So there’s a subreddit called Obscure Media where people are supposed to post little fascinating clips of something no one has seen before. The reality is that younger people think anything created before they were born is rare and obscure.
It sometimes feels like 20-somethings don’t really realize that the world existed before they were born.
And before you accuse me of telling you to get off my lawn, I can say that when I was their age, i survived on a steady diet of media from before I was born… Bugs Bunny, old horror movies, all the stuff from the 30s and 40s that low rent television could afford to rebroadcast. In the age of media-on-demand, it makes it so you can avoid decades of content unless you intentionally seek it out.
I think it did, as a part of the movie soundtrack, but the dynamics are completely different today. Thanks to streaming services, young people listen to everything, old and new. It still surprises me when 20-something colleagues break out in songs from the 80s and 90s spontaneously.
I’ve thought a fair bit about this too. I think, like you say, it’s down to the sheer volume of content kids have now. We grew up on a mix of decades-old cartoons and newer stuff because it was all that was available. Three television channels, top-40 radio, and whatever magazines the corner store carried was all most of us had. That’s a very small straw through which to consume culture.
It’s also down to current availability as well. Our world was analog and only some of the analog world made it to digital. There are still hundreds of thousands (millions?) of VHS movies, cassettes, magazines, TV shows, and other things that nobody ever digitized/scanned and aren’t streaming anywhere. Kids aren’t likely to find that stuff unless they really look hard. Heck there’s plenty of stuff that I can’t find from my childhood and I know exactly what I’m looking for.
I often wonder how much of the analog world has been lost that we don’t even know about. The internet and digital-everything was like a cultural reset on a scale that perhaps only historians will appreciate.
Well, television stations erasing and reusing videotapes to cut costs, because they honestly thought no one would be interested. Or film stock degrading to the point of spontaneous combustion.
But that is a great analogy of the soda straw of content, vs. the deluge of content now. I never thought about it that way.
I regret there are no longer “oldies” stations for my kid to listen to 50s and 60s pop music like I did in the car in the 80s.
Also, heres to my parents generation for not burning down the stations who marketed the30 year old songs they listened to as kids as “oldies”. Gen X I don’t think would stand to have 80s or 90s music labeled as such!
That was some very tight editing on that ad with The Joker. They managed to show a woman changing her pants without really showing anything, yet leaving you feeling like you saw something illicit.
I remember the first time i heard that. I was in a pub in Cardiff (maybe a pool hall). I was having a quiet pint with the wife you see, and this chap guy wearing a maroon jacket came in and started dancing like a lunatic. He had the freshest moves I’ve ever seen, like he was floating on air.
Stranger Things was actually where I heard it for the very first time. I’m not as musically inclined as many people, but I’ve listened to a lot of 80s music in particular, and I can’t believe this never once came up in any playlist.
