WHY HAS THE WORLD GONE RETRO?
Something nasty has crawled into our world, bringing with it hipsters and vacuous fakery. The nasty thing is called nostalgia. The word was coined in 1688 to define as a ‘mental disorder’ the homesickness felt by Swiss mercenaries fighting abroad. It was thought to be caused by brain damage from hearing cowbells constantly clanging. Today’s frenzied nostalgia means big business flogging people a bogus past. Pointy-heads at the Henley Centre for Futures predicted this trend some 15 years ago. They foresaw how our world of ever-accelerating change would draw people to obsolete objects and styles as emblems of steadier times (even though those times were never actually steady). The guitar business is awash with it. Fender and Gibson are raking millions from selling big-ticket ‘relic’ guitars that look like golden-age originals from the Fifties and Sixties. These come especially pre-dinged, as if emerging from hard decades in a rock god’s calloused hands, not straight from an automated factory. It’s harmless stuff for six-strings. But the trend spells death for motorcycling. To list the marques and models afflicted would be long. Pretty much everyone now churns out new bikes that look old. Meanwhile genuine old bikes are disappearing from the road, stuck on mantelpieces as investments. Harmless fun it ain’t. Motorcycling’s focus is being diverted from the risky joys of riding. It is instead being reinvented as an accessible consumerist nondestination, a fantasy world that obsesses over the look and feel of machines you can’t ride practically, and riding gear that’s unwearable. There can be no other explanation for burgeoning sales of retro helmets that induce a violent Parkinson’s shudder in the slightest breeze, ‘classic cut’ jackets that billow and leak – and that bizarre obsession with fitting comedy fat tyres and thin seats to cobby old SOHC Hondas, thus making them even worse. I used quite happily to be a wobbling obsolescence. Now I’m supposed to be Mr Cool astride his gen-yoo-whine icon. More likely I’ll be taken for some buffoon who’s overpaid vastly for a relic of the wasted youth they never had. Worst of all, the mainstream retro-ising of new bikes strangles the future. To believe that the old designs are unsurpassable is to deny any chance of creating another new era of amazing bikes. This kills optimism and suffocates motorcycling in aspic. (Look at Harley Davidson, trapped in a Jurassic Park outlaw cliché.) In an honest world, old things should look old. New things should look new. Otherwise people in the future will have nothing old to look back upon fondly, just a morass of fake nostalgia and a thing called motorcycling that wasn’t.