Everyone is posting their hottest photos from 2016 – but there was actually nothing to celebrate. Are we taking refuge in an actually shitty past out of sheer desperation about the present?
Well, have you posted your 2016 throwback on Instagram yet? I have to admit: I also became weak. I actually try not to succumb too much to nostalgia and not to follow social media trends. But this time I couldn’t hold back and posted funny photos from my 2016.
Nevertheless, I ask myself: Why did we collectively succumb to flashbacks this year of all times? Maybe because the millennials who primarily populate Instagram are collectively approaching middle age and people fondly remember their twenties and early thirties? Or because the reality out there is currently extremely confusing and unbearable? Inflation, AI seems to affect all areas of life – and jobs! – to take over, Trump vs. Venezuela, vs. Greenland, the Iranian regime vs. its own people, a chancellor who insults us all collectively because we are supposedly sick too often. It’s understandable that we want to take refuge in the past. In 2016, when I was still in my mid-20s, I didn’t have a wrinkle on my forehead and everything looked better in the golden glow of the past and the filters of VSCO-Cam. But does it really?
In 2016 everything went down the drain
2016 was the year when everything really went south: I was living in Great Britain at the time and was there first hand when the Brexit vote took place. The weeks and months beforehand were absurd, the climax was when, a few hundred meters from our office, Bob Geldof and the right-wing politician Nigel Farage met on fishing boats in the Thames to raise the mood for Brexit (Farage) or against it (Geldof).
On the evening of the vote we had a block party in our house in south London; no one could imagine that Great Britain would decide against its membership of the EU. The next morning was to be even more bitter. In the fall, Trump’s first election followed, unexpectedly for many, a similar shock. A few days after the election, I flew to the US to visit friends and family. In New York, subway stations were covered with colorful post-its on which people expressed their fears. I was visiting a good friend in Boston and it seemed as if the entire city was collectively sitting around the bar getting drunk in mourning.
Politics meets pop and meme culture
It was also the beginning of a time in which the mixture of pop culture, meme culture and politics became absolutely mainstream. Not just because of Bob “I don’t like Mondays” Geldof, who had a sea battle with a right-wing politician on the Thames – I’m thinking more of absurd developments like the meme universe surrounding the gorilla Harambe. Remember Harambe? The 17-year-old gorilla was shot dead at the zoo in Cincinnati, USA, after a child fell into his enclosure and he refused to let go. Sad, but according to primate researchers like Jane Goodall and many others, it’s probably the best course of action for the zoo.
The internet saw it differently: Harambe ironically became a heroic figure. In Australia and the United States that year, people wrote his name on ballot papers rather than choose one of the realistic options. Numerous musicians and those who would like to do so made tribute songs, including Young Thug – and Elon Musk, who was still perceived as supposedly unproblematic at the time, and who wrote his track together with Caroline Polachek (!). He probably had a weakness for alt-pop girls back then.
The year was horror, an annus horribilis, a year of horror: terrorist attacks in Berlin at the Christmas market at the Memorial Church, in Istanbul, in Nice, in Ouagadougou, in the Brussels subway and at the airport, in the “Pulse” club in Orlando, Florida, to name just a few. An attempted, foiled military coup in Turkey and its consequences, more and more natural disasters, civilian aircraft shot down, death and ruin everywhere. The year was so bad, the New York Times published an op-ed entitled “2016: Worst. Year. Ever?” and late-night host John Oliver symbolically blew up the year.
Music about the shittiness of things
This feeling of general shittiness didn’t stop at the music either: Leonard Cohen, George Martin, Prince and David Bowie died. It was the year of albums like Bowie’s “Blackstar” (which was released just a few days before his death), Beyoncé’s “Lemonade”, Kanye West’s “Life of Pablo”, depending on your point of view the last album before he finally became an asshole or the first album since he finally became an asshole, Solange’s “A Seat at the Table” and Frank Ocean’s “Blonde”, the anthem for all sad girls, boys, and theys.
And even though it was one of the great years for EDM pop, anxiety and melancholy also ran through the absolute mainstream chart crap: In Germany, “Die immer lacht” by Kerstin Ott and Stereoact became a hit, a song about a person with depression, Justin Bieber said “Sorry”, Twenty One Pilots went steep with a song about being stressed (“Stressed Out”), Mike Posner with one about the crash after a great career (“I Took a Pill in Ibiza”, ironic that it would become his biggest hit).
It is certainly no coincidence that insecurity, fears and diffuse sadness were also discussed in pop. Pop is always a reflection of the moods that prevail in society. When we post our throwbacks today, many glorify 2016 as a year when everything seemed fine, at least on a personal level. Others see it as the year that is to blame for why the present sucks. I rather believe that 2016 was the year in which the cracks that we are still struggling with today became visible. It is the year in which British filmmaker Adam Curtis released his almost three-hour documentary “HyperNormalization” about political and technological upheavals since the 1970s. Maybe this film really is the key to understanding the year and the ten that followed: It was the year in which hypernormalization, the diffuse feeling that something is really wrong but at the same time everything seems to be going on as normal, became the defining feeling.
But what do we conclude from this for the present? Maybe that yesterday was just as shitty as today – and maybe it makes more sense to think about how tomorrow won’t be completely shitty. Let me just post a few photos and cry to Frank Ocean first, okay?