In their hit single Year 3000, tween-friendly pop-punkers Busted sang of a future world submerged underwater, populated by triple-breasted women swimming around town “totally naked!” A lot had changed, in other words, and yet the trio’s popularity hadn’t waned. In this far-flung future, “everybody bought our seventh album” rejoiced the boys, as those of us who like to take nonsensical pop songs way too literally wondered why on earth the people of the next millennium would still be listening to them.
It turns out Busted might have been on to something. It’s been 20 years since they released Year 3000, and the group are once again the talk of the town, with their huge arena comeback tour currently selling out at impressive speed.
“There has never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artefacts of its own immediate past,” wrote the critic Simon Reynolds in his seminal book Retromania, a dismayed catalogue of the endless revivals, reboots, reissues, remakes and reunions that characterised the music of the 2000s. Today, the zombie pop culture Reynolds observed is no longer simply prevalent – it is ubiquitous.
In fact, the worlds of music, film and television are so saturated with industrialised nostalgia that it’s even possible to observe microtrends within the endless renaissance of renaissance itself. This spring, for example, sees a swathe of 80s and 90s erotic thrillers remade for the small screen (Dead Ringers, Fatal Attraction, Presumed Innocent, Fear, True Lies). Britpop, meanwhile, is getting a mini-revival this summer as major players Pulp and Blur reform for live shows, while the Oasis reunion rumour mill is currently in overdrive (according