The Filter of Time: Culture
Why your memories are wonderful, and the oldies really are golden and Tradition usually has the right answers.
I spent my twenties and thirties working as a teacher, and although I taught all ages (literally from 3 to 83) the majority of that work was with teenagers preparing for exams in English. What began as a fairly amusing phenomenon soon became a trend and I started seeing teenagers wearing the t-shirts of bands that had been popular when I’d been their age in the 90s. The most memorable example was a girl striking out into her own style of flannel shirts over band t-shirts and ripped jeans - naturally it turned out she’d never heard of either grunge or Nirvana. I can remember chatting with a young couple in an oak panelled pub in York last summer who were debating the relative merits of Blur and Oasis - it took me a minute to figure out they hadn’t been born when both were at their peak.
There has recently been some research about how the songs of your teen years define you and your taste, and I’m certain that there’s something to this. If anything, it’s when you can commit most time to following music and its trends and when many important memories are formed and firsts happen. Yet there’s also the retro trend, and I’ve been told countless variations on the theme of “You were so lucky in the 90s, there’s no bad music from back then!1”.
This doesn’t get to the heart of the issue though.
As time passes, the only things people truly remember are the great and the bloody awful2. The mediocre, average and mundane all slip from notice and you effectively end up with a greatest hits compliation - we can remember 1995 for the Blur/Oasis rivalry and not Robson and Jerome doing covers of 1950s crooners3. It’s a similar thing with film - we can remember 1999 as a great year for cinema because of The Mummy, The Matrix and the Sixth Sense. Not the Rugrats movie.
This phenomenon is observable in most areas of culture, in fact it’s remarkable how few bestselling novels are still known or read today and have slipped entirely away from public consciousness. Peruse even recent decades and I bet you’ve heard of less than a quarter on the list and read bear handfuls. What still gets read tends to be either a classic or to have been made compulsory by a school system4. Works which were briefly cultural phenomena turn out to have been mere ephemera. I can remember sitting in the main market square in Krakow and seeing people reading the Da Vinci code in just about every European language. 20 years later it’s hard to see what the obsession with Dan Brown’s airport novel was all about.
I feel that many reading this will be able to accept the general argument, that the passage of time leads to only the best of a given cultural genre being remembered. What throws me though is how the world of politics and ideology seems to work in the exact opposite manner to this - with an almost obsessive neophilia5.
Timmy Mallet, Mr Blobby, Right Said Fred, Vanilla Ice, B*Witched, Ace of Base, and a hundred Poundland John Lennon indie wannabes all provide ample evidence this is untrue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robson_%26_Jerome
The War Poets are a good example. Sassoon, Owen et al. would not be so well known if judged on their merits and not their inclusion in generations of school curricula.
“A fondness for, or obsession with, novelty and change”
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100228417