Nostalgia's Not What it Used to Be

So, here we are, almost a month into a new decade- and it can’t have escaped your notice. The already tepid TV that we’re subjected to over the Christmas season (except Doctor Who. Doctor who rules) was jam packed with programmes reviewing the last ten years. Someone somewhere must have thought we cared.

The ‘noughties’ were my decade. I was eleven when the clock struck midnight on January 1st 2000. I went to school and college and uni. I began to forge an adult identity out of the sticky, awkward clay of adolescence. I became aware of music and films and culture and art in a new and critical way. I (in theory) physically and emotionally matured. I grew up in the first decade of the twenty first century and, let me tell you, it was rubbish.

Standing where I was and looking back at the vibrant culture from the fifties onwards I can perhaps be forgiven for feeling a little peeved that I was born so late. There’s been no youth movements to speak of in the noughties. ‘Chav’ is an insult and ‘emo’ is a resurrection of an ‘80s subculture. Nu metal was the worst thing to happen to music ever.

Fashions just copied what had gone on in other decades. The fashion industry ran out of ideas so they started marketed things as ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s revival. And people actually bought it. This was also decade when you could start buying music t-shirts at Topshop. Now if you see someone in a Beatles or Rolling Stones or Jimi Hendrix t-shirt it’s actually a pretty good bet that they don’t know a single one of their songs. Of course, there are exceptions. My friend is a die hard Bowie fan and his Bowie t-shirt came from Topman, but on the whole they’re meaningless.
Mainstream music all but died as the really creative people retreated to the safe and cheap haven of the internet to market their products. There’s more artists now, but fewer are well known, and even fewer are well known and good.

Coupled, seemingly insanely, with an increase in paranoia over paedophiles the sexualisation of children reached terrifying heights. The clothes marketed to six year olds included jeans with ‘sexy’ written across the arse, thongs, padded bras, mini skirts and t-shirt bearing such delightful slogans as ‘bitch but you want it’. Barbie may have been a patriarchal tool to trap girls in tradition female roles, but at least she did stuff other than party and kiss boys like Bratz do. My Barbie had a 4x4 and went camping with Cindy and Action Man back in the ‘90s.

So much has been done to undermine women. The models got skinnier and skinnier until they started dying and the pressure to be beautiful increased as botox and plastic surgery became more readily available.

Politically speaking things have been no better. The ‘War on Terror’ has acted as the green light for our civil liberties to be systematically eroded. Health and climate change scares have been motivated, in my humble opinion, less out of concern for our welfare or that of the planet and more as a handy way of making everyone easier to control. People lost faith with their politicians and in the isolation that followed every community from the white middle classes to the Asian working classes saw an increase in extremism. Young people who’d gone to school and been friends with every race started voting for the BNP. Young Muslims whose parents had been staunch liberals were drawn into anti-West rhetoric.

And the name sucked. ‘Noughties?’ Seriosuly? It sounds like a euphemism for stealing biscuits from your Mum when you’re five.

So, yeah, 2000-2009 sucked in almost every way I can think off. Obviously there were some good bits, but this wouldn’t be a very good rant if I included the good bits, would it?

Peace and Love and enjoy the rest of 2010. x