The Rise of the Reboot: Why We Can’t Escape Nostalgia

Where were you when Emo Fest was announced? Who did it give you permission to text? What playlists did you revisit? Which elements of your younger self were suddenly unearthed?

I was on my couch, staring at my phone, when Instagram refreshed itself and presented a post from the band Meet Me @ The Altar, announcing the When We Were Young festival—promptly renamed “Emo Fest” by fans. Paramore, My Chemical Romance, Avril Lavigne, and Taking Back Sunday on one bill in 2022? These were the artists who’d soundtracked my adolescence. Such news could only be the fictive concoction of a wistful millennial or a Gen Zer who narrowly missed the wave’s peak in the aughts.

I shared the post to my story with a single question—Excuse me???—and was greeted with a slew of messages asking, “Is this real?” As I joked with friends about journeying to Vegas in October, a common viral cycle ensued online: excitement and jokes followed by skepticism and critique. Originally scheduled as a one-day event, the festival added a second date only after the public voiced safety concerns. (The event is produced by the same company involved in the Astroworld tragedy.)

Looking at the sixty-five featured bands, the lineup seems a bit too stacked. If the point of a festival is to pool together an eclectic mix of artists, ideally that curated experience would extend beyond hey kid, remember this? The event could be an interesting attempt to bridge current alternative acts with a well-known cultural moment of the past. But with the exception of a handful of groups (Meet Me @ the Altar, Wolf Alice, Knocked Loose, Neck Deep, Car Seat Headrest), most of the acts formed and gained popularity prior to 2010. Even the title—a seeming reference to the 2006 song by The Killers—clarifies the festival producers’ target audience: those who are no longer quite as young and, as my friend Bayley put it, old enough to have disposable income.

When We Were Young follows the resurgence of Y2K fashion that combines trends of the nineties—think wide-leg jeans and scrunchies—with popular styles of the aughts that include low-rise skirts and pants, bedazzled T-shirts, and trucker hats of the once-iconic brand Von Dutch. It coincides with the endless succession of “reboots” of popular television shows and movies of the sometimes not-so-distant past. With nonrefundable ticket prices starting at over two hundred dollars (and the next tier up, at over four hundred dollars, offering access to air-conditioned bathrooms), it’s understandable why some would call it a ploy to capitalize on collective nostalgia. Yet general admission and VIP packages sold out so quickly that a third date was announced shortly after tickets went on sale. If costs and accessibility weren’t barriers, how many more of us would be willing to have our longing exploited in exchange for the specific elation that comes with communally experiencing a dearly held song?

As my mother would say, ain’t nothing new under the sun.

The success of the festival, the stream of TV reboots, and the rise of fashion callbacks are a reminder that reminiscence is sellable. With targeted advertisements that allow companies to store and track our likes and dislikes as they alter in real time, it’s easy to dismiss nostalgia as a tool that lulls us into being better consumers. Overly affectionate remembrance can lead to flat, myopic representations of history that are easily commodified. While this is true at times, it’s only one facet of the concept. Nostalgia taps into our memories, conflicting histories, and desires, connecting individual experiences to wider narratives. This unique relationship between memoir and public record has transformative potential. Noting the similarities and differences between our memories can help us identify which parts of the past we want to use as a bridge to new futures. Because, as my mother would say, ain’t nothing new under the sun.

Which is not to say that Emo Fest isn’t a soulless cash grab. But maybe it’s getting harder to determine when it’s okay to shrug your shoulders and go along for the fun of it, and when you should resist what’s being sold.

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My earliest forms of expression were often tied to different genres of music and the clothing I associated with them. My love for bands like Fall Out Boy led me to emo-adjacent styles: sideswept bangs dyed with midnight blue Manic Panic that, to my disappointment, hardly showed up in my dark hair. Music videos on BET’s 106 & Park helped me to imagine my own sense of femininity underpinned by black cool. I wanted low-rise jeans to hug me like they did Ashanti, exposing my bare stomach as I imitated her hip sways and circles.

By age fifteen I became infatuated with classic rock. At the time, around ’08 and ’09, public opinion had shifted against the American military in Iraq. Vague gestures to the counterculture and antiwar movements of the sixties and seventies began appearing on clothing-store mannequins. My fashion interpretation of the broad genre of “classic rock” included (the more modest, to my mother’s satisfaction) long flowy skirts, billowing sleeves, and a fixation on peace signs. Unfortunately, I became the sort of kid who said things like, “I was born in the wrong decade.”

In their article “The commodification of time and memory: Online communities and the dynamics of commercially produced nostalgia,” Katharina Niemeyer and Emily Keightley define nostalgia as “a recollection of times and places that are no more, no longer accessible or perhaps never were.” Though I was never present for the sixties and seventies, romantic fantasy allowed me to feel longing for those times. I asked my mom and aunts for their own accounts—what was it like experiencing the artists I loved, many of whom had since died? It’s just how it was, they said. The local black radio station went off the air at 11 p.m., which created a familiarity with rock and country music they otherwise may not have sought out. I watched Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical movie, Almost Famous, repeatedly. I couldn’t decide if I was more envious of the character Penny Lane—the leader of the young girls who followed their favorite bands and sometimes inspired their songs—or main character William (based on Crowe), who dropped out of high school to write about his favorite band for Rolling Stone and was mentored by seminal rock critic Lester Bangs. I silenced the voice that kept reminding me that my blackness might have limited either possibility.

