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There is some discussion below about the game Mixtape, and the suspicion that it AI was used to some extent. I haven't played video games in a long time, and what I know about them could fit on the head of a pin, but as a 90s kid I became intrigued by the nostalgia that this game was supposedly aiming at, and how the producers supposedly got it all wrong, so I naturally did a little research to see what the big deal was. One of the comments below points out that in games like Red Dead Redemption a murderous outlaw wouldn't dare also be a racist, and while political sentiments might be the most obvious and ham-fisted examples of this, there's a larger trend of assigning contemporary values to historical eras. In the case of Red Dead Redemption I'd argue that this is more forgivable, as the further back one goes in history the less source material one has. After all, nobody who remembers the 1890s is alive today to tell you what you got wrong, so one can be forgiven for making some assumptions out of necessity.
But there are plenty of people who remember the '90s. If we narrow in on the specific demographic and assume that the game takes place some time in June 1995, there are about 3 million people who would have been graduating high school and are alive today to talk about it. But even there you run into problems, because the people from the Class of 1995 most willing to talk about their high school experience are the ones most likely to idealize it. Most contemporary reminiscences of 1995 are from the kind of hipster journalists who want to make it sound like they were cooler than they actually were, and thus use their current selves as stand-ins for their high school ones. I don't want to suggest that these people are lying about the past, simply that there is a tendency to emphasize that which has stood the test of time and conforms to contemporary tastes. The problem arises when people who were born too late to experience an era become influenced by contemporary ideas about what made that era cool and assume that the coolness that they perceive was typical. And it compounds further when this false nostalgia includes a dash of contemporary coolness for good measure.
The first time I noticed this in my adult life was when Vaporwave took off in the early 2010s. As a meditation on the nature of nostalgia it's not without interest, but as a representation of the aesthetic of 1992 it's absurd. The visuals suited the style fine, as the millennial memory of the era is as influenced as much by worn out VHS tapes as actual experience. But the music had more to do with creating a nostalgic mood than it did with evoking anything that was being played on the radio between 1987 and 1998. The movement's canonical song, "Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing" by Macintosh Plus, was nothing more than a slowed down and chopped up remix of Diana Ross's "It's Your Move". More original works in the genre can be described as synthwave with a heavy dose of smooth jazz. The tunes are enjoyable enough, but the insistence of pairing them with found VHS footage of home videos and toy commercials is puzzling, since the sound is more 80s than 90s.
Given the right context, this isn't a mortal sin. One of the watershed moments in vaporwave's development was the discovery and upload of tape reel of K-Mart muzak from 1988, and the subsequent uploads of cassettes from later years. The visuals often included shots of store interiors or clips taken from commercials. To the extent that vaporwave sought to evoke nostalgia, it was an oddly specific nostalgia for a certain kind of consumer capitalism. And even that's an unusual choice, since the period we're supposed to be nostalgic for sits on the divide between two very different eras—the more traditional, jingle-based make your product look like loads of fun on one side and the more detached, ironic style of turning the commercial into a work of art that can be appreciated on its own terms on the other. Just look at beer commercials; the ads of the early 90s showed men at pools surrounded by beautiful women in bikinis, clearly trying to impart an association of the product with parties and the opposite sex. By the middle of the decade they had frogs in a swamp each croaking out one syllable of the brand name. What this was supposed to say about Budweiser was anyone's guess, but it's one of the most iconic commercials of the era.
This all makes sense when you consider that Macintosh Plus and many of the other top vaporwave practitioners weren't born until the early 90s. Their earliest memories would not have been until the end of the era they were trying to evoke, and their nostalgia was largely for an imagined world based on the detritus of the era that ended up on the internet. It's ultimately a lie, but it's a lie in the same sense that all nostalgia is a lie. Because if vaporwave did give an accurate impression of what life was like in 1992, that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. There wasn't much better about 1992 as compared to today, and quite a bit was worse. More importantly, 1992 doesn't exist as a discrete entity that you can visit. I remember 1992, and at the time there was nothing more exciting about it than there is about 2026. If you were to visit 1992 as a tourist, you would be aware of that fact and unable to experience things as you remember. But if you were to visit 1992 while not conscious that it wasn't the current year, then there would be nothing interesting about it; it would just be normal. And no, I'm not nostalgic for my childhood either. It was great, mind you, but people forget that when you're a kid all you want is to be older. Every minor decision is made by your parents: Who your friends are, what time you go to bed, what you have for dinner, what you can watch on television, how you spend your Saturdays. Yes, I remember retail outlets in the early 90s. I distinctly remember standing for what seemed like hours as my mother looked at every article of clothing in the store, and when the women's department was finally exhausted she moved on to babies because of some relative's kid, and at that point I was begging to go to domestics, or, preferably, home. If I go back to 1992 I do not want to spend it in a K-Mart.
Which brings us to Mixtape. It was almost certainly created by people who are too young to recall the era they're trying to evoke, because anyone old enough would have been well into their 40s by the time of the game's development. Much has been made of the whole "using a pencil to rewind a tape" thing, and while nobody would have done that just to rewind it, there was a use case. If the player mangled your tape, which wasn't an uncommon occurrence, you would usually use a pencil to wind it back up once you got it disentangled from the player. But that's beside the point, because the idea of a mixtape as something that you give as a gift to that special someone has more to do with our contemporary interpretation of 90s culture than to actual 90s culture. I don't want to suggest that the practice never happened. But it certainly wasn't widespread. Mixtapes were mostly something you made for yourself, either because few cars had CD players or because you were taping off the radio.
