Y2K wait a second, it wasn't like that
The craziness of concocted memory
It’s come to my bemused attention that gen-z shares a deepening interest in “Y2k fashion” and “Y2k music,” two labels that those of us who were undergraduates in those days would have been loathe to apply. When the millennium ended and nothing happened, we were all embarrassed that we had ever made a big thing about Y2k: technology had not come to a halt, as foretold. Computers did not reset en masse, obliterating all medical records or payroll in every field everywhere. We were not catupulted back into an imagined cave without electricity or indoor plumbing, and the extremists who had blown life-savings on bunkers and lifetime supplies of grain and bottled water were left to reset their mental calendars if they didn’t want to change religions or transform their worldview.
Once it became clear that Y2k, itself, was no cause for alarm, we put the whole concept behind us: it was a collective drunk dial made in a moment of semi-delirious panic, not to be referenced, not to be judged, not to be remembered.
But we never asked for it to be so aggressively misremembered.
I have no cause to get preachy on the subject of silly imagined histories for idealized far-away eras: my parents were bewildered when I bought my first pair of bell-bottoms in the 90’s. My friends and I sat at coffeehouses and bemoaned the fact that we couldn’t ever know the awesome ‘60’s or ‘70’s, never imagining that everything surrounding us then would transform into its own nostalgia. As a college sophomore, I checked the Woodstock documentary’s multiple videocassettes out of the Iowa City Public Library and took copious notes as I watched, the better to write my 60’s period piece for my final project in Advanced Playwriting. I don’t remember what prompted my interest in the decade, and I have no idea to what extent my diligent research (period memoirs, internet interviews) made my characters convincing.
I do know, however, that I got the music right. And this has been one of the strangest outcomes of the Youth’s unfolding interest in “Y2k:” they seem convinced that we all listened to Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, that pop music reigned. But if anything defined the popscape of that era, it’s the fact that those pop-stars-turned products took a backseat. What we traditional-college-age-students-in-the-aughts sought to be was indie.
At the start of my college years in ‘01, Napster had just begun to make record executives nervous, and few of us, percentage-wise, were listening to the radio (excepting the college stations, of course). Our ever-expanding knowledge of musical possibility came from burned CD’s made by music majors and local band members in the know — listen to this. And this. And this. Every region had a different spokesperson for the just-above-ground culture: Ian informs me that in Santa Barbara, where he spent his college years, nobody passionately cared about the quintessentially Midwestern Bright Eyes. In Iowa City, though, pain didn’t exist until pain was expressed thusly:
Music was wrenching lyrics of poetic internal turmoil. To the extent that the indie icons of the aughts stoked that over-used over-tweeted-about over-interneted concept, “joy,” it was as a heart-rending contrast to the sort of lyrics they usually wrote. Britney Spears was ages away from providing her unwitting and devastating education about what a conservatorship entails and how vulnerable people can be abused under its restraints. Justin was just the former lead singer of a boy band, and if any of us had listened to those, we certainly weren’t going to admit it to our cool college friends.
Music, like all media, has become an atomized thing, something to discover alone via impersonal personalized algorthims, and with the loss of collective entertainment has come the obliteration of musical taste: you do you. Who else is there?
Part of the reason this collective history-revision is getting to me is because the people rewriting it can’t imagine a world where there was no you do you. Who you listened to signified who you were and what you believed in. It was how you found your friends, or, in the case of a place like Iowa City’s hilariously elitest indie music store, Record Collector, it was how you found your anti-friends. If you didn’t listen to the right bands according to the values and aesthetics of a certain group, you — sorry, not sorry — could not enter that group.
I don’t miss not feeling cool in front of my hot music-major friends or internally debating whether I should pretend to indie-band knowledge I don’t have. But I do miss the thrill of putting my lifelong faves aside to yield to what other people had discovered before I did. Two of my lifelong favorite albums, Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister and Hefner’s We Love the City, came into my hands because of two respective people who understood that I would love this sort of thing. I’m not sure if it’s considered socially acceptable for gen-zers to say to someone else, “You need to hear this.” (If it is, let me know!) My sneaking suspicion is that atomized media and you do you have so obliterated our former understandings that it’s not considered my domain to tell you what you need to hear.
