Hypermodernity and cultures as aesthetic individuality reservoirs

The cultural effect of the collapse of progress leading to the “big now”, short-term nostalgia, cultures as identity reservoirs, hypermodernity, and individuality as an end in and of itself.

Hypermodernity and cultures as aesthetic individuality reservoirs

There is an ongoing debate as to whether we’re still living in a modernity that began sometime in the late 17^th century as a result of the increasing secularization of European society and the beginnings of what would become known as the Enlightenment, or if we are living in a post-modernity that began in the late 1960s, early 1970s. There are also many who say we’ve already moved far beyond post-modernity and that, as a concept, it’s something quite passé – a cultural product or lens through which contemporaries were attempting to understand the breakdown of the progressive ideals of modernity. The two don’t necessarily cancel each other out: what some call post-modernity is simply an unveiling of the many perspectives inherent to modernity that had, until then, been denied or actively suppressed – e.g., feminism, a wide range of minority rights, non-western perspectives, or various forms of underground culture. These different interpretations of sociopolitical and cultural phenomena emerged to challenge Western modernity, Enlightenment, and humanism, and to make good on their claims of all-encompassing values and rights. This post-modern time is a marker for a shift in thinking and how we view culture, a shift that might end up being fairly minor in the grander scheme of things, but one that is essential for understanding contemporary Western culture.

Beginning in the 1960s, the belief in a progressive modernity that would keep moving towards the betterment of society began to crumble. This was by no means an exclusively Western phenomenon, though we are probably most acquainted with its concepts and effects. Both the political left and right began to see the failings of a strict belief in progress, something that nuclear bombs had not even been able to rattle twenty years prior. The increasing shortfall of Keynesian economics and the post-war welfare states; the wave of independence movements in former colonies and the Vietnam War exposing the hypocrisy of Western ideals; the failure to implement solid and successful socialist states in the Southern hemisphere; the oil crisis exposing the frailties of the Western economies; the clear deficiencies of the communist economies and political structures; the frustration of idealistic student movements – all of these gave way to a growing feeling of stagnation and cynicism. While in some countries the student movements shifted to domestic terrorism, the downturn of the welfare state opened the door to neoliberal economics and growing wealth inequality, the stasis of secular democracy ushered in the prominence of religious discourse, and the oil crisis became the public marker for the beginning of the green movement – just a small selection of various currents with other, huge social movements arising at the same time. The many truths that still compete today (more so than ever) reflect that idea of a post-modernity with its analysis of multiple paths of modernity and competing conceptions of the world that constitute our reality. The questioning of what were once sold as monolithic truths, and the ensuing debates that this caused, is the root of the world we live in today. However, it’s not something that necessarily followed modernity, but more something inherently modern in the Western sense. It is hypermodernity, a world in which the value of individuality, so paramount in Western cultural ideals, stands above everything. Individual identity is the be-all and end-all, and how one constitutes that identity, the battleground of our time.

It was in this atmosphere of a vanishing truth that the first of many nostalgic cultural phenomena occurred – that of a longing for a past that one hadn’t directly or personally experienced. This has almost always taken the form of a past some 20 years prior to the current moment. If you look at the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, the films, TV shows, and musical movements that stand out are often nostalgia-based re-rememberings of the 1950s. Whether it’s Happy Days, American Graffiti, Grease, Sha Na Na, or punk rock, there was a longing for the days when things were simpler, less convoluted, at least for the white population of the country. Bands such as The New York Dolls or The Ramones expressly pointed to the pureness of original Rock and Roll as their goal. In the UK at the same time, Teddy Boys looked to their 1950s ancestors for inspiration. The idea of taking things back to the way they were, a simplifying escape from the confusion of today’s failures, was the first building block on the way to our present. Hip Hop’s beginnings, with the repurposing of breaks, the hands-on manipulation of older music to create new, brought with it the first practical technological method for creating new identities out of the pieces of old cultural touchstones.

As the 1980s commenced, culture forged ahead with the nostalgia-based movements in tow as an additional flavor from which to draw on, initiating a feedback cycle that has continued until today. Technology increasingly made its mark on the tone of cultural repurposing through enabling more widespread synthesizing, sampling, and an ever more personal interaction with culture. Digital technologies and video allowed for the recreation and recycling of well-known sounds and more intimate experiences of what had hitherto been group events. As movies increasingly dealt with topics such as Vietnam or 1960s pop culture, with Jim Morrison posters as popular as ever, youth subcultures began to draw on references like psychedelia, garage rock, and rockabilly. The late 1980s also saw the first proper nostalgia wave hit Hip Hop, with Afrocentric leanings coming to the fore and the “rediscovery” of cultural figureheads such as Malcom X. The rise of Acid House and Techno in Chicago and Detroit began building the final bridge to our time – the complete synthesis of past, analogue sounds to create music based on disco era formats, to be played in clubs of people dancing exclusively for themselves, losing themselves individually to the music. Though originally enacted as communities and scenes, the night out at the club today manifests itself as the perfect, singular, hypermodern act, where the focus is on the event that you individually prepare yourself for, getting dressed, looking forward to, and ingesting whatever you might need to guarantee the peak experience to be had for oneself.

By the time the 1990s rolled around, the cultural referential movements were in free flow, and looking backwards was almost a matter of course. People could now pick the culture or subculture they wished to belong to, and which best expressed who they, as individuals, were, and it would come replete with the appropriate fashion, music, and relevant cultural artifacts, as well as offering a template as to what a person’s taste in general creative aesthetics should be. Music, art, movies – all drew on increasingly advanced technology to rework past events and ideas. While electronic music evolved along with the technology, giving rise to temporarily new forms of expression, the Riot Grrl movement gave a new voice to feminism, punk revivals were followed by swing crazes, so-called “stoner rock” bands reveled in riffs lifted from by bands like Black Sabbath, and as rap became the predominant force in popular music, it began to turn back and borrow from itself in the form of reworking classics from the early 1980s. Art may have already been a step ahead, as it had long established itself as a market where individuals drew on the vast pool of culture to reflect their specific individuality, enacting the thoroughbred marketing of a single person and their life as a brand. Movies reflected the growing synchronous nature of the world from various perspectives, the first hypermodern apocalyptic inclinations set in as the popular unconscious started to register the failure of progress (as opposed to the past traumatic fear of nuclear annihilation), while Quentin Tarantino movies operated fully from a position of both self-awareness and audience awareness in their referential character.

The 2000s are most recognizable as the beginning of where we currently find ourselves, with the 1980s – a decade that had been mercilessly scorned throughout the 1990s – becoming the celebrated decade. Mustaches, once the signifier of macho, violent, homophobic men, became the ironic facial accessory of an entire cultural subset. The angular sounds of early 1980s bands such as Gang of Four were the blueprint for an army of successful bands, while garage rock once again made a return and even entered the mainstream. A host of artists were hoisted into untouchable status through the first deluge of documentaries and biopics – Joy Division were cemented as a legendary act, Ramones t-shirts sold at chain stores, Johnny Cash and others were discovered by global society at large, opening up the various cultural universes to a worldwide audience, and initiating popular culture’s evolution into a practice of the patchwork assembly of identity. By the time the decade ended, and with the beginning of the full onslaught of social media, past culture was already a palette from which to pick the right element to represent the mood of a movie, or a facet of your personality. A movie like “Drive,” for example, could make use of a soundtrack soaked in 80s synth nostalgia without distracting from a very contemporary story, something that would have been off-putting in a movie ten years prior.

Though there have always been times in history, such as in ancient Greece, where the ideal “Golden Age” was in the past (never in the present and definitely not in any kind of future), this short-term, inter-generational look backwards is novel to the last 50 years and has to be seen in connection with the increasingly fast-changing forms of media through which culture is mediated (and, with them, the production of cultural artifacts). In that way, Hip Hop is the first truly hypermodern art form, repurposing old snippets of music and expanding on oral traditions to create a completely new art and culture – it is the blueprint of what is now the lifeblood of contemporary mainstream culture. Rap has become the dominant form of musical expression, and maybe the only truly socially relevant music genre left, precisely because its DNA is custom-made for vast oceans of cultural references. Though it now seems to be bucking against a dead-end, with social media having caused a sealing up of cultural horizons, creating a distinct lack of originality through a now finite pool of influences to draw from. So far, its DNA had allowed it to evolve smoothly through the decades, continuously incorporating the cultural nuances around it, while movies and other popular music forms were stuck in their 20-year cycles of remembrance. It will be interesting to see if it can break free from the digital stranglehold of trapified reggaeton beats and autotuned vocals that have mired down rap scenes around the world.

A rudimentary, personal, and subjective psychological take on why it has always been a 20-year throwback, is that for someone in their teens and twenties (an age that only became significant in the post-war world, when they began to constitute a marketable demographic), the 20-year gap is close enough to be relatable but also far away enough to not have any active memory of it. Things will seem simpler, problems further away, and culture more authentic because you didn’t experience it directly. If you’re lucky, you had a good childhood, so that this past also takes place in the time that birthed your initial worry and trouble-free life, and if you had a troubled childhood, it was a time before the darkness. A time that was somehow simpler because you can project whatever you want onto it. The importance of the 20-year gap has deteriorated somewhat, but we continue to see revivals of traditions, fashions, and customs, sometimes ones that are centuries old.

For the time being, we have arrived in a culture constituted out of a never-ending universe of references. We are so caught up in referencing everything around us to our current position, in whatever form, that the future has become closed, movies only ever imagine the future as apocalyptic or dystopian, and music, art, and fashion exist in constant relapse – our concepts of ourselves and ideas of the world circle around how to live individually in the current moment. This is the “big now” that we live in today, with digital media allowing all culture to exist simultaneously, the past is omnipresent and exists as an everlasting and ever-deepening pool of references to orient yourself in as you try to fashion an identity. This factor, combined with social media and the nature of the internet, has pushed us into hypermodernity proper. Meaning that, through “progress” as the liberation of the individual, and our modern understanding that to “live your best life” is to “be yourself” – to make the most of your potential and to maximize your individuality – the entire world around us must become a resource from which to draw on to actualize this “best” life. People present themselves as brands on social media, even on the most personal level: “influencer” is an actual job. Our thoughts, moods, tastes, and relationships exist to be platformed. As such, culture in any form serves the purpose of accentuating our current moment of being. Everything exists as a wardrobe from which we pick what we want so that we can express how we wish to see ourselves and then present that self to the world. It is hypermodern because it is hyper-individualistic. There is only the now, because there is no break from the past, and since we feel there is no progress, we can see no future.

Culturally, this means that anything goes, and that cultures past and present exist as reservoirs to select how to express one’s specific individuality. Does one choose a “purer” form, or will one combine elements of different identities to express one’s mental and emotional state? That choice has meant that it’s quite common to see someone walking down the street who is a mirror image of a 1970s rocker, replete with giant hair, something that would have looked completely comical in any other time save the 1970s. Fashion, much like music, rehashes itself. The irony of the 2000s has become one of many base notes to choose from as fashions draw on the aesthetics of the poor or working class from decades gone by, or different regions, to express a certain mood or authenticity. People will dress like a cartoonish 1990s raver yet listen to rap and wear a tie-dye Nirvana shirt. Trapped within the range of strict 4/4 beats and the most extreme of noise acts, the music world has seen everything and cannot offer distinctly new forms, but rather offers new versions within the borders of audible experiences from the past. Art, even when attempting to address societal topics or political perspectives, exists solely as a vehicle for self-expression and interpretation. Movies retread and copy, rehash, and grasp onto tropes to find a way to their audience. The only somewhat compelling thing about this phenomenon is that history shows that this type of stagnation usually predates a radical shift, though this does not have to be positive. The future that then arrives is usually something the people of the time could never have imagined, a complete paradigm shift. It will be extremely interesting to see what that entails.

Image credit: Phil Oh (https://www.instagram.com/mrstreetpeeper/) featured in “The best street style from the Paris Fashion Week fall/winter 2025 shows” on Vogue.sg (March 6, 2025)