When life is changing at a pace faster than you can keep up with, sometimes the simple pleasures are the most comforting. Only, sometimes those pleasures are less simple than they seem.
Okay, soz, I just wanted to come up with an opening line as spoken by Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years because I’ve been watching the series over and now every thought I have is narrated by a nasally man pretending to be a 12-year-old boy who stares at nothing a lot while he waits for the nasally man to do the voiceover, which is still a nice break from every thought coming in the form of a status update but less preferable than, y’know, having a sense of self.
Anyway, as I’ve lay in bed alone watching The Wonder Years and spilling cereal on my pillow (date me!), a few things have occurred to me. One is that Paul Pfeiffer aged 14 could be in almost any current Australian ‘indie’ band and still not be the most ‘authentically dressed’ member. The second is that David Schwimmer’s only good work was the bit-part playing Karen’s boyfriend, which I realise isn’t saying a lot. The third is that that the series uses nostalgia in a way that spotlights its current misuse, or just evil use, in the lo-fi, post-chillwave, post-Arcade Fire, post-East Coast, post-‘underground dance revolution’ climate of ‘indie’.
Masked in all the things that have made it alluring, like actually good-sounding amps and Hipstamatic lenses, it’s taken a while to latch onto the realisation that nostalgia is the predominant thread that runs through the ‘blogosphere’ music culture of the last year or so. Whether it’s meta-nostalgia for the ‘current’ events of the US summer – ie. all the Super 8 videos by beachwear-clad American bands that pre-emptively long for the seaside fleeting loves and friendships that are happening right now – or it’s a darker take on the frozen-dream state of the suburbs, there has definitely been a prevailing desire to reflect on what we ‘miss’, or will miss, about simpler and ‘freer’ times. The headline of the Measure blog attached to Brooklyn street press The L Magazine summed it up recently when posting about a new Brooklyn band called Your Youth (pictured below): “Oh Good God, When Will It End? There is a Brooklyn Band Called Your Youth.” I mean, for fuck’s sake, there’s even a band now called The Wonder Years.
Of course, the blog’s frustration, and the general growing tiredness with all this dripping-wet backwards-looking, comes from the fact that the nostalgia is overplayed and related to things that never really happened or never really meant much to begin. As more bands like Your Youth inhale the zeitgeist, we’re feeling like they’re attempting to trick our real emotions into making some sort of ‘connection’ that isn’t there, or at least hasn’t been realised. In truth, I never sat around my bedroom thinking, “I wish he was my boyfriend,” like the teenage-recalling bubblegum voice of Best Coast suggests, without also thinking, “I wish I didn’t have to go to the dermatologist,” or, “I wish I could write html so I didn’t have to use Geocities.” Not romantic, and I never want to have those thoughts again.
And that’s what The Wonder Years got so right. The show was written with nostalgia at its core: each season predated its on-air year by exactly 20 years, beginning in 1968, airing in 1988; the man voice intends to be both Kevin as adult looking back and Kevin as inner thought; and most episodes are centred around the idea of a ‘simpler time’. But that time always turns out to be less than simple and connected to a truth. When college-aged Karen decides to move in with David Schwimmer and has a falling out with Mr Arnold over it, there’s no easy fix, just as there isn’t/wasn’t with our own parents. When Winnie Cooper decides that same season that she can’t see Kevin any more, it isn’t some flight of hormones; it’s to do with the need to let go of the past regardless of what it costs. Oh, yeah, ‘emotions’ and things. But that’s the thing about nostalgia: when it’s based on the truth, it’s usually a bit embarrassing and even sometimes hurts a little. Damn, there’s that Kevin voice again.
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