Sentimentality makes for effective marketing—whether you’re tapping into your own or into sentiments that exist in the ether. It’s a long-used sales technique that Bangs himself decried in his 1977 obituary of Elvis Presley, the so-called King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Presley’s final years consisted of performances that bordered on self-parody. His records, by Bangs’s evaluation, had become increasingly mediocre. Presumably once or also a fan, Bangs had long lost hope that Presley could return to the fervor he once brought to (white) America. But his concerts had remained populated and his twenty-third studio album still made it onto Billboard’s pop and country charts.

This was courtesy of the fans that continued to bow to their king no matter how makeshift his throne. They were the people most deserving of Bangs’s sympathy because, as he wrote, “Who’s left they can stand all night in the rain for? Nobody, and the true tragedy is the tragedy of an entire generation which refuses to give up its adolescence.”

The charge resounds fittingly for occurrences like When We Were Young. I’ve wondered if I, too, have become a member of a generation reluctant to move past adolescence. If Bangs, who died in 1982, was unsettled by what he saw as the solipsism of people navigating toward their own “obsessive corners,” what would he make of the World Wide Web and its enclaves? In a sense, we could stand in the rain forever—or at least until the current systems as we know them implode—for our respective faves. From message boards and the instant messaging of early social media to the current proliferation of Twitter sects and Instagram archive accounts, there is a corner for every niche and sub niche, in which the past and present run alongside one another.

In a culture eager to tout progress (from the post-racial trope of the Obama presidency to more recent assertions that the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has ended), reassessing what once was can also highlight what actually hasn’t changed or moved forward. Looking critically at the past helps us thwart social amnesia and challenge the accepted but flawed narratives of traditional history.

At its most basic, writing about the past can be an indulgent exercise where I get to recreate my own history. It can also afford connections with people of similar experience or perspective, pushing beyond individual contemplation and toward communion. In my own pop-culture consumption, I resist the demand of urgency as it is dictated by capitalism, enticing us to speed forward. Instead, I spend time reflecting on and writing about pop-culture artifacts, and my own memories, to help tether me to the present.

This past summer while reading Rahel Aima’s review of Writing in Space, a collection of writing from artist Lorraine O’Grady, I learned that though known for her visual and performance art, O’Grady also wrote music criticism in the seventies. Reading her poignant essay on the soulfulness of the Allman Brothers Band, I realized that though I often revisited the work of Lester Bangs, I hadn’t spent much time uncovering his black women contemporaries. I had accepted the supposed whiteness of rock criticism, barring myself from the music journalism of Kandia Crazy Horse and Cynthia Dagnal-Myron, the first black woman critic published in Creem (where she was edited by Bangs) and Rolling Stone. Nostalgia is both a condition of being and a tool of potential—like whose words get excluded from the canon when we only elevate a limited range of voices.

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A fan’s love isn’t articulated only by their singular admiration of a subject. It exists in tandem with others who share that adoration, compounding to form pockets of community. Fandoms and subcultures have always existed, but digitality ensures that no one is huddled in their corner alone. During a pandemic, joining with others has proved vital.

Accepting nostalgia as an ever-present condition allows us more agency in how we choose to engage the past.

Perhaps, then, what makes When We Were Young more egregious is the manipulation of people’s yearning for community at a time when convening remains a safety and public health issue. Joy, a crucial tenet of nostalgia, is a sentiment that similarly gets used for profit. “Joy is an act of resistance,” taken from a Toi Derricotte poem and later used by collectives like the Resistance Revival Chorus, became a mobilizing declaration for black women asserting a right to happiness amid and in direct opposition to systems that thrive on our despair. But as with many well-known sayings and expressions of a politic, the expression has been co-opted for merchandising, appearing on bags, totes, and mugs readily found on Amazon. It has become a marker of individual expression, taken out of communal relation to instead prioritize capital gains.

While I can’t say for certain that joy is always radical, I do know that it’s essential to survival, as is connection. I have been scared—I am scared—of what comes next. It’s possible that looking backward is mostly an attempt at escape into what one may call “simpler times,” but that requires operating under the delusion that the times have ever been simple. Accepting nostalgia as an ever-present condition allows us more agency in how we choose to engage the past. Instead of looking back with the only intention of recreating old joy, we can learn to fashion new circumstances that produce hope.

At my most optimistic, the initial buzz of the festival announcement reminded me of our desire to be reflected back to one and another. How electrifying it is to see a part of yourself reverberating in the world. I was imitating Hayley Williams’s inflections on “Misery Business” and maybe you were finding solace in Bright Eyes, and for a moment, however fleeting, we saw each other.

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