The New Nostalgia

For several years now, when it comes to nostalgia the eighties have been all the rage. This renascent interest in the eighties popularly peaked with movie versions of The Transformers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There is a new nostalgia about to sweep the country though, and its already started. The new nostalgia is for the fifties.

You hear this everywhere. Gwen Stefani's "The Sweet Escape" sounds like it could come blaring out of a soda fountain. Fergie's "Clumsy" is a complete ripoff of Little Richard's "The Girl Can't Help It." Shawn Kingston's "Beautiful Girls" sounds like a frat-reggae cover of the Drifters. You are starting to see it too, with knee-high boots and caked-on makeup becoming all the rage. The thing is, I heard people talking about the 80s comeback several years before it was in full spring, but I haven't heard peep about the 50s comeback. Somebody is doing a really good job of marketing the 50s as though they weren't the 50s.

What really bothers me is the source of this rebirth is rockabilly. Hellbilly, psychobilly, rockabilly ... these forms have thrived, and have done so mostly underground since the disappearance of the Stray Cats. As the Carson Daly crowd co-opts the fifties, rockabilly and all of its divergent substrands are at risk of losing their vivacity; hopefully, the cool hunters won't kill their prey this time.