Produced by | Tiger Sniff Youth Culture Group
Author | Cucumber soda
Edit, title map | Slag County
This article was first published on the tiger sniff young content public account "That NG" (ID: huxiu4youth). Here, we present the face, stories and attitudes of today's young people.
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 once again sounded on the TV set, Jay Chou's concert nine years ago is now watched by 100 million people on mobile phones, Zhen Xue still occupies the highland of film and television commentary, the music variety show stands Lin Zixiang and Ye Qianwen, who are more than 10 years old, and the treasure seafood boat in "God Eater" sank three days later, turned around and ushered in Chow Xingchi's 60th birthday.
Nostalgia is not uncommon. Just as the straight man recalls the Tough Guys of Rome, And Wen Qing misses the Rioters of the Republic of China, such a distant look at the ancients carries an unrealistic filter.
And the nostalgia of 2022, the "old" nostalgia is too "close". I don't have to recall it carefully, but the colors, temperature, and smell of that period can be seen in front of me.
As the nostalgia cycle was compressed to a less and less shorter degree, almost becoming a cultural manifestation, I became curious:
What makes nostalgia younger?
You don't miss something you never had.
What the post-80s and post-90s jointly own constitutes all the contents of the present and caring for the old - the generation of gods.
Let's start with the music.
Online concerts are like a capital fishing, and every time you can catch a large number of fish that urgently need nostalgia. They held a narrow screen, trying to retrieve the throbbing they had once been standing on the scene or wearing headphones.
If you time an online concert, you'll find that it's a nostalgic plan that's been publicized in advance. Every traffic brought by the audience has not disappointed the capital.
In December 2021, the West Side Boys Online Concert fired its first shot on the video number.
On April 1 this year, Zhang Guorong'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 20 and 21, the total number of views of Jay Chou's concert exceeded 100 million;
On May 27, Luo Dayou and Sun Yanzi played in the ring on two platforms, and the number of viewers was 40 million and 240 million respectively;
In June, backstreet boys and West side boys merged, with 46 million viewers.
If it weren't for the word "online", it would even feel like opening the newspaper from 20 years ago.
In the muddy waters of the Chinese music scene, the record industry is dead, and the traffic and algorithms have produced countless divine comedies that you don't want to hear but are forced to brainwash. And those ancient names, like inviting Ares and Athena in a scuffle, are classical, correct and majestic.
The meaning of their voices is "eternal and unchanging". This certainty is like a sedative, injecting a panicked, anxious, confused generation into the body.
On July 2, Station B reached a copyright cooperation with Jewell
Bullet screen brush screen "finally waited for Jay Chou"
Music synchronization influences variety shows.
When everyone thought that the depleted "Sister Lang 3" would not have any more miracles, Wang Xinling made the right bet.
In the context of the construction of this variety show, all women default to changing and breaking their own stereotypes, and even Twins did not choose to win the bigger "Next Stop Tianhou" to earn feelings. Wang Xinling, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction: unchanged.
When a girl with a high ponytail appeared singing "Love You" released in 2004, she fulfilled a 20-year promise. Like asking Britney to stand on stage and dance Baby One More Time in a crop top, anyone who experiences this kind of picture will probably have an unrealistic sense of vertigo – if everything can be left unchanged, can I get back to the happiness and carefree I was 20 years ago?
As for the level of business, Wang Xinling is only one of the "small" of the "four big three small snake groups" in Taiwan's music industry.
Whether it is personal style or song quality, it does not have the greatest energy of Taiwanese pop music that year. Just imagine, if jolin Tsai or Sun Yanzi 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 upside down.
If you pull the program list of "Sister Lang 3" to the end, you will find that Mango TV recommended another variety show of its own, "Sound and Endless".
In addition to the theme of "Hong Kong pop music", the nostalgic ideas of the two are the same.
When the show pulled out Cantonese pop music symbols familiar to the public, such as Lin Zixiang, Ye Qianwen, Li Keqin, and Yang Qianwei, it was already aimed at its target audience.
