The Shock of the Old

"We thought it was time to do a show about the 1970s because Retro seems to be coming back."

(Theatrical Producer, 1998)

On the face of it, this seems like an innocuous comment, presuming a common knowledge of our capacity for recycling past trends. However, this producer's choice of words is indicative. He does not claim that Retro is currently "in," but that Retro is "coming back" – as if it could do anything else! It could be said, in his defence, that Retro was "in," and then went out again for a while, before coming back into style. Either way, this ambiguous observation contains a slippage that does not so much denote a case of "history repeating," than a "repeating history."

Retro is one of many doors into a discussion of what it means to be "dated." Why, for instance, is the "out" in "out-dated" usually silent and implied? Why can’t it mean "up-dated"? Or dated in futuristic terms (i.e. that film is dated, and the date is 2020). Has the supermarket-apocalypse of the "use-by date" contributed to a mentality that ingests as quickly as it excretes?

Take the case of my friend. In 1997 he liked the Prodigy, but refused to buy their new album because "it’ll sound so dated really soon." This is no doubt a dilemma, faced daily by people buying their spring wardrobe. It seems that this logic, however, is not pursued to its destination. If we live in a world where styles come and go in the blink of an eye ("that’s so five-minutes ago"), then won’t our discarded dresses and CDs be "in" again in just another blink of that same over-stimulated organ?

Cultural critic, Frederic Jameson, described this state of affairs as "nostalgia for the present," and the signs of such a condition are multiplying around us. Those early 90s snake-skin boots at the back of your closet, for instance, are made out of the serpent of history, devouring its own tail. Postmodernism itself continues to be touted by undergraduates as an avant-garde philosophy, whereas Mark Dery provides the "timely" reminder that postmodernism is a mid-80’s phenomenon just like Franky Goes to Hollywood and Choose Life T-Shirts (which themselves were re-credified by the film Trainspotting).

And yet today’s postmodern atemporal flux, fostered by late capitalism’s media machinery, must constantly deny such a status quo in order to move the merchandise. The kids need to constantly know what is "in" and "out" in order to keep a dynamic market (hence the laughable, amnesiacal volatility of those fashion thermometers). Can we imagine a season without a dominant colour-scheme? Confusion equals consumer paralysis. No doubt The Prodigy’s new album will be in the bargain bins soon enough, however the ghost of the "cutting edge" refuses to slink off with any dignity. My advice is if you can afford it, don’t worry about its life-span. Pop music is meant to be disposable, and being a consumer entails exactly that – consumption. Preferably mindless.

Another instance of the auto-dating process became obvious to me as I followed two old-guard punks to the supermarket. They were offensive to my eye, but not perhaps for the same reason as they would be for my old Russian neighbour. I experienced their safety-pinned pants and mohawked hair as a brazen defiance of the dignity of chronology. To insist that "punk’s not dead" is proof that it is. The punk revival inhabits the temporal afterglow which comes several layers after tragedy, farce and anachronism. Post-ironic parody I suppose you could call it. Or the shock of the old. They might has well have been wearing ruffs, given the chasm which separates the late 1970s from the late 1990s.

And yet, of course, nothing’s changed. And that’s what’s so fucking depressing. "Wine, women and song," has morphed into "sex, drugs n rock-n-roll," losing little in the process. As the Beastie Boys announce proudly, "In the new millennium I’ll still be old school." Herein lies the paradox: Heroin Chic lasts far longer than anyone addicted to the stuff, and the lounge-music fad lasts longer than the 1950s themselves. All which goes to prove that while history itself has a half-life, we have even less.