Source: Tiger Sniff Youth Culture Group
Author: Cucumber Soda
Half of 2022 is over.
If you want to give it a phased keyword, the word “nostalgia” is the most appropriate.
Wang Xinling’s voice sounded on the TV again, Jay Chou’s concert nine years ago is now watched by 100 million people on mobile phones, Zhen Xue still occupies the high ground of film and television commentary, and Lin Zixiang and Ye Qianwen, who are over sixty years old, are standing in the music variety show. , Three days after the treasure seafood boat in “God of Cookery” sank, it turned around and ushered in Stephen Chow’s 60th birthday.
Nostalgia is not uncommon. Just as straight men reminisce about tough guys in Rome, and Wen Qing reminisces about saucy people in the Republic of China, this kind of nostalgia for the past has unrealistic filters.
And the nostalgia of 2022, the “old” is too “close”. So close that I don’t have to remember carefully, the colors, temperatures, and smells of that period can come to mind.
When the nostalgic cycle was compressed into shorter and shorter, almost a cultural manifesto, I became curious:
What makes nostalgia more youthful?
You won’t miss what you never had.
And what the post-80s and post-90s co-owns constitute all the content related to nostalgia at the moment – the generation of the gods.
Music first.
Online concerts are like fishing for capital, and every time a large number of fish that are in desperate need of nostalgia can be caught. They held a narrow screen, trying to retrieve the throbbing that they had once stood there or wore headphones.
If you draw a time line for the online concert, you will find that it is a nostalgic project that has been publicized in advance. Every traffic brought by the audience has not disappointed the capital.
In December 2021, the first shot of the Xicheng Boys’ online concert was fired on the video account.
On April 1st this year, Leslie Cheung’s online concert had an online audience of 9 million;
On April 15, Cui Jian’s online concert was watched by 45 million people;
On May 20th and 21st, Jay Chou’s concerts exceeded 100 million viewers;
On May 27, Luo Dayou and Sun Yanzi fought on two platforms, and the number of viewers was 40 million and 240 million respectively;
Backstreet Boys and West Side Boys combined in June, with 46 million viewers.
If it weren’t for the word “online”, it would even feel like opening a newspaper from 20 years ago.
At the moment when the Chinese music scene is in murky waters, the record industry is dying, and traffic and algorithms have produced countless divine songs that you don’t want to listen to but are forced to brainwash. And those ancient names, like calling out Ares and Athena in a melee, are classical, correct and majestic.
The meaning of their voice is “constant.” This certainty is like a sedative, injected into a panicked, anxious, and confused generation.
On July 2, Bilibili reached a copyright cooperation with Jewell
The barrage screen “finally waited until Jay Chou”
Music synchronization affects variety shows.
When everyone thought that the depleted “Sister Lang 3” would not have another miracle, Wang Xinling bet right once.
In the context of this variety show, all women default to changing and breaking their own stereotypes, and even Twins did not choose to win “The Next Stop” to earn feelings. But Wang Xinling went in the opposite direction: unchanged.
When the girl with a high ponytail appeared singing “Love You,” released in 2004, she fulfilled a 20-year promise. Just like asking Britney to stand on the stage and dance Baby One More Time in a cropped dress, I am afraid that people who experience this kind of picture will have an unrealistic sense of dizziness – if everything can remain the same, then I will Is it possible to get back the happiness and carefreeness of 20 years ago?
As for the level of business, Wang Xinling is only a “small” in the “big four, three small and one snake group” in Taiwan’s music industry.
Whether it is personal style or song quality, it does not have the greatest energy of Taiwanese pop music back then. Just imagine, if Jolin Tsai or Stefanie Sun came to the stage of “Sister Lang 3”, would the effect be more terrifying than the Wang Xinling effect?
But just Wang Xinling’s return to the stage was enough to turn everyone around.
If you pull the program list of “Sister Lang 3” to the end, you will find that Mango TV has recommended another variety show of its own, “The Sound of Life”.
Except for the theme of “Hong Kong pop music”, the nostalgic ideas of the two are the same.
When the show pulled out the familiar Cantonese pop music symbols such as Lin Zixiang, Ye Qianwen, Li Keqin, and Miriam Yeung, it already aimed at its target audience.
