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 For those who are unfamiliar with homestarrunner.com, it was a flash site spun off from an unpublished children’s book by a couple of hipster brothers.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.
