The year: 2023.

My typical Thursday: a long day of class­es. As I commute, I put on my headphones, lis­ten to 1989 (Taylor’s Version) with some Troye Sivan thrown into the mix. I arrive home, have dinner, tidy up, and study a little. Before bed, I could unwind by watching Dan and Phil’s latest upload, or I could catch up on the most recent episode of Big Brother. I’m almost spoiled for choice. Friday will be much of the same.

Here’s the thing: swap the train journey to university with the bus ride to school, or the Spotify playlist with the radio. Have a quick scroll through YouTube or TikTok’s trending videos, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to feel like you’ve time-travelled back to 2013.

We’re seeing a renaissance of pop cul­ture from our past, bundles of work we’ve long cherished re-emerging in ways that are almost indistinguishable from their original form. The idea that fashion trends repeat themselves is fa­miliar to us, but we’re somewhat less acquaint­ed with the literature, music and cinema of our time largely consisting of replicas and remakes. We all love listening to the same albums on a loop, re-watching the same show over and over until we can quote every line. The world seems to have caught on. But does everything need to be brought back to life? Can’t things just be left as they are?

The most obvious explanation is that it’s all just a cash grab, an easy way for big corpora­tions to prey on the nostalgia audiences hold so dearly. Plus, it allows artists to produce content that’s been tried and tested, almost guarantee­ing success. The Hunger Games franchise has grossed almost $3 billion worldwide; why rein­vent the wheel, when Hollywood could release yet another movie that millions will run to watch and compare to the original? It makes sense that many industries are looking for shortcuts to sourcing an income, but I suspect there is more to it than just this. We must have some power over what’s going on too.

There’s the argument that we’re lacking innovation these days, that the quality of art is declining so we’re having to go back to basics. It is difficult to even conceive of modern pop music sounding as perfect as it did in the early 2010s, unless, of course, you’re re-recording it. I don’t really buy into this melodramatic idea, though, that the art world is undergoing a tragic sort of death. I think of all the books I have read and films I have watched and songs I have listened to that were released recently, and I’m in awe of how stunning and original so many of them are. My favourite album of all time came out three years ago, so it’s hardly something I’m clinging onto from primary school.

Equally, there’s so much out there from before my time that I’m only just beginning to familiarise myself with. I may have been seven­teen when I first read The Secret History, but my reflections on the book are more concerned with late autumn in the early 90s at a prestigious lib­eral arts college rather than my life at the time. In fact, that became my life at the time, albeit met­aphorically. I go back to this novel every year to try and recreate that feeling from the first time I read it. But I’m sure there are many books yet to be written that I will go on to feel the exact same way about.

There is a part of me that looks back to the things I loved when I was younger and often agrees that they encapsulated something that con­temporary art doesn’t. As Christmas approaches and the new John Lewis advert fills every other break on TV, I imagine many of us had a reaction that was something along the lines of, yeah, it’s just not the same anymore, is it? Similarly, I’ve yet to meet a single person who prefers the Dis­ney remakes over the originals; most people think they’ve lost their ‘magic’. I think that our dissat­isfaction with a lot of current work has less to do with our connection to it, and more to do with our ability to see things how they are as we experi­ence them. We always look back on the past with rose-tinted glasses – when I’m in my thirties it’s likely that I’ll look back to now and think about how these were better times, and that the media I consume now (that is, when I’m not looking back to 2013) acts as some perfect time-capsule.

We love to label things, to compartmen­talise them into boxes of seasons and years and scents so that we can pick out the right thing at the right time and go back to it when we need it most. Is it really such a bad thing that we’re just so desperate to feel? Is it cheap that we just opt for the easiest option, run back to what we know and love instead of letting go and expanding our horizons? Maybe a little. But all I can say is if you were to place a tenner on me having gone to see The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I’d owe you your next cinema ticket, too.

Rhiannon McGovern

Editor-in-Chief.

Fourth year English and Creative Writing and Politics and International Relations student.