Even the selected tracks precisely avoided the unfamiliar period of the post-80s and 90s. It recreates the hong kong that once swept across the world and was heroic, rather than the Hong Kong that in recent years has focused on private contexts. Hong Kong pop music has changed, but most people don't care, everyone only cares about the Hong Kong in their hearts.
The relationship between post-80s and post-90s audiences and Hong Kong is stagnant in front of the word "nostalgia". In Hong Kong, it will always be Karen Mok singing "Look forward to meeting him every minute, silently waiting and never complaining", and it is Chow Sing Chi with silver hair standing in front of the Jumbo Seafood Boat.
So what the audience wants to hear is still 1993's "Sea and Sky" and 2006's "Best Friend". The whole show revealed the "prosperity of holding on to the cripple", 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've also experienced 2007's Happy Boys, you must know that the comments at the time were not friendly to this group of boys. And 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" who are no longer idolized with an average age of 30+ make the audience feel intimate with every move.
Compared with the idols of the current era, the audience preconceived that the idols of 10 years ago were more powerful.
The 07th fast man is still there, but at the same time, more people and things have become history.
More than a decade 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 is more empty.
Even if the number of TV dramas broadcast on video platforms is refreshing records every year, and even if cultural practitioners rack their brains to purify social issues from film and television works, we have to admit that from the creation of content to social impact, TV dramas cannot regain the vitality of ten years ago.
Image source: Douban group @ Ratings Research Center
A "Biography of Zhen Huan", which began broadcasting in 2011, took ten years to condense into a thick "Zhen Xue", and the text of "Zhen Xue" is a huge amount of secondary creation information on the Internet.
Some people make a living from this, make an account with millions of fans, squeeze every drop of content from 76 episodes, and sell all the scraps about the TV series.
More ordinary viewers who participated in it, from student boys to workers in the past ten years, swallowed more than 20 yuan of takeaway on the background sound of "Zhen Huan". This may be one of the few moments of inner peace in times of anxiety.
In addition, 2006's "Wulin Wai Biao", 2005's "Bright Sword", and 2005's "Family with Children" are still providing emotional corpora for content creators and content consumers.
How many people still laughed forward and backward after knocking down the barrage of "Yamamoto carelessly lost his ancestors" at station B, as if their laughter would always stay in the old story.
The road in front of me was slim, and I could only look back. Just dig it down, all the way to "I Love My Home", "The Story of the Editorial Department" and "The Life of poor Zhang Damin", how much inventory do we have left that can be used for archaeology?
"The Happy Life of Poor Mouth Zhang Damin"
And the movie goes to a field that is even sadder than the TV series.
People joked about the passage "Some people say that the epidemic has set back the Chinese film industry by thirty years, and I think there is such a good thing", while looking at the group photo of the three people on the beach of Cannes 29 years ago. Everyone knows that this is probably the culmination.
In contrast to Zhen Xue, 2010's "Let the Bullets Fly" derived from "Let the Bullets Fly" at station B, constantly editing, collageing, and parodying every line and shot of Jiang Wen.
If you open Douyin at this moment, you will find that "I came somewhere to do only three things" and the high-spirited soundtrack of Jiang Wen's appearance are becoming new popular imitation videos. It's hard to imagine that the vitality of a line can spread for ten years.
When people talk about Chinese movies, they stop at a "Let the Bullets Fly", and even Jiang Wen himself can't change this fact, because he has not been able to come up with a better new story.
In addition to audio and video, the game, known as the ninth art, is also constantly being remade. These works, which have been proven successful by history, are becoming new financial products for game manufacturers.
Whether it's the critically acclaimed Resident Evil 2, the spray-out Warcraft 3, or the upcoming Last of Us and the mobile game diablo.
A remake of Warcraft 3, the Prophet became a fool
We don't mean to morally blame the major manufacturers for their business considerations, but it's inevitable that a game kid will be disappointed when he witnesses a situation where new games keep skipping tickets and old things are constantly being refurbished.
