We need to stop living in the past. People complain how the youth of today knows nothing of history, when in fact they know far too much. Everything they do, create and think is compared unfavorably to what came before. Maybe we could forget the influences of The Beatles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jack Kerouac, wipe the slate, and start again. Like overbearing older siblings, the titans of the past set everything new in claustrophobic shadows. Will any band ever be as vital as The Beatles? You'd think not from the constant noise of nostalgia. (See this month's cover of Rolling Stone.)
It sounds fascistic – but perhaps we could put a ban on talking about culture prior to this millennium? Particularly that period that inspires such obsession – the '60s. We've all internalized, by osmosis, the major movements of the era. They've been cartooned over the years, the truths of the time reduced to cultural shorthand. Tie-dye t-shirts, LSD, camper vans, peace, sexual revolution – it all means both too much and nothing at all. It could be argued that the last 40 years have been shaped, politically and socially, by waves of '60s glorification and/or backlash, rather than by the decades' actual events.