Even the selected tracks have precisely avoided the unfamiliar period of the post-80s-90s. What it reproduces is the Hong Kong that used to be a hero, rather than the Hong Kong that has focused on private contexts in recent years. Hong Kong pop music has changed, but most people don’t care, everyone only cares about Hong Kong in their hearts.
The relationship between the post-80s and 90s audiences and Hong Kong is stagnant in front of the word “nostalgia”. In Hong Kong, Karen Mok will always sing, “I look forward to meeting him every minute, and I never complain when I wait silently.” It is Stephen Chow with silver hair standing in front of the Jumbo Seafood Boat.
So what the audience wants to hear is still “Broad Ocean” in 1993 and “Best Lost Friend” in 2006. The whole show revealed “prosperity that embraces remnants and deficiencies”, and did not salvage Cantonese fragments outside the mainstream discourse.
In this process of increasing nostalgia, the audience’s tolerance is also quietly increasing.
If you have also experienced “Happy Boys” in 2007, you must know that the commentary at that time was not friendly to this group of boys. But now a variety show “Welcome to the Mushroom House” has gathered them, but unexpectedly gained traffic and word of mouth. This group of “former idols” with an average age of 30+ who are no longer idolized, make the audience feel cordial in every move.
Compared with the idols of the current era, the audience preconceived that the idols of 10 years ago were more powerful.
The 2007 fast men are still there, but more people and things have become history at the same time.
More than ten years ago, the golden age of the idol industry in China, Japan and South Korea
Compared with music and variety shows, the prosperity of film and television appears to be more empty.
Even if the number of TV plays on video platforms is breaking records every year, and even if cultural practitioners rack their brains to purify social issues from film and television works, we all have to admit that from content creation to social impact, TV plays cannot reproduce ten times. the vitality of the past.
Source: Douban Group @ Ratings Research Center
A “Zhen Huan Biography”, which was broadcast in 2011, took ten years to condense into a thick “Zhen Xue”, and the text of “Zhen Xue” is the massive secondary creation information on the Internet.
There are people who make a living out of this, making accounts with millions of fans, extracting every drop of content from 76 episodes, and selling all the leftovers about the TV series.
More ordinary viewers who participated in it have changed from students to migrant workers in ten years. They swallowed more than 20 yuan of takeaways with the background sound of “The Legend of Zhen Huan”. This may be one of the few moments of inner peace they have in an age of anxiety.
In addition, “Wulin Biography” in 2006, “Bright Sword” in 2005, and “Family with Children” in 2005 are still providing emotional corpus for content creators and content consumers.
How many people are still laughing and laughing after knocking down the barrage of “Yamamoto carelessly lost their ancestors” at station B, it seems that their laughter will always stay in the old story.
The road in front of me is very narrow, so I can only look back. Just keep digging, and dig all the way to “I Love My Family”, “The Story of the Editorial Department” and “The Life of the Poor Zhang Damin”, how many books do we have left for archaeology?
“The Happy Life of the Poor Zhang Damin”
And the movie has gone to a sadder field than the TV series.
People laughed at the joke “Some people say that the epidemic has set back the Chinese film industry for 30 years, and I think there are such good things”, while looking at the group photo of the three people on the beach in Cannes 29 years ago. Everyone knows that this is probably the culmination.
In contrast to Zhen Xue, “Let the Bullets Fly” in 2010 spawned “Let the School” at station B, which continuously edited, collaged, and parodied every line and scene of Jiang Wen.
If you open Douyin at this moment, you will find that “I only do three things in a certain place” and the high-spirited soundtrack of Jiang Wen’s appearance is becoming a new popular imitation video. It is hard to imagine that the vitality of a line can spread for ten years.
When people talk about Chinese movies, they stop at “Let the Bullets Fly”. Even Jiang Wen can’t change this fact, because he can’t come up with a better new story.
In addition to audio and video, the game known as the ninth art is also constantly launching remakes. These works that have been proven successful in history are becoming new financial products for game manufacturers.
Whether it’s the well-received “Resident Evil 2”, or the smashed “Warcraft 3”, or the upcoming “The Last of Us” and the mobile game “Diablo”.
