• dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️English
    32•6 days ago

    I had to explain the concept of Vaporwave to my father, a musician who was active throughout the '80’s. I told him it’s zeitgeist for an era that never actually happened. So I think this hits the nail on the head.

    There are similar, albeit less ᴀ ᴇ s ᴛ ʜ ᴇ ᴛ ɪ ᴄ, notions for other decades as well.

    Everyone thinks the 1950’s were a nonstop sock hop and an episode of Leave it to Beaver.

    Everything thinks the entirety of the 1960’s was Woodstock.

    Everything in the 1970’s was brown and orange, or wood grain, and had a ridiculous mustache on it.

    …But then, everything that everyone knows happened didn’t actually happen in the decade everyone thinks it did anyway.

  • @[email protected]English
    14•6 days ago

    80s/90s according to tv: You live in a large house with a huge bedroom and own everything anyone at the time would have wanted.

    80s/90s reality: You more than likely owned almost nothing. Except for the lucky few, you were most likely broke and everyone you knew were broke too. You did happen to own a piece of shit VCR.

    • @droporainEnglish
      15•6 days ago

      Idk I remember if you worked at Sears selling VCRs you could afford a modest home. Or at least an apartment without having roommates. You could get a car and see concerts, ballgames, and movies. The food wasn’t all garbage processed milk and eggs were cheap a lb of burger was like 2 bucks. Cable TV/streaming wasn’t 150 dollars a month. You still could make it work. After 9/11 that dream ended.

      • sunzu2
        10•6 days ago

        2001-2008 there was still hope… but yeah once they bailed out the parasite class, then successfully suppressed public lashing out in NYC. It was a wrap for the pedon class but even then most were in denial until COVID hit.

        THEN THEY AGAIN BAILED OUT THE PARASITE CLASS

        I think we are finally hitting the critical mass of population who got woke on the class war issue.

        • FlashMobOfOneEnglish
          1•5 days ago

          2001-2008 there was still hope

          Yep. The college education I got in the early 00’s now costs 4x as much.

          Young people now are screwed. I am glad I never procreated.

    • FlashMobOfOneEnglish
      4•5 days ago

      The 90’s for me.

      Had a hard-working dad who was on a roof every day and owned his own company. (Which the '08 crash pretty much destroyed.)

      I had everything I needed, a lot of what I wanted, and my life as a kid was a good one. The major upside, looking back, was that I had a future to look forward to, and that’s something most young people now don’t have.

  • @[email protected]English
    4•5 days ago

    I’d think the wording should be more like

    ‘… back to the way they never got the chance to be’

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      17•6 days ago

      Not sure where that’s coming from, I’m an anti fascist and interpreted this as more about how nostalgia twists our memory

      • @[email protected]English
        6•6 days ago

        My first thought had been along the same lines. I thought of the word anemoia from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

        anemoia - n. nostalgia for a time you’ve never known

        youtube.com/watch?v=wH6ZClRjl14

        Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins - and live in a completely different world.

        Vaporwave is inherently about a time that never existed, as it’s a re-interpretation of very specific parts of a time period into an aesthetic. A nostalgia for dial-up modems, corporate ad jingles, and hold music all rolled up in that one pattern every paper cup had in the 90s with classical era statues, southern California palm trees in the sunset, and dolphins. A tourist’s view of the nascent internet and the corporate tech world of the time.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•6 days ago

        “going back to a past that never existed” is a pretty common internet esoteric fasho thing