Everything is constantly reminding you:
The old ones are the best. Audiences don't have to risk new stories, and capital doesn't have to.
People will always believe that the period from sixteen or seventeen to twenty was the golden age.
And the product of the Golden Age is always right.
So what about those who are going through their own golden age?
As Internet natives, the 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, the music industry experienced rapid expansion and growth under the dual benefits of the environment and the times, creating the gods mentioned by the post-90s generation, followed by a hesitation, entering a long period of withering. Today's Chinese music scene is not completely free of good music, but good music is no longer so easy to meet with the largest number of listeners.
Nowadays, when it comes to music, it is not the time of a song, but a BGM in a 15-second short video. Brushed to the good bgm, and then returned to the music software to find the song, the user's operating habits have been quietly changed by the algorithm.
TikTok real-time hot music charts
In order to spy on the aesthetic taste of the post-00s, I found 3 post-00s who are similar in age, have different experiences and have different hobbies. Admittedly, they can't represent the entire post-00s, but we can still find some dark lines from individuals.
A rough observation of personalization is that the post-90s adolescence will be more or less involved in rock elements; The growth of the post-00s is inseparable from rap. Although both are imported products, the attitude of refraction is different: the former is angry and wandering, and the latter is free to do as he pleases.
In Jay Chou, the values of the two generations are surprisingly consistent.
Jiang Yi, a post-00 girl, told me that she no longer has a singer she likes regularly, but if she wants to talk about the number one in adolescence, it will be Zhang Jie, Wang Sutaki and Jay Chou. Although Zhang Jie is very earthy and Wang Sutaki is very "youthful pain", it still does not affect the appearance of those songs in her seventeen-year-old song list.
And her favorite movies are "Farewell to the King" that was only interpreted by various films and televisions after growing up, and "Little Times", which is a must-see for parties with girlfriends, even if the two are very different.
She suspects that she may also become a "nostalgic" when she grows up, because she also agrees that "the music and movies of 20 years ago were more attentive." "I'd be thrilled if I could see a comeback from a star we like in ten years. It's like reuniting with your friends and youth, and there is a feeling of pity for each other."
The boy born in 2002 is thoughtful, and his favorite singers are Drake, J Cole and Jay Chou.
He did not empathize with the large-scale nostalgia caused by Wang Xinling: "Just because there was a certain fan base at that time, and then through the short video platform to divert ten to ten hundred." Maybe there are real fans supporting it, but more are some follower netizens who have not heard of Wang Xinling."
Those online concerts after 80-90s are a bit boring for Zhou Quan: "After all, I still lack the feeling of offline concerts, and I will be tired after watching it for a while." ”
Compared to Jiang Yi's nostalgia, Zhou Quan prefers to look forward. "Compared to 20 years ago, I think the movies and TV series are better now. The special effects are richer and futuristic. ”
Doctor Strange 2: Crazy Multiverse
Harry, a boy born in 2001, talked about the singers he admired the most, and threw out all rappers, including Wang Ether, The Weekend and Kendrick Lamar.
Although he appreciates the old things that the post-80s and 90s remember, he admits that he is not very cold: "I think the songs of around 2000 are very good, but I rarely watch movies of that era." I prefer the movies I have now because I like the feeling of being up to date."
For Harry, as long as Netflix is still broadcasting new dramas, the word nostalgia is a disease-free groan.
Stranger Things 4
When I asked these three post-00s how they viewed the phenomenon of the post-10s elementary school students' crazy fascination with "Lone Brave", they all laughed.
Zhou Quan did not understand this phenomenon, he thought it was the blind conformity of a group of children.
On the contrary, Jiang Yi and Harry found it very interesting: "Just like we sang Zhang Jie's "Reverse War" and Xu Liang's "Bad Girl" at that time, if Xu Liang stood on the stage one day and sang "Bad Girl", I would also can't help but remember killing it."
