The 2016 nostalgia. The vinyl renaissance. Golden era music is timeless, modern pop is cringe.
It seems pop culture is increasingly looking backwards rather than generating new movies, aesthetics, clothing, television, and music. Today’s pop culture is no longer centred on originality or era-defining ideas, but is fuelled by TikTok micro-trends, monetisation, and nostalgia, ultimately asking the question that has lingered in my mind for the past few years: Is pop culture really dead?
One night over the winter break, I was in the car with my dad, driving home from dinner, blasting some 80s tunes, when I started to think out loud about how modern music and movies don’t even begin to compare to their older counterparts. As the biggest music fan and movie fanatic I know, my dad agreed, and evidently, we are not alone. In a recent YouGov poll, music and movies from past decades were consistently ranked higher than 2020s music, and only 10 of the 100 IMDb top-rated movies are from the last 10 years. When we think of movies or songs that are true classics, we often think of those that are from a different era. The recent Katseye performance at the Grammys (with sketchy vocals and the lyrics ‘fried chicken, gnarly’ being sung, or rather spoken, on stage) is a perfect emblem of the cultural stagnation that many of us are feeling as we enter 2026. If we keep looking to the past for pop culture, do we really still have one of our own?
Madonna, Prince, and… Benson Boone?
Let’s start by looking at one of the most significant decades for entertainment: 1984. Picture this: radios are blasting Madonna’s Like a Virgin and Prince’s Purple Rain, cinemas are showing Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, and The Karate Kid, and streets are lined with acid wash denim and iconic, bright statement clothing that defined the era. For my dad, pop culture sparked a palpable sense of community, largely shaped by the limited availability of entertainment. When my dad was growing up in the 80s and 90s, he recalled:
“we only had three or four tv channels. Pretty much everyone watched the same shows and films at the same times. Kids would watch whatever the parents watched as most houses only had one TV, so naturally the culture was more shared across generations”
Media had a cultural impact that drew together communities from all over the world: a little later in the 90s, the sitcom Friends was hugely popular in many corners of the world, particularly Middle Eastern countries, and Jurassic Park performed very well in Japan, grossing over $107 million in its first 79 days. As a Swiftie, I think Taylor’s music and tour is perhaps the closest form of entertainment that has fostered a similar level of global, cross-generational community that pop culture once delivered. Yet this is rare, and today’s fashion, movies, television, and music typically lack consensus on quality or widespread popularity, instead generating niche fanbases.
One of the most obvious reasons for this decline of pop culture is that content simply isn’t as compelling or original as it once was. With songs like Internet Girl, Mystical Magical, abcdefu, and even Antihero taking over the charts and short-form platforms, it feels like artists are using intentionally meme-able, quotable lyrics specifically to catch TikTok virality, leading to repetitive and shallow content that feels so far removed from the classics. Today’s TV shows and movies show similar patterns, privileging attention-grab moments and virality over the authentic characters and storytelling that defined 80s and 90s cinema. This isn’t a coincidence or because the entertainment industry has ‘run out of ideas’, but rather due to the fact that the commercialisation of the arts and media has led to a distinct decline in novel ideas and experimentation. Entertainment is increasingly produced for its monetary value rather than cultural contribution, and monetisation favours familiarity over unique creative risks, leading to oversaturated content that lacks authenticity.
Tomato Girl Summer, Balletcore, and Frugal Chic: the Death of Monoculture
In our era of digital media, where anything and everything is available to us at the click of a button, trends are no longer era-defining but rather are ceaselessly produced and instantly discarded. Great cultural output still exists, but due to hyper-personalised algorithms and trends with an increasingly short shelf life, its popularity is fragmented, creating niche subgroups rather than a staple of monoculture. Rather than different generations across the world lining up outside movie theatres on release day to catch the new Jurassic Park movie, entertainment culture is now experienced through niche artists or digitised flash trends. As my dad grew up, there were only a select few radio stations to listen to; vinyl was expensive, so variety was limited, and when a big film was released (like Star Wars or Indiana Jones), everyone watched it and talked about it. Yet in today’s world, with endless choices, entertainment feels as if it has lost the spark of excitement and, consequently, the cultural unity it once delivered. Culture was once an experience rather than a digitised moment, and it seems to have been lost. I think this is the most significant difference in today’s pop culture, and it’s one that seems to accompany the divisive nature of our current political and social worlds.
The Nostalgia Factor
There’s also the possibility that the nostalgia factor plays a role in making older cultural content more appealing than current output. Twenty years down the line, when nostalgia glosses over the cringe lyrics and underwhelming production, will we treasure the legacies of Katseye and Cardi B just as we treasure the Beatles and Amy Winehouse? Whilst there is some credit to this view, and nostalgia is certainly a powerful drug, there is also evidence that we are in a period of structural stagnation. In his book Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher develops a theory of cultural inertia, arguing that 21st-century pop culture is stuck in a cycle of recycling old content due to the structural limitations of our neoliberal, digital capitalism (I highly recommend checking out his book if you’re interested). Is it possible that the content we’re consuming now won’t become nostalgic, and instead we will keep recycling the same retro ideas?
The idea that we will keep endlessly repackaging old ideas, never producing new content, is quite a depressing one, and I’m not sure I fully agree with it. Pop culture as a mainstream monoculture may be dead, hence the recycling of old content, but there are new creative minds lingering outside of the algorithms on the fringes of the mainstream. If you’re ever feeling like the arts have become a shallow pit of attention-grabs and money-making machinery, I encourage you to check out the local arts scene here in St Andrews which, in my opinion, is evidence that authentic creative minds are still flourishing. To retain this sense of community that is so important to pop culture, bring some friends along to watch one of the plethora of original shows at the Byre Theatre or the Edinburgh Fringe, or check out some local live music with your parents when they come to visit. Pop culture may be evolving, but I believe that human creativity is more powerful than we think. If we can tune out the noise of the algorithms and look local, we will find that authentic cultural output can be rediscovered and revived into classics of our own time.