At The Awl, Josh Kurp writes about what VH1’s shows “I Love the 80s” and “I Love the 90s” did for our memories of those decades—basically, he argues, they undermined and falsified and replaced the truth of what we actually experienced. Revisiting them recently, he also discovered that the shows had less actual content than he thought they did: [T]he talking heads aren’t so much telling jokes as they are explaining the film/show/album/whatever, and then either singing or quoting from the material. There are virtually no jokes; the show is simply for people who say, ‘Hey, I remember that!’”
I didn’t remember Tron, because I’d never seen it. But I felt like I did. Likewise, I spoke about ‘Til Tuesday as if I had heard “Voices Carry” constantly on the radio in 1985, which I did not. My friends do the same thing, for things for which they weren’t actually alive—and it’s not like we’re talking about the Beatles here, we’re talking about MTV VJs and Pound Puppies. Our memories of things we couldn’t possibly remember were brought to us by VH1, and they’ve stuck.
His take on how those shows served as bizarre kinds of backgrounders on the relics of one’s own generation is pretty spot on, but I don’t think nostalgia is “false” just because it’s directed at a movie you haven’t actually seen. A movie couched in a particular time—sure, like Tron, which I haven’t seen either—is rarely just about what’s actually playing out on the screen. The memory of it is about everything surrounding it, and that’s as much what VH1’s joking decade experts are riffing on as anything else. Secondhand nostalgia isn’t necessarily any more “false” that genuine nostalgia—whatever that is. The slipperiness and uncertainty of memories has everything to do with what nostalgia is, and it’s part of why people get so defensive about it in the first place.
Meanwhile, at Capital Gillian Reagan declares 2010 “The Year of 90s Nostalgia,” full of reunions of 90s bands, a few zines being published, vintage glasses, lots of plaid, beards, awfully familiar political struggles, 90’s-centric Tumblrs and of course, Tavi Gevinson.
“Roughly speaking, the 1970s had its ’50s obsession, the 1980s had its ’60s, the 1990s had its ’70s, and the 2000s had its ’80s,” she writes. “Our nostalgia is right on schedule.” Her verdict is more positive and hopeful than Kurp’s: “It is easy to pine for the past, and ignore its ugly chapters, instead of figuring out how to make a future in which we want to feel present. The fear of repeating ourselves is just like nostalgia itself: cyclical and universal.”