When I asked whether the post-00s had their own generation of "Jay Chou", the three post-00s almost all resolutely denied at the first time: "No one can replace Jay Chou, this is for sure."
This problem is indeed suspected of pulling and stepping, and no one dares to sit in this hot ass position.
After a while, Jiang Yi said cautiously, "Maybe Yi Qianxi can?" ”
Nostalgia is an inevitable disease of the times for human beings.
It can be an elite discourse or a mass sentiment.
During the turmoil of World War II, Zweig looked back at the people, events and things in the Old World and the European homeland in a foreign land, and lamented that yesterday's world and gilded era were annihilated in the gunfire. These words are, of course, nostalgic.
A post-90s who had just left work, turned on QQ music on the bus and listened to a song of Jay Chou's "Qilixiang", closed his eyes and returned to the afternoon of the summer vacation of the sixth grade. This feeling is, of course, also nostalgic.
Nostalgia is a unique emotion created by humans, and even the word "nostalgia" is artificially invented. In 1688, a Swiss physician proposed in a medical treatise: "The expressiveness of the word nostalgia can describe the kind of melancholy that stems from the desire to return to the homeland."
Nostalgia, from two Greek words: nostos (homecoming) and algia (nostalgia), is the yearning for a home that no longer exists or has never been. "Nostalgia is a loss and displacement, but it is also a romantic entanglement of the individual and one's own imagination."
Homer's Epic: Odyssey
As long as the wheels of the world roll forward, there will always be people looking back. This retro wave that we are experiencing is like a rest in a great migration. Knowing that a new world is coming, he refuses to open the door.
No matter how the world changes, there is always a group of people who are nostalgic. And today's nostalgic protagonists have become the post-80s and post-90s who grew up in the controversy. The children of the past became the prime-age of seizing the right to speak, conspiring to plan a long farewell.
The new world is no longer attractive. So we often look back, looking for the familiar connection point with the world.
And people who are immersed in nostalgia, the future or will face an embarrassing question - decades later, what should people take nostalgia for our present? What proof is there to prove that we have stopped and created the world?
A live broadcast with goods, a tasteless variety show, or a divine comedy that vibrato cuts songs in 15 seconds.
No new story has emerged, which is the crux of today's nostalgia and inability to say goodbye.
The future is out of focus and blurry, no longer full of temptations. And the memories are constantly romanticized, layered with halos, and finally shaped into a collective myth. We can only continue to archaeologize, re-archaeology, and dig the ground three feet to the sky, looking for the rope that is tightly bound to the earth.
Nostalgia is really looking for a group mood, holding certainty, security and belonging in the drift. Individuals are blown by the rain and wind, turning into lonely atoms, eager to hold each other again. And what leads us to a group is nostalgia— the only way to solve the anxieties of the moment.
"With this nostalgia epidemic now circulating across the globe, more and more people are eager to always have a sense of community of collective good, to gain a continuity in a fragmented world. This epidemic is a defense mechanism for people in an era of accelerated upheaval in life and history. The essence of this defense mechanism lies in the promise to rebuild the ideal home advocated by many influential ideologies today, tempting us to abandon critical thinking and replace it with emotional solidarity. (Sigismund Baumann, "Nostalgic Utopia")
Human beings are always oscillating in the directions of stability and adventure, conservatism and freedom, nostalgia and prospecting, and the process of swinging constitutes the life of most of us.
Remember at the end of "Midnight in Paris", the male protagonist who woke up from a big dream said:
"People always think that the times they live in are terrible, and they always think that if they can go back in time, they will be happier. But to those we now think of as the Golden Age, the world they lived in was equally pale. ”
We rely on the good experience of the past, and hope to borrow some courage from the old Yoshimitsu Kataba to face the future.
It is precisely because we have experienced the best that we can see the unsatisfactory of the moment.
And every minute and second of the present may also be the theme song of others' future nostalgia.
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