A Generation Stuck in the Wrong Generation? The modern drought of cultural movements
By Charlotte Harris
When I remember my university days I think about watching telly with my housemates. Our favourite programmes were University Challenge, Top of The Pops and Blackadder. We all knew which of The Young Ones we were most like, and we could quote entire scenes from The League of Gentlemen. I remember sunny afternoons spent listening to our tinny radio in the garden. We bonded deeply over music, and frequented our local vinyl shops to hunt for CDs and records by the likes of The Beatles, The Jam, The Who, and The Smiths, and we loved going to gigs. Blondie, Gary Numan, and The Manic Street Preachers were some of the highlights. When we were getting ready to head out for the evening, or nursing our hangovers the next day, we would stick on a movie - The Blues Brothers, Trainspotting, The Graduate, or anything that happened to be playing on BBC Four.
My uni experience will sound familiar to many of you reading this. But here’s the odd thing: my friends and I graduated in 2023. We were born in 2002, and we consumed all of this media with our iPhones within an arm’s reach. So why were we culturally stuck in a century that we weren’t even alive in?
Perhaps it’s true that we were all doing the classic student thing of being overly pretentious in a bid to look cool, but I also think that the reason our tastes were rooted so firmly in the culture of an earlier generation, was - ironically - because we were products of our own time.
Adoration for twentieth century media is rife amongst young people. Gen-Z have put the likes of Kate Bush and Fleetwood Mac back in the charts. By typing ‘film recommendations’ into TikTok, hordes of other youngsters are recommending films like The Shawshank Redemption, Casablanca and Ferris Bueller’s Days Off. Today’s youth aren’t afraid to love the same things their parents did.
As a concept, this is not new. The Northern Soul movement, for instance, saw the youth of 1970s Northern England embrace Motown from 1960s America. Similarly, the success of Britpop in the 1990s was down to huge interest in the British Invasion music of the 1960s. However, in these cases the new generations were borrowing culture from a specific place in time and embedding it into their own identity. For Gen-Z, it is not so much that specific old things are making a resurgence, but simply that anything can be on trend. In the short term, this is brilliant. The wealth of choice gives us unlimited options, and feeds into our desire for rapidly changing fashions.
But herein lies my fear: which cultural identifiers will Gen-Z be able to claim as our own? How is our coming of age to be remembered and celebrated by future generations? Where are our Teddy Boys and Punks? What will our equivalents be of the Mods and Rockers? Which bits of culture will bind us from our music taste and questionable hairstyles to our friendships and principles? So far my list extends as far as Roadmen, and Emos - although I haven’t seen many of those in the wild for some time.
Let’s face it: our access to unlimited content has resulted in a weird kind of cultural isolation. Whilst my housemates and I were able to influence each other and grow our tastes together, the majority of young people today live with their parents. We can’t exist freely amongst other young people as previous generations did, and so we suffer from cultural drift, and lack a sense of common belonging.
Perhaps I’m being a little over dramatic. After all, in years to come our generation will at least be able to reminisce over the pandemic, Barbenheimer, and Iconic Vine Compilations. And there's still a lot of room left in the decade for exciting things to kick off.
For now, it’s too early to draw any conclusions on Gen-Z. Time will have to pass, as it tends to do, and one day we’ll find ourselves boasting that the 2010s and 2020s were a golden age. In return, our children will start ‘discovering’ the likes of Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, and wearing COVID masks as a fashion choice. Oh, how wonderful it is to be young and ridiculous!
