Cycles, trends and shoegaze
When it comes to young people, the more things change, the more they stay the same
One of the more pleasurable parts of getting older is seeing trends from your youth come back around. I loved a Nehru collar 'granddad' shirt when I was a teenager in the 90s. And lo and behold, you can find them on the high street again. Beavis and Butthead are enjoying something of a renaissance. Young people continue to discover the joy of Nirvana - there's something heartwarming about seeing a young kid in the guitar shop playing Smells Like Teen Spirit on their first guitar.
If you'd asked me which trends from the 90s were likely to make a TikTok-inspired comeback, I wouldn't have put shoegaze at the top of the list. But it's having something of a moment—with YouTube channels such as Pedal Partners and artists like Starcrawler 69 bringing dreamy, reverb-drenched soundscapes and swathes of fuzzy noise right back into fashion.
As with many 90s scenes, you could spend hours arguing about what is and isn't shoegaze - it's more interesting to explore why a short-lived, relatively niche genre might explode back into the public consciousness. To my mind, there's definitely a line to be drawn between "fuzzy soundscapes" and "lo-fi beats to work to". Music that walks that fine line between not being so in your face that it distracts your attention but isn't so banal that it sends you to sleep. Personally, I like a bit of post-rock, mainly when I'm writing - my Explosions In The Sky and Mogwai playlists are regular go-tos.
The return of shoegaze also speaks to a broader faultline that I see regularly discussed on Substack and LinkedIn.
On one side of this fault, you have the line of thinking that everything is cyclical. There are no new trends - all we see are the same trends dressed in different clothes. So, shoegaze is back, but it's not limited to Ride, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive - it's anything noisy and guitar-based that uses plenty of pedals.
See also the concern about young people's relationship with their smartphones. It has reached a boiling point this year, but we shouldn’t worry because similar concerns have been raised about beepers, TV, and even books in the past.
Similarly, the worries around AI stealing our jobs remind plenty of people of conversations around the introduction of computers and spreadsheets back in the day. Everything is cyclical, the thought goes, so let's eschew the moral panic and be objective in our approach.
My instinct is to side with the everything is cyclical, objective approach. Particularly in a client context, I regularly research historical precedence to inform thinking. After all, if we can't learn from the past, we're doomed to make the same mistakes.
But the problem is that human beings aren't objective creatures. Any number of books or psychologists will point out just how emotive we are as a species—particularly when it comes to the things that matter to us, like our children.
So objectively, we can understand that Jonathan Haidt's book has been found to have holes in its research methodology. We can say to ourselves "well I watched TV/went online/used MSN messenger when I was a teenager, and it didn't do me any harm". But still, there's this creeping sense that the kids are not OK.
The latest edition of Ofcom's annual Children's Media Lives study reflects on the past ten years of data, identifying some of the major differences in how kids in the UK behave online today compared to 2014. The study is as fascinating as ever—the change in habits around sharing, the rise of ASMR videos among young girls, and the complete lack of engagement with news and current affairs across the board.
In addition to that rise in ASMR and its adjacency to "bodily, adult and sexual themes," the study notes just how obnoxiously loud and in-your-face the videos that young people enjoy are. The gold rush to grab attention means videos get more dramatic, more exaggerated and more clickbait-y to stand out. And for many kids, these videos represent their media diet. On the surface, it's probably my age that a diet of such videos feels like my version of Room 101. But it certainly makes you wonder what this diet might be doing to their brains.
I think Charle Warzel summed up this feeling perfectly on Threads recently: "so much has changed technologically in a short [amount] of time! We know this connectivity is working on us, but it's hard to pin down exactly how."
No matter how much everything is cyclical, particularly when it comes to music, fashion, and culture, society is now different from how it looked in the 90s. The ONS recently released an eye-opening study into the milestones people in the UK go through in their lives. The overall trend is that people's major life milestones now happen later than they did, even ten years ago.
More people are living with their parents at the age of 24, particularly in and around London. Fewer people under the age of 30 live in a couple. The average age of first-time mothers is 29, compared to 26 in the 90s. While, like many slower-moving, more underlying trends, the change is relatively slow, it demonstrates that not all societal changes are cyclical.
The traditional markers of what it means to be an adult (moving out of the parental home, getting married, starting a family) now happen later in life. As life expectancy increases, along with the retirement age, moving into adulthood - however you define it - is happening later. Young people stay young for longer.
That has profound implications for brands and businesses - particularly when it comes to recruiting the next generation of talent. The concept of a career for life rarely applies to people in their 20s - more and more people tend towards squiggly careers, changing roles to avoid boredom. Businesses need to think about non-linear pathways through their organisation.
While sounding extremely Alan Partridge, liquid skills come to the forefront - transferable training that can be applied in various contexts. And while it's not true that all young people prioritise the environment, people in their 20s want to feel like their work has a purpose - that they can see some impact, rather than being a stereotypical "microserf" or cog in a corporate machine. Again, businesses must consider how they can demonstrate their impact and the role that employees play in their organisations to continue attracting and retaining the best talent.
The issue of children’s and teenagers' relationships with their smartphones remains rather more thorny and nuanced—two factors that never translate well into the media or politics. The obvious routes are still likely to be the most effective: more resources to help parents, increased digital literacy across the board, and better conversations between parents and teenagers (never easy with any generation of teenagers).
Whatever happens in the future, my parenting experience tells me we can't help but worry about our children, particularly as they get older and become more independent. And while everything is cyclical, we can't escape the fact that society is different now. But that doesn't mean that the so-called likes of Gen Z or Gen Alpha are completely alien to us, despite what plenty of media headlines would have you believe.
The trick, as ever, comes from listening and understanding what's going on in their worlds - not rushing to judgment, not constantly comparing young people to ourselves at that age. While there are similarities, there are significant differences. Listen, understand and guide, creating environments where the next generation has the opportunity to thrive. That's all we can realistically do. And anyway, if the kids get into shoegaze, they will probably be alright.