school, when I switched to the PlayStation and never looked back. The days of single-console houses weren’t quite over yet, and as a result I missed the entire N64 era.
Fast forward to the early aughts. I’m checking out a Homestar Runner Halloween episode with a buddy. Much of the fun of HR’s yearly Halloween cartoons was trying to identify the characters’ costumes. In keeping with the site’s theme, each muppet-creature would go as some pop culture footnote from a bygone decade.
I guessed most of the costumes correctly, but there was one I just couldn’t figure out. Finally I gave up and asked my buddy.
“He’s Tingle from Majora’s Mask.”
“What’s that?”
“An N64 Zelda game.”
“You mean Ocarina of Time?”
“No. The one after that.”
“They made one after that?”
At the time, I still considered Ocarina of Time to be “that new Zelda game” because I hadn’t played it yet. The twofold revelation that a) it already had a sequel and b) the sequel was already old enough to be Homestar Runner joke fodder, proved quite unsettling.
Are stories like these of pop culture leaving us behind a normal part of growing up? Absolutely. But the relatively recent substitution of pop culture for the bonds of faith and community that used to inform American life seems to have contributed to members of generations X and onward experiencing more such instances of temporal displacement.
There’s another, more sinister aspect to this phenomenon that heightens the already disorienting experience of learning that the Weird Al single you’d meant to buy on release but kept putting off is now old enough to drive–like children born on September 11, 2001 are now. It’s an empirical fact that Western pop culture–and even Western technology itself–has remained largely static since the late 1980s.
Brian’s characters are as interesting as Nick Cole’s.
Everybody loves the Homestar Runner. He is a terrific athlete.
“… think of a less pandering, animated Ready Player One, and you’ve got the general tone.”
Purely tangential, but if you want a painful taste of RPO, but seasoned with Riff Trax/MST3K verbal evisceration, Mike Nelson’s “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” shows you how AIs fail at writing books, grinding up Ernest Cline’s shovelware book for landfill as a demo.
I’m in a kind of temporal displacement right now as people stampede to the repackaged and re-censored Diablo II.
I hadn’t even heard about that, and I’m Twitter mutuals with one of the original Diablo II devs.
Just played through the original version a couple years back. What a game!
With Majora’s Mask and Ocarina of Time, the one came out right after the other so quickly that it was more of an expansion than a sequel (at least compared with the way most of the mainline Zelda games have gone, anyway).
That explains a lot.
“A brief aside: I grew up on Nintendo until high school, when I switched to the PlayStation and never looked back.”
ABAP, baby!
*Ballin’ starts playing*
More seriously, for me this has happened a couple of times, though in a slightly different way: something I think of as relatively recent (say, a videogame from 2012 or 2016) is referred to by someone else as “a huge part of their childhood”.
People now old enough to drink in most US states were 12 when Mass Effect 3 came out.
Disorienting, isn’t it?
Indeed. I remember the controversy over Mass Effect 3’s ending as one of the first gaming-related scandals that I actively paid attention to online.
Listening to Weird Al is itself weird now, because his versions have surpassed the originals for decades now. Word Crimes absolutely demolishes Blurred Lines, for instance. The non-parody tracks on his last album were all rock songs, too, because even he knows how bad off the genre has been since the ’00s.
I’ve never really had a problem of time slippage. Everything feels as far away as it should have. Though I will admit hearing that Oasis is putting out a live album for a 1996 show that happened 25 years ago and seeing all the people who were there tagging themselves on social media is quite a trip. Really solidifies how much of a different world it was back then.
Weird Al has never gotten due credit for his musicianship.
I listen occasionally to ToddInTheShadows, a Youtube music reviewer. Despite his uh…questionable…politics, which he doesn’t keep entirely out of his reviews, he has one of the most simple and accurate descriptions of Weird Al that I’ve ever heard (paraphrased):
“Being a comedian and staying relevant is hard. The same is true of music. Weird Al has managed to stay relevant in BOTH fields for forty years. This makes him one of the most phenomenally talented and hardworking people in the entire industry.”
“Word Crimes” is actually insanely brilliant.
I still haven’t heard the song it’s based on, so Al’s parody is the real version to me.