Sunday 12 June 2011

The Dark Decade?

More on the question of whether the Seventies were really all that bad. If they were, then why is completely unironic nostalgia for them a mainstay of popular culture?

These things are now dictated by people marginally, if at all, older than I am. Yet we associate repeated or revived Seventies music and the comedy, especially, with our own Eighties and Nineties childhood and adolescence. And we are busily ensuring that those who are that age today will take the same view in due season. Even the clothes are revived as the height of fashion on a fairly regular basis.

Think of the popularity of Life on Mars, never quite matched by Ashes to Ashes. Coronation Street pulls in an enormous audience for what is essentially what Britain would have been like today if the Eighties had never happened.

Something truly terrible happened to this country in 1979. And everybody knows it.

2 comments:

  1. ‘If they were, then why is completely unironic nostalgia for them a mainstay of popular culture?’

    There’s a lot of 70s nostalgia in my generation (if one can be nostalgic for a time when one wasn’t around).
    Whilst we keep hearing of the three day week (which was unavoidable due to the oil crisis), a time when young people were practically guaranteed a job, accommodation and transport and popular culture produced singles which were not covers of previous boyband melodies and films which were not sequels to comic book adaptations hardly seems the nightmare era that a lot of others define it as.

    Of course, it would be stretching a point to say that Alex Salmond also offers voters a Britain when the 80s never happened, but it would also be difficult to deny that as a facet of SNP appeal.

    Perhaps the deeper irony is that I think Scottish people did assimilate the best features of popular culture and liberalism which English people, or their representative class, have not. Fettes boy Tony Blair seems to see social liberalism as a license to betray his country rather than in any genuinely anti-imperialist paradigm (and I think I can guess how many black, Hispanic and poor people Blair speaks to when he visits the country he betrayed us for; probably about as many as David Cameron would want to meet when he goes to fawn over them).

    By contrast I think Scotland has done pretty well in abolishing the class system (I’d have no idea or interest whatsoever about what economic background Alex Salmond has) whilst at the same time wanting to preserve our culture.

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  2. Scotland has done pretty well at abolishing the class system? Pull the other one!

    I liked the rest, though.

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