Every generation looks back several generations, mining earlier eras for cultural ideas to be reinvented in its own image. Such nostalgia+remixing tends to skip a generation. After all, in our youth we don’t follow the lead of our parents, because by definition they are not cool. But their<\/i> parents’ culture is fair game for sampling.<\/p>\n
This is probably why, say, the hip downtown bohemian New York poetry scene has reliably reemerged as a hot trend every forty years — first around 1922, then around 1962, then again around 2002. And why swing dance trends from the mid-1950s came back with a vengeance in the mid 1990s.<\/p>\n
For some reason, trends that are about the future tend to reach further back in the past for source material. Steampunk, a vision of an alternate SciFi future, borrows from all the way back to the time of Jules Verne, who was writing his visions of tomorrow about 140 years ago.<\/p>\n
In mid-20th century U.S.A, up until the early 1960s, there was another kind of optimistic vision of the future, exemplified by Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland<\/i> and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier<\/i>, with their focus on the wonders of technology in the Atomic age, and on exploring the Universe (leading directly to Star Trek<\/i>, which actually came out as this optimistic trend was already in its death throes).<\/p>\n
I wonder whether there will be an attempt by some forthcoming youth generation to embrace that lost vision of a better tomorrow and “punk” it. That is, will future young people embrace America’s lost utopian futurism in order to recreate it as a kind of alternate fantasy vision of their own?<\/p>\n
If such a trend were to emerge, I guess it could be called “Rocket Punk”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every generation looks back several generations, mining earlier eras for cultural ideas to be reinvented in its own image. Such nostalgia+remixing tends to skip a generation. After all, in our youth we don’t follow the lead of our parents, because by definition they are not cool. But their parents’ culture is fair game for sampling. … Continue reading “Rocket Punk”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8057"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8058,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8057\/revisions\/8058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}