A while ago I tweeted that many middle-aged people fail to understand Gen Z’s interest in the decades they came of age into. Their mistake is believing the young are fascinated by the actual history and daily life of past generations rather than by their aesthetic ideas.
Of course, being Twitter a platform that prefers the instant thought and a limited word-count to actual elaboration of one’s musings, I got some comments from people who had a problem understanding what I meant. It is no fault of them, because it is objectively something hard to explain, given that what I talk about is still nebulous even in the mind of Zoomers. Hence, I will try to expand on the subject here.
First and foremost, we must have a clear image of how the Zoomers grew up in regards to consumption of media. As I wrote in my previous post, they are people who saw the rise and the golden age of YouTube, and witnessed how different the platform was back then. While radio stations and TV music channels stopped broadcasting music, and being music shops by then just a relic of an old world, YouTube was the best and favorite way to discover new music. Except that they ended up finding old music they liked a lot, for tons of reasons1.
Do you want to know my favorite band when I was 14/15? Led Zeppelin. Do you want to know how did I discover them? Through YouTube. My parents had never been rock n’ roll aficionados, nor other relatives of mine listened to the band regularly. Were it not for the Internet, one of the best rock bands of all time would just be a name like any other to me.
This is the cultural landscape we grew up with: as the artistic world outside started to become boring and dull, a digital world easily accessible promised plenty of hidden treasures waiting to be brought back into the light from the ruins of the past, by teenagers whose taste was still in formation. And that is when things should become clear: to us youngsters this stuff is not historical in the slightest. We did not experience it as history, at best we just had to come to terms with the fact that its creators were older than our parents. Because we were, again, discovering it for the first time in that moment, and enjoying it as it was and because we liked it, not because of historical value, and because we shared it with our friends who did the same, the impact of old art was in our present and immediate.
This is why Gen Z does not care about the actual history of the 70s, the 80s, or the 90s, not when discussing aesthetic matters anyway. We care very little about your actual childhood (and may you forgive us for it); what is a factor of attraction is the aesthetics that surrounded it, and those elements of it that became cult as the years went by. This immediate enjoyment of old artwork, detached from the actual historical context, created the interesting consequence an appreciation of it that goes out of a confined timespace. Young people absorb old art as something that is relevant in the moment, ready to be re-elaborated by taking what makes it good and transferring it into the current context.
It is a difficult process to understand, and ultimately it requires not only for Zoomers to create clear examples through their art, but also for older generations to cancel the progressive mindset out of their minds2. But it is what I mean for “experiencing the old times on steroids”. I repeat: historical events do not matter in this point of view. The impulse is to take certain elements that the past decades used to describe and narrate themselves, strip them of their historical context, get a stylized aesthetic idea, and re-elaborate it, transfer those ideal sounds, images, stories into the present.
A good example, and explanation, has been provided by a friend:
There is widespread need for a type of energy that the West has lacked for twenty years. Youthful energy that is confident, irreverent in a non-obnoxious way, and sure intrinsically fallen but nonetheless striving for what is good and worthy of love; Zoomers move with insecurity in a world where everyone else tells them what they have to do, and most times they are wrong messages, dissonances coming from all sides, which makes them furtherly confused. As I said another time on Twitter, everyone knows what the Zoomer needs, but no one cares what he wants. And most of all Zoomers want to find their way, a chance to take control of their own means and be confident in themselves.
In the aesthetic and cultural sense, this way us youngsters implicitly seek is the idea of what the old world could have become, and how we can retrace our steps to get where we should have gone. Can we get the mix of positivity and impetuosity of glam rock, and bands like Dokken or RATT, and overcome the negatives: the problems of that era, and the industrial complex of corporate music that has in the end destroyed the culture?
This is, at its core, what the Zoomer generation is looking for. The feeling is still cloudy, because Gen Z is entering adulthood just now and is still learning to take initiative and control of its life. But as the first experiments are coming to the light, I think we are soon going to see this attitude transform into something concrete and coherent.
Old songs often got into recommendations due to their classic nature, the music industry was already coughing blood at the time, etc.
With “progressive mindset” I am not referring to politics, but to the idea, instilled in almost everyone born before the late ‘90s, that time goes always on, that the past is to be left behind completely without looking back, and that the world must always move towards the new thing.