Getting through COVID-19 has lead to a number of coping efforts. I’m sure we all have done that. I have…
- Tending to minor creature comforts at home, like investing in a good pair of new slippers. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of them.
- An absurd amount of MST3K.
- Drove to a different part of the city to just take a walk around the neighborhood – but with different surroundings than I am use to.
- Assembling Lego kits as a form of meditation.
- Discovering the music style called LoFi and making ChilledCow effectively the SNES RPG game theme music of home office.
Nostalgia use to be recognized as disease state. I could sort of see that. Nostalgia is a backwards looking mental state with a longing for more comfortable past times. Now a little bit of reminiscing is not a bad thing. But to immerse one’s self in the past all of the time should be a hint that your present life has problems and your future doesn’t look better – and nostalgia is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself.
Patrick (H) Willems blew my mind with his video essay, How Austin Powers Predicted the Future of Cinema. (Really, it’s deeper than it sounds, give it a watch.) One of points he tried to make a case of was that the 60s were a very different time because for all of the rebelliousness, forward-looking instead of backwards looking. Music was different than it ever was before. We were going to the moon – and beyond?! Fashion? Anything goes – try it!
Now one might say “Not true, Everything is a Remix™, and the 60s were no different.” But the intent was different. The intent was to look forward.
How much backwards looking culture do you see around you now? How much has the intent to look backwards?
Which finally leads me to the beginning of the rabbit hole that was the original point of the essay. Let’s see, how did the path of discovery go?
- Years ago, back when Boing Boing was still good (pre second-term Obama administration), I discovered Smash TV’s masterwork Skinemax.
- Over the years, from time to time, I wandered through Smash TV’s (mostly defunct-junk) Tumblr site. Usually very late at night (make that a sleepless night) just looking for something interesting. Insomnia is boring.
- Came across the music video for Topaz Gang’s “why can’t you sleep”, which proceeded to become an ear-worm with me, though I couldn’t tell you why.
- Discovered Vaporwave. And about 5 other music genres I had no idea about.
Saw a video essay on Vaporwave, learned about Hypnagogic pop, a music style referring to the psychological state “between waking and sleeping, liminal zones where mis-hearings and hallucinations feed into the formation of dreams.”
Now I, of all people, will not be up to the task of really explaining Vaporwave – Mister Amazing did that already. It is the juncture of taking a song from the 80s, slowing it down to 75%, looping bits of it, maybe adding some beats, cobble together an album-cover to go along with it made up Sega Dreamcast game-case artwork, Windows 95 screen grabs, some old-anime bit, and you have Vaporwave – the whole Ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ of it. Your young-adulthood, slice and diced, returned back to you. Go ahead. Drift back in your imagination to that late night in that mall that you went to all the time, closing time drawing near, its empty, nobody’s here anymore, and that piped in “please buy things!” music is degrading like a VHS copy of Back to the Future that has be played a thousand times.
My point is that I see a lot of backwards looking mentality these days. I am guilty of some of it myself. I am challenging myself to limit how much I do that and challenge others to do the same.
M.