The thing people don't realize is that music was expensive in the '90s, and less popular acts were hard to find, especially outside of major metro areas. I can tell you that in 1997 the going rate for a CD at Music Oasis was $15, which is $30 in today's money per the CPI, more when you take into consideration that the average teenager in those days was more likely to make under $5/hour than today's teenager is likely to make more than 10. I looked through a lot of CD binders in my time, and most people only had like 15 CDs, and people who were really into music might have had about 20. If you were relying on your own collection for material, the well would have dried up fast, especially considering that most people only bought CDs for the hits. Most mixtapes per se were things that you made for yourself, either by borrowing from friends or taping off the radio. To the extent that most people made mixtapes for other people, they were likely to just record the whole album, or record the good songs from their CDs without regard for the running order.
The idea that mixtapes were curated items derives from the movie High Fidelity. Except in the film, the characters who are obsessed with mixtapes are music geeks who work in a record store. They aren't representative of the general public, let alone high school kids. To the extent that they existed they were, like mall music, not something that most people thought much about. John Cusack's monologue at the end of the film is notable because it's unusual. But beyond the overstated relevance of mixtapes, the game fails for its overreverence for the 80s.
I took a peek at the soundtrack, and it mostly consists of either stuff from the 80s or indie stuff from the 90s that wasn't popular. This can't be stated strongly enough, but nothing about the 80s was considered cool in the 90s. The entire decade was seen as anathema to any modern sensibilities. The divide in commercials was representative of a larger cultural shift, whereby grunge swept everything else away. By 1995, alternative rock had become mainstream to the point that anything from the previous decade sounded incredibly dated. The idea that high schoolers in 1995 would listen to Devo would have seemed laughable. The idea that they would listen to Joy Division or the Jesus and Mary Chain would have seemed puzzling, because most teenagers wouldn't have even heard of either of those bands. Their stuff was technically available, but in a city like Pittsburgh you would have had to go to a place like Dave's Music Mine on the South Side to find anything like that. A typical National Record Mart in the mall was unlikely to have it, and if they did, you would pay top dollar for it. A discount place like Music Oasis or K-Mart? Forget about it. Even in the 2000s I was having trouble finding classics like The Band's Music from Big Pink in normal CD stores; kids who were into non-mainstream music had to go into the city to find it.
The idea that anyone would discuss their favorite 80s movie is equally absurd. First, nobody really thought of 80s movies as a distinct category. A more accurate description would have been asking about movies shown on cable ad nauseum. And the only 80s movies with any purchase among high school kids at the time would have been kids stuff like the Goonies or ET, or maybe comedies like Ghostbusters. Nobody was discussing something as obviously dated as Aliens. And nobody was certainly seeking out movies from the 80s as an exercise in nostalgia. The same people may tell you now about what they liked in the 80s, but that's with 30 years of perspective. High school kids trying to be cool aren't sitting around talking about what they liked when they were 8. In the early 2000s I certainly wasn't having debates about the best 90s movies.
When all that changes for most people is college. It's only then, once you're out of the coolness rat race, that you get over yourself and start getting nostalgic over your childhood. My own college experience was a bit different, because the 90s didn't feel like they had ended yet culturally, and the 80s were starting to lose their stigma. But nonetheless, that's when most people widen their cultural horizons and realize how cloistered their earlier lives had been, and it's easy for us to look back at our lives and assume that those are the same people we were in high school. And when someone younger consults an LLM, they're bound to get a distilled, distorted version of whatever our collective memory tells us the past was like. And when we don't rely on those distillations, it isn't much better, because we put too much stock in what we ignored, and end up with vaporwave. What can be done about this? Detailed research is one possibility, but even that may be hopeless. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Be careful not to prove too much here. If all nostalgia is just based on one's subjectively biased viewpoint and is never grounded in anything objective, then that would imply that nothing ever gets objectively worse for anyone. But that can't be true. Sometimes the past actually was just better.
There's something about vaporwave that's deeply resonant for me. I was a small child in the 90s, but I do still have a number of distinct memories of those years.
I do think that vaporwave captures something essential about the dreamlike quality of those years (as I experienced them). You might naturally respond with, well, all of your experiences are a bit more dreamlike when you're a small child. And you'd be right. Although, if we want to analyze things in terms of "objective material conditions", the 80s and 90s presented a very brief and very unique window when consumer computing technology was becoming widely available, but technology (and the world at large) hadn't yet been thoroughly demystified by the infinite free information we have available on wikipedia/youtube/LLMs/etc. The computer was like a portal to another dimension, filled with bright promises of the future; there could be anything in there. If the kids on the playground told you that you could unlock Mew in Pokemon RBY, and you didn't have internet at home, you really had no way of knowing if they were telling the truth or not except for just exploring the game yourself. Part of what vaporwave is trying to evoke is the early mystique and promises of consumer technology, and the failure of those utopian promises to materialize.
As you were intimating, part of what vaporwave is trying to accomplish is to get you to construct your own nostalgic relationship to the past, rather than simply accurately presenting the 90s as they actually were. Listening to Floral Shoppe alone in your room? Kind of whatever. Listening to Floral Shoppe while walking around the dead mall 20 minutes down the street from the house where you grew up, where you used to spend so much time with your parents when you were little, virtually the only person in the whole building in the waning hours of a Saturday evening in August, a once vibrant shopping center full of families and children, now almost abandoned, every shop boarded up except for the GNC which is the final holdout? One of the most ethereal and otherworldly experiences I've ever had.
Anemoia: “nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known”
I used to think this concept was incoherent, and yet listening to Holst's "Jupiter" makes me feel patriotic for a planet I've never set foot on and never will (because one physically cannot "set foot" on it).
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