MOVING ON: THE 80'S HAS BEEN OVER FOR A REALLY LONG FUCKING TIME

...or has it?
I can't go a day without seeing some flashback of the 80's. I'll be online chatting with friends and get sent a link, only to realized I have been "rick rolled". This last year alone has just been a barrage of fanny packs, faux mullets (hell even real mullets), 80's themed parties, and raybans, and high top sneakers with air pumps in the padding (I mean, really, the pump alone must outweigh any extra 'oomph' you were hoping the air would give you when you imagined yourself flying high to dunk the ball like Jordan).
To be honest, I think most of these cultural re-phenomenon's, if you will, are best summed up in the YELLE music video...



If you don't know anything about it, you probably wouldn't be surprised if I had told you that was my favorite music video when I was 4. Well, it was made like within the last year.

Yelle might be an extreme case. There are countless other examples of this resurgence and return to the 80's.

Dan Deacon as well as Crystal Castles often use 80's video game noises in their songs:


[[I've just seen both of these artists live within the past 6 months and the crowd was very edgy and hip. 8-bit music seems to be really taking off.]]

New Cut Copy album, In Ghost Colours, is 15 tracks of pure 80's hits, only done in 2008.


Not only are we seeing this in music, but I've been seeing it in the gallery too. Explosions of neon colors and neon lights take you straight back to the 80's on a jet plane.
(above) Multi-media extravaganza exhibition titled "a very anxious feeling" by assume vivid astro focus (avaf) @ in New York City. Eli Sudbrack and is said to contain many members who are all born anytime between the 20th and 21st centuries in various parts of the world.

Anyways, you get the point. So what's going on?

I'm going to start out with a bold claim that nothing, at this point, is original and that we, as a collective population, are the products of re-appropriation, a world built up on the idea of a simulacrum. Given that, it is only natural that our processes, fashions, and other cultural tokens are cyclical in nature; they are 'novel' or 'innovative' at a certain point and then are regurgitated into the masses and then again fashioned and re-contextualized decades later. Prime example, the 80's.

I only use the 80's as the main topic of discourse because, I don't know if anyone else agrees with me, it seems as if the 80's has overstayed it's welcome a little longer than other 'decade' trends have. I remember in the middle of high school, the idea of the 80's becoming the next trend hit. That was about 6 years ago. And it made sense for the 80's to come back around 2000-2002 ish. 20 years for a culture to return seemed normal given that the whole 60's-70's hippie thing had just died off (Austin Powers, etc). But really, it's 2008. In fashion, a 6-8 year old trend is like wearing polka dots with plaid. It just doesn't happen.
But I think in this case, the explanation is simple. All of us who were made in the 80's or grew up amidst all things 8-bit, flashy, glamy, and synthy, are now in our twenty-somethings. And as everyone knows, the twenty-somethings will always be hot. We set the pace in what's 'cool' for the most part and what hip and in. As I'd like to put it, young enough that everyone older wants to be us, but old enough to have a firm say in what's hot.

All in all, I think I may have come to terms with the whole nostalgia of being "made in the 80's". I may as well enjoy my music filled with roland 909 and synths galore while it's still 'fashionable' to do so because once those "made in the 90's" become twenty-somethings, listening to Tears for Fears will just be plain stupid.

//

Bibliography:
Lustro, Drew. Aim conversation. 4/16/2008.

Drew Lustro, I trust you on this.