For-profit Nostalgia, Pop-Punk, and UK Electronica: An Unrelated Analysis

For-profit+Nostalgia%2C+Pop-Punk%2C+and+UK+Electronica%3A+An+Unrelated+Analysis

Nostalgia is a booming business in the music industry. The success of 70s and an 80s nostalgia was cemented in the mid 2010s with groups like Greta Van Fleet and Vulfpeck engaging in mimicry of Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder, and pop acts like Dua Lipa and The Weeknd shamelessly borrowing the maximalism of 80s pop. Now, in the post-COVID era, nostalgia for the 90s and early 2000s has come knocking, and the industry has eagerly answered its call. 

Modern pop music is going through a huge pop-punk phase, with artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Willow, and Maggie Lindemann drawing heavily from the sounds and aesthetics of the late 90s and early 2000s, sometimes to the point of controversy. This resurgence of turn of the century pop-punk and emo seems to be part of the larger Y2K trend obsession among Gen-Z, where the aesthetic of the early aughts is prized to the point of fetishization. Much of this interest seems genuine; as Gen-Z ages, these young adults wish for the simplicity of their childhood, a time when the weight of the world seemed less heavy. This desire is justified, particularly after generational trauma like COVID, but it has also been taken advantage of by cynical corporations, including those in the music industry. Of course, there is a clear difference between genuine influence and forced nostalgia bait, and to say that all music (or any form of media) that takes ideas from the past is simply a money-making scheme is absurd. That said, it seems that not all such media is necessarily made in good faith, and because nostalgia is such a dangerously potent emotion, it can be difficult to separate the genuinely creative from the profit motivated. As a personal example, I’ll look to the resurgence of 90s UK electronica, which has begun to creep into the mainstream once more, though not to the extent of styles such as pop-punk. 

UK electronica is important to me: from drum n bass to jungle to UK garage I can’t help but love sounds that originated some 30 odd years ago. As a result, I love the breakbeat revival, and I was incredibly excited to see these styles come back into the mainstream through artists like PinkPantheress and Charli XCX. The problem, though, is that my love of this music makes me susceptible to the type of nostalgia bait I just discussed: listening to Denzel Curry’ Zatoichi for the first time, I was ecstatic to hear a rapper who I liked and respected using the amen break in a nod to 90s jungle. Upon repeated listens, though, the song seemed off to me. Unlike tracks by jungle revivalists such as Tim Reaper or Lavery, Zatoichi seemed more and more inauthentic in its treatment of the break the more I listened to it. I still think the song is decent, but I can’t shake the feeling that it might’ve been better without the break, that its inclusion may have had more to do with following industry trends than genuine passion for jungle. This is no one-off artistic misstep: more and more I’ve been hearing breakbeats in music where they don’t seem to add anything, perverting the conventions of a genre to cash in on nostalgia-driven hype.

It’s probably true that these songs aren’t created exclusively with profits in mind: I can’t say for certain that Zatoichi and songs like it were the direct result of a label exec saying, “include more jungle for the kids”, and I’m not even sure that such a thing happens much in reality. But I do believe that creatives (and their management) are susceptible to jumping on the hype train of a certain style, even if it isn’t something they are truly passionate about. Therefore, artists have a responsibility to examine exactly where their music is coming from- passion or hype- and consumers have a similar responsibility to not get swept up in nostalgia, but critically examine the media in front of them to see if it’s really a worthwhile and meaningful piece.

Responsibility aside, I still have some questions about why exactly 90s UK electronica has experienced newfound popularity, especially among many Gen-Z including myself. I’ll take a deeper look into this in my next article, but I have one chief suspect for now: video games.


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