Have you ever noticed that a lot of trends repeat themselves? Everything comes back in style at one point or another, but they usually occur in twenty year intervals.
In the last decade—the 00s, the Aughts, the Naughties, whatever—pop culture seemed to be haunted by the 80s. VH1 started those I Love the… series with I Love the 80s; Rocky, Indiana Jones, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were featured in comeback films, and our popular music has been autotuned and digitized so much it wouldn’t be out of place in an 80s club.
With that in mind, it seems that the 90s are prepped for a pop culture revival.
Ally McBeal the Movie?
A sequel to Madonna’s Sex book, the fifty year old edition?
The return of grunge?
Here are twelve suggestions to help guide this new decade:
1. Boomboxes! Yes, MP3 players are light-weight, convenient and can easily contain 1000 songs, but everyone is wired out of the world, isolated from everyone else, their headphones blasting Animal Collective or Plies.
If the music’s right, there’s nothing like someone lugging a boombox on their shoulder, setting it down and letting the music play. It’ll help return the communal feeling of listening to music, and who wouldn’t want to see people break dancing outside Plant Hall?
2. Keep O.J. locked up for a good long time.
3. With Oprah Winfrey ending her talk show in September 2011, there seems to be room for an influx of new ones. I love Ellen and Wendy Williams, but I don’t think Ricky Lake and Sally Jessy Rafael are doing much these days.
4. MTV needs to start playing music videos. Let’s never speak of The Hills and Jersey Shore again.
5. Lauryn Hill should release a new album and return from her self-imposed exile. We miss her.
6. No more digital cameras, inexpensive Polaroid cameras—because when was the last time you shook a Polaroid picture like, well, a Polaroid picture?
7. A Clinton sex scandal and I’m not talking about Bill or Chelsea.
8. Am I still a third-wave feminist? It’s about time for a fourth wave where feminist leaders stop wasting time over petty ideological battles and actually fight for women’s rights; this time without the self-righteous attitude toward women comfortable in traditional roles or towards women who don’t live in the West.
Equal rights and equal protection should be global, but western feminists don’t need to shape women from other nations in their image.
9. Make Mother Teresa a saint.
10. Late-night television needs a change; it needs a fresh face. The warfare between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien had me thinking that now would be a great time for Arsenio Hall to reappear with a TV show—or at least someone similar.
In the early 90s, Hall originally appealed to a largely black audience, which gradually broadened, exposing rap artists like 2Pac and N.W.A. to new audiences. Hall interviewed figures from Madonna to a sax-playing Bill Clinton to, perhaps most infamously, Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam.
If NBC wants to keep late night fresh, then don’t fill the timeslot with the same old faces.
11. Note to Disney: Keep hand drawing movies, it’s nice to see them again, but don’t make another Toy Story sequel.
12. Wasn’t there supposed to be another Duke Nukem game a decade ago?
Derrick Austin can be reached at daustin@ut.edu.