Before Ian and I knew each other, a girl he ended up not even meeting on the ancient dating site OKCupid told him that he couldn’t call himself a fan of house music if he didn’t know who John Tejada was. That girl changed my life by proxy, not only because I ended up sharing Ian’s then-ignited passion for Tajada’s uniquely influencial output but also because he went on to form half of Wajatta, a duo with vivacious iconoclast Reggie Watts. Their two-so-far albums, Casual High Technology and Don’t Let Get You Down, encompass some of the most invigorating and new-every-listen music I’ve ever heard. Those two obliterated my once-circumscribed folksinger’s daughter notions that only acoustic genius makes for worthwhile music. But having lived that belief for so long, I never would’ve sought out their wonders on my own. Someone had to say, Listen to this, and the algrithim couldn’t have done it, because that only gives you what you’ve already proven to like.
In 2006, we suddenly had another way to discover music, often via direct messages from bands and singers imploring us to listen to them: MySpace. At the time, my friends and I lamented that the site overflowed with photos of self-objectifying women we felt pressured to be, and we had our suspicions about the direction that those sexualized photos would take. We didn’t predict a generation that would have a perfectionist but perfunctory relationship to “nudes,” but we knew this wasn’t going to end well. We had no way of knowing how much would actually end.
As any historian will tell you, MySpace now represents an alarm and a warning for the preservation of history: much of what we know about how people used to live during, for example, WWII, we know because of written correspondance, journals, and other records kept by the natural hands of ordinary people. With so much of what we express now going in all directions at all hours via digital media, future generations will have no idea how we talked or what any of us were actually thinking about unless all of it is preserved. We talk a big game, and perhaps rightly so, about the shudder-inducing notion that everything online remains there, but MySpace has shown us that it doesn’t. The vast majority of that once-vibrant archive is gone. When my father died in July of 2006, the first place I wrote about it was my MySpace blog. Maybe I don’t need to see how 22-year-old-me attempted to stay a writer during my life’s most enduring rupture, but in a sense, it’s sad that her words can never be retrieved.
And it’s sadder to think of the unknown unknown: by definition, we can’t know what was lost.
It may sound harsh to say to a young person, “You weren’t there, you can’t know.” I remember emerging from the living room of my very first apartment that college-year believing, after I watched the final moment of the last Woodstock video, that I pretty much had been there. I knew that guys were “cats” and to have sex was to “ball” and that approaching strangers to ask philisophical questions like “what color is jealousy?” then wander off after the exchange was perfectly normal in the 60’s. So I pretty much had it, right? Is there really so much more that I can’t just imagine?
We can’t respect the potential of imagination if we’re not cognizant of its limits. In the decades since I was young-on-paper, we’ve made extraordinary strides toward asking questions about whose histories are deemed “worth” preserving and what informs the narratives that shape subsequent stories. Some of the most insightful research I’ve seen on periods of American history in which I was alive are from young scholars who weren’t.
Perhaps what this all comes back to is a renewed obligation for all of us to perform the imaginative labor of remembering a world in which social media did not inform our communication. Even text-messaging, which is ostensibly not media, opens avenues of anxiety heretofore unknown by those of us who couldn’t text in middle-school. I once explained to a gen-z coworker on the edge of a meltdown over what they perceived as an faux pas in a sent text that once upon a time, people just said things, and the things we said were generally forgotten. Anything that couldn’t be summed up as “I love you” or “I hate you” disappeared into the ether if there was nothing to distinguish it. We did not have the option of reading our own casual conversations back to ourselves, distorting their tone or newly questioning their context.
Remember the luxury of truly forgetting. But don’t forget that those who are now most vividly remembered were not who we promised we would never forget at the time.
Oh, and listen to this: