The inherent human tendency to reminisce about the past with fondness, and approach the future with apprehension, affects all of us at some point. This inclination frequently transpires in political circles as declinism – the notion that society is deteriorating, or even unraveling, from a perceived superior past, embodied in catchphrases such as “make America great again” or “take back control”. The desire to return to an ostensibly more straightforward, preferable era has been shrewdly manipulated and commercialised not just by politicians, but also by the entertainment industry, to the degree that some individuals hanker for a period before they existed.
However, as the eminent author Marcel Proust pointed out, the genuinely poignant delight in nostalgia derives from reflecting on one’s own fleeting youth, and indirectly, one’s finite life span. A huge number of mature millennials in Ireland and the UK are girding themselves for the onslaught of 1990s keepsakes that will coincide with the Oasis reunion tour next summer, and in the process experiencing a vivid revival of their adolescent years. A time marked by Jack Charlton and Riverdance, or Tony Blair and the Spice Girls. Numerous pop culture symbols blended to characterise a decade that kicked off a bit earlier with the Berlin Wall’s fall and closed slightly later when the first aeroplane crashed into the World Trade Centre.
Undoubtedly, like any other decade, the 1990s also had its devastating moments: the Yugoslavian war and the Rwandan genocide. Nonetheless, it was, for an extraordinary majority globally, a period of comparative peace and increasing wealth.
This was most prevalent in Ireland, where the miraculous economic boom labelled the Celtic Tiger by economist Kevin Gardiner in 1994 was escalating, peace was emerging in the North, and for the first time, a youthful generation could plausibly anticipate building a career in their homeland.
For nostalgia to genuinely resonate, there needs to be an element of a bygone utopia. The 1990s marks the final chapter before the internet infiltrated every facet of public and private life. It was the last epoch when an individual could acquire a home for a rational figure. It was also the era when the initial causes of future grievances were planted by the phenomenon of economic globalisation. Many events that have happened subsequently, including the Middle East military mishaps, the 2008 economic downturn and the emergence of the new nationalist right, are arguably all offshoots of the 1990s.
The Gallagher brothers, however, recently reunited, are unlikely to be perturbed by this as they perform Oasis’s biggest hits in Croke Park come next August. Yet, they might ironically reflect on how their peak in the mid-1990s often saw them being pegged as merely a Beatles tribute act. Evidently, even nostalgia isn’t quite what it was.