MILLENNIAL DIARY
MILLENNIALS have made a religion of 1990s nostalgia. Our favourite news sites know they can always get plenty of click-throughs on a slow day with a rose-tinted listicle like ‘19 things all siblings fought over in the 1990s’, or ‘19 pictures that smell exactly like growing up in the 1990s’, or ‘41 things you definitely had in your bedroom in the 1990s’ — these just in the last month.
While our parents and grandparents would all have experienced a certain nostalgia for the decade of their childhood, the internet has snowballed our 1997 reminiscences into a cult.
The last couple of weeks have seen speculation mount about a possible Spice Girls reunion. Victoria Beckham shared a picture of the girls over at Geri’s house, with the caption ‘Exciting’ and the hashtag ‘friendshipneverends’. Emma Bunton’s caption was ‘the future is looking spicy!’. The millennial internet went into a total meltdown.
Now Kylie Jenner has come out of the pregnancy closet, we needed to channel our detective work and theorising over social media clues elsewhere. We’re convinced it’s happening. We feel truly blessed.
The Spice Girls were deeply formative for girls pretty much exactly my age: when the film Spice World came out I was seven and ripe for their glittery nonsense. Spice was the first album I ever owned (on tape and then CD). I had the T-shirt in lime green and also aqua — spicy apparel for all moods and occasions. My buddy made a Girl Power mosaic which was featured in the official fan magazine. I was livid.
Every self-respecting 27to 32-year-old will still know the rap from Wannabe, etched as it is in our hearts like the theme to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Yes, 1997 was a time of hope and fun, when fash-power-goddess Victoria Beckham could still be referred to as ‘Easy V’.
The Spice Girls was a first introduction to feminism with their messages of sticking with your girlfriends, paving the way for a generation who can now drop ‘intersectionality’, ‘internalised sexism’ and ‘transmisogyny’ into conversation with ease. We may not have known exactly what Emma Bunton meant by ‘put it on, put it on’, but I like to think it subconsciously influenced our thinking on safe sex.
But it’s not just millennials who are excited — 1990s-obsession has seeped into every corner of pop culture. Millie Bobby Brown (born 2004) expressed her excitement at the reunion on her Instagram story. I couldn’t help feeling slightly put out: you weren’t there, man, you don’t know.
But then again, she is the star of nostalgia juggernaut Stranger Things, which has proved that if we have to have new things, we want them to seem kind of old.
We seem to take pride in the ‘1990s kid’ label, despite the fact it tends to translate as ‘stunted, miserable and deluded adult’.
We think of the 1990s as a happier time because, before the ubiquity of the internet, humanity wasn’t constantly reminded of all the horrible depressing things happening in the world.
According to actual science, playing the Spice Girls, or rewatching old episodes of the Gilmore Girls sends us down a dopamine-lined neuron path. Nostalgia makes us feel warm (literally) and hopeful, apparently.
It can backfire, though. The experiences of watching Friends for millennials has been the constant bickering of the angels and devils on our shoulders, because the Friends we’re watching now on Netflix bears little resemblance to the Friends that we remember from when we were 14 and blissfully unwoke.
When we are watching the finale, the angel says ‘that’s a strong, successful woman giving up her dream career because her boyfriend is insecure, needy and controlling. GET BACK ON THE PLANE, RACHEL’. The devil’s silken tones tell us ‘Don’t you remember how romantic it was? I’m sure you cried in 2004. That was nice, wasn’t it? ADMIT IT’.
The angel will interrupt every episode to remind us of the homophobia, fatphobia, sexism and cringey whiteness.
That Ross is boring because he loves dinosaurs is not plausible in 2018, where dinosaurs are awesome. Chandler’s shame at his father doing drag is incomprehensible, when we all know that the only sensible reaction is ‘YAAAAASS QWEEN, WERK!’.
The resurrection of Friends has gently suggested to us that perhaps some things are better left in our sweet, rose-tinted memories.
No one told the makers of Will & Grace, which has been hauled out of its grave for a new series, 12 years after its final episode aired.
I can’t help but feel that Will & Grace was great... for then. It had a very timespecific job to do: show that gay can sell. Granddad-Bae Joe Biden said in 2012, ‘‘I think Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has done so far.”
He’s probably right, but I think we’ve learnt everything we can from it. The world has moved on. The dichotomy of gayness represented by ‘straightacting’ Will and ‘feminine’ Jack is at best archaic and at worst damaging. It’s taken a lot of time and effort to deconstruct those stereotypes. It’s telling that the character most gay men identified with was straight female Karen. She’s the gayest thing about the show.
It’s responsible for millions of women believing they are in need of, nay entitled to, a ‘Gay Best Friend’, a loathsome concept that has been the scourge of gay men since. I asked my Gay Best Friend about Will & Grace, because that’s what they’re there for. ‘Ugh. I hate it. I respect what it did in its first outing. But now? No thanks.’ And in an age of Call Me by Your Name and Orange Is the New Black, the queerness of Will & Grace just isn’t very queer. It’s boring.
We all live in fear of 2018 wheeling out our 1990s favourites only to batter them horribly to death again in front of our eyes.
Can the Spice Girls live up to our neon and sherbetsoaked 1997 fantasy? It feels unlikely. Victoria Beckham has said she won’t tour — and anyway, their brand of feminism-lite will find it difficult to establish a place in 2018’s political landscape, where the battle against sexism feels more urgent and complicated than peace signs and ‘Girl Power’.
But as the girls taught me, friendship lasts forever — so I’ll support them on this, if it’s what they want to do. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
‘Perhaps some things are better left in our rose-tinted memories’