“Warcraft 3” remake, the prophet becomes a fool
We have no intention of accusing the commercial considerations of major manufacturers from a moral point of view, but when a game boy sees new games keep bouncing and old ones keep refurbishing and out of the game, it is inevitable to be disappointed.
All phenomena keep reminding you:
Old is the best. Audiences don’t have to risk new stories, and neither does capital.
People will always believe that the period from sixteen to seventeen to twenty is the golden age.
And the products of the Golden Age are always right.
So what about those who are going through their golden age?
As internet natives, post-00s are outsiders to this wave of nostalgia. They grew up in the world of Douyin and Station B, the circle of interest is more closed, and the information they absorb comes from a more complex distribution mechanism.
At the beginning of the millennium, under the dual benefits of the environment and the times, the music industry experienced rapid expansion and growth, creating the gods that the post-90s said, followed by a stumble and entered a long period of withering. Today’s Chinese music scene is not completely without good music, but good music is no longer so easy to meet with the largest number of listeners.
Now when it comes to music, it’s not the time of a song, but a BGM in a 15-second short video. After swiping to a nice bgm, and then returning to the music software to find the song, the user’s operating habits have been quietly changed by the algorithm.
Douyin real-time popular music list
In order to spy on the aesthetic tastes of the post-00s, I found 3 post-00s with similar ages, different experiences, and different hobbies. It is true that they cannot represent the entire generation after 00, but we can still find some dark lines from individuals.
A personal rough observation is that the adolescence of the post-90s will be more or less involved in rock and roll elements; and the growth of the post-00s is inseparable from rap. Although the two are imported products, their attitudes are different: the former is angry and hesitant, while the latter does whatever he wants.
In Jay Chou, the values of the two generations are surprisingly consistent.
The post-00 girl Jiang Yi told me that she no longer has a fixed favorite singer, but if you want to talk about the number one broadcast in adolescence, it would be Zhang Jie, Wang Sulong and Jay Chou. Although Zhang Jie is very earthy and Wang Sulong is very “young pain”, it still does not affect the appearance of those songs in her seventeen-year-old playlist.
And her favorite movies are “Farewell My Concubine”, which was reversed by various film and television commentaries after she grew up, and “Little Times”, which must be watched when gathering with her girlfriends, even though the two are very different.
She guesses that she might also become a “nostalgic” when she grows up, because she also agrees that “the music and movies of 20 years ago are more attentive”. “If we can see our favorite stars come back in ten years, I will also be very excited. It’s like having a reunion with our old friends and youth, and there is a feeling of sympathy.”
Zhou Quan, a boy born in 2002, his favorite singers are Drake, J Cole and Jay Chou.
He has no sympathy for the large-scale nostalgia phenomenon caused by Wang Xinling: “It’s just because there was a certain fan base in the past, and then the short video platform was used to divert more and more people. Maybe there are real fans supporting it, but more Some netizens who have never heard of Wang Xinling are just followers.”
Those online concerts that swiped the screen after 80-90 are a bit boring for Zhou Quan: “After all, I still lack the feeling of offline concerts, and I get tired after watching it for a while.”
Compared with Jiang Yi’s nostalgia, Zhou Quan prefers to look forward. “Compared with 20 years ago, I think the current movies and TV series are better. The special effects are richer and futuristic.”
Doctor Strange 2: The Multiverse of Madness
Harry, a boy born in 2001, talked about his favorite singers, and he threw out all Rappers, including Wang Yitai, The Weekend and Kendrick Lamar.
Although he appreciates the old things that the post-80s and 90s reminisce, he admits that he is not very cold: “I think the songs around 2000 are very good, but I rarely watch the movies of that era. I prefer the current movies. , because I like the feeling of being in touch with the times.”
For Harry, nostalgia was a moot point as long as Netflix was showing new shows.
Stranger Things 4
When I asked these three post-00s how they viewed the phenomenon of post-10s primary school students being madly infatuated with “The Lonely Brave”, they all laughed.
Zhou Quan didn’t understand this phenomenon, he thought it was the behavior of a group of children blindly following the crowd.
