Born too late

Undoubtedly, a relatively large number of articles from The Onion are funny. However, there is a considerably smaller pool of them that are not only funny but, for lack of a better term, profound. Today I was reminded of this trusty old chestnut, in which the writers quite presciently forecasted a looming "retro crisis," in which the continually-shrinking temporal gap between events and the nostalgic echoes they engender could result in the dreaded "futurified recursion loop." While the article didn't get too specific about what form this conflagration could take, I have a suspicion it might involve us crashing into Kelsey Grammer over and over again.

While I spotted no skirts today (see preceding posts) I did spot what I believe is the first genuine intrusion of my middle-school era across the retro threshold and into the main front of mass-market-backed commercialized nostalgia. Another one of those MuchMusic flip-bys that had previously reintroduced me to Avril Lavigne's thighs this time resulted in me watching the latest production by an outfit known as hellogoodbye. Wikipedia informs me that their name is a reference to "the general transience of opportunities." I think their name is a reference to the general shortage of names that haven't been taken already.

Anyway, the video in question will be reproduced below, as including YouTube clips spices up the visual impact of the blog and breaks up blocks of text.


Now, pathfinding tendrils of '90s nostalgia have been creeping into our era for some time now. MC Hammer pretty much had a retro incubation period of about seven years, tops--driving up and down your town's main street pumping "2 Legit 2 Quit" from your pickup truck definately had ironic cachet by around 1999. His hip hop colleague Snow managed to do one better, timing his comeback album to exactly coincide with that moment that a new release from "that Informer guy" would tug on our heartstrings, although I gather his prison sentence had something to do with that, too. I don't want to even have to mention Dustin Diamond, so I won't.

But I think this video marks the '90s's Wedding Singer moment. There's a cross-the-board referencing of the early '90s--the hobbies, the fashion, and so on. There's the direct linkage between the band in question and the childhood era that they would have found themselves in at that time. There's also the complete lack of wink-wink nudge-nudge. This is key, I think--retro in the purest sense isn't at all self-conscious or apologetic about its origins. It just uses visual cues to set a broader tone as innocuously as possible.

Perhaps more interestingly of all is the phenomena of time-collapse. The video openly anchors itself in the summer of 1991, and certain aspects of it do tend to match that quite nicely--neon T-shirts, Ray-Ban sunglasses, twisty straws, and even, broadly speaking, the electronic pop genre as a whole. But pogs are definately anachronistic to this period; while the game dates back to the '30s in Hawaii, some of the more unusual Googling of my internetting career confirms my personal suspicions that the pog craze was distinctly tied to the 1994-1995 period, or in other words they're about four years early. The keytars are a nice touch--nice to know someone other than the Doodlebops are making use of them--but I think there's a bit of historical revisionism at play here, too, as I reckon the keytar was good and dead by '91. It's like a special fictional '90s has been created which blends together all sorts of catchy images without real regard for historical accuracy, per se.

The even more thought-provoking part is that hellogoodbye were probably too young to be going to overnight camp in 1991. (Lead singer Forrest Kline is apparently 22 at the moment.) Throw in the fact that their target audience is even younger--back in 1991 they were probably more worried about not wetting the bed--and I think the plot thickens considerably as to the whole appeal of this retro thing. You might think that retro is aimed, first and foremost, and those who lived through it the first time. Not so. I think it's aimed at those who were just a shade too young to have lived through it the first time. It's as if deep down we all wish we had been born five years earlier, that we'd been some sort of cooler older cousin. There's this mild pathological myth we tell ourselves about our childhoods, somehow coaxing our birthdates back a few years and retroactively maturing our perspectives.

My age cohort is just as guilty of this sin, I think. There's a heavy dose of Degrassi nostalgia linked to we early-'80s children, for instance, even though its honestly a bit of a stretch for some of us to claim Snake and Joey Jeremiah and the gang as true contemporaries. We might reflexively look back at Cobain as the Jesus of our generation, without doing the cold hard math and calculating how old we were when he did himself in. (JFK-style, I can still remember where I was when I heard the news, but it's revisionism of the worst sort to think that this event through our entire grade into some sort of state of paralyzed mourning. That was a privilege for the older kids.)

This little pattern might help clear up the whole pog mystery, as that likely was a part of the band's childhood which got caught in the shuffle when the whole video was timeshifted the requisite five years back. It also explains why no real premium was placed on historical accuracy: the 18-year-olds calling in requests to see hellogoodbye aren't likely to realize that the relationship between pogs and Ray-Bans is akin to the relationship between cave men and dinosaurs.

Postscript: For reasons I'm not quite solid on, I also get an odd Napoleon Dynamite vibe from the video. Now there's a movie that did something which was in many ways even weirder, namely play fast and loose with the concept of era altogether. Production design clearly dates huge chunks of that movie back to the near past, and yet other elements clearly set it in the present, and I get the overall sense that you're honestly not supposed to worry too much about that, or just chuckle about how backwards rural Idaho is. In writing this, I was also reminded of Donnie Darko, which also has a fairly unusual relationship with the year 1988 which eschews easy categorization.