Instead, Jiang Yi and Harry thought it was very interesting: “Just like when we sang Zhang Jie’s “Reverse War” and Xu Liang’s “Bad Girl”, if one day Xu Liang stood on the stage and sang “Bad Girl”, I would also I can’t help but remember killing it.”
When I asked if there was a “Jay Chou” of his own generation after 00, almost all the three post-00s resolutely denied it at the first time:“No one can replace Jay Chou, that’s for sure.”
This question is indeed suspected of pulling and stepping, and no one dares to sit in this hot butt position.
After a while, Jiang Yi said cautiously, “Maybe Yi Yang Qianxi can do it?”
Nostalgia is an inevitable epochal disease of mankind.
It can be elite discourse or popular sentiment.
During the turmoil of World War II, Zweig looked back at the people, things and things in the old European homeland in a foreign land, and felt that the world of yesterday and the gilded era were annihilated in the fire. The text is certainly nostalgic.
A post-90s generation who just got off work turned on QQ Music on the bus and listened to Jay Chou’s “Qilixiang”, closed his eyes and returned to the afternoon of the sixth grade summer vacation. This feeling is of course nostalgic.
Nostalgia is a unique emotion created by humans, and even the word “nostalgia” is artificial. In 1688, a Swiss physician suggested in a medical treatise: “The expressive power of the word nostalgia may indicate the kind of melancholy that stems from the desire to return to one’s homeland”.
Nostalgia/nostalgia, from two Greek words: nostos (to return home) and algia (to miss), is the yearning for a home that no longer exists or has never been.“Nostalgia is a loss and displacement, but also the romantic entanglement of the individual with his own imagination.”
Homer: The Odyssey
As long as the wheels of the world roll forward, there will always be someone looking back. The retro wave we are experiencing is like a break in a great migration. Knowing that the new world is coming, but he is reluctant to open the door.
No matter how the world changes, there is always a group of people who are nostalgic. Today, the protagonists of nostalgia have become the post-80s and post-90s who grew up amid the controversy. The former children became the prime men who seized the power of speech and conspired to plan a long farewell.
The new world is no longer attractive. So we look back frequently, looking for the familiar connection point with the world.
And people who are immersed in nostalgia may face an embarrassing question in the future-decades from now, what should people use to nostalgize us now? What can prove that we have stopped and created the world?
A live broadcast with goods, a bland variety show, or a Divine Comedy that cuts songs in 15 seconds on Douyin.
The absence of new stories is the crux of today’s hot nostalgia and inability to say goodbye.
The future is out of focus and blurry, no longer full of temptation. Memories are constantly romanticized, layered with halo, and finally shaped into a collective myth. We can only continue to do archaeology, re-archaeology, and digging three feet in the ground, looking for the rope that is tightly bound to the earth.
Nostalgia is actually a search for a collective emotion, a sense of certainty, security, and belonging in the drift. The individual is blown by the rain and wind, and becomes a lonely atom, eager to hug again. And what leads us to stick together is nostalgia—the only solution to the anxiety of the moment.
” This nostalgia disease is in vogue all over the world right now, and more and more people yearn for a sense of community where there is always a collective good, and for a sense of continuity in a fragmented world. A defense mechanism for people in an era of accelerated and upheavy history, the essence of which lies in the promise of rebuilding the ideal home that many of today’s influential ideologies are blindly advocating, tempting us to abandon critical thinking and replace it with emotional solidarity. “(Sigmund Bowman, Nostalgic Utopia)
Humans are always swinging in two directions: stability and adventure, conservatism and freedom, nostalgia and outlook, and the process of swinging constitutes the life of most of us.
I still remember that at the end of “Midnight in Paris”, the male protagonist who had just woken up from a big dream monologue said:
“People always think they live in terrible times, and they think they’d be happier if they could go back in time. But to those we now think of as a golden age, the world they lived in was just as pale. Powerless.”
We rely on the wonderful experience of the past, and hope to borrow some courage to face the future from the old auspicious film feathers.
It’s because we’ve experienced the best that we see what’s wrong in the moment.
And every minute and second of the present may also be the theme song of other people’s nostalgia in the future.
Special statement: The content of the above article only represents the author’s own views and does not represent the views or positions of Sina.com. If you have any questions about the content of the work, copyright or other issues, please contact Sina.com within 30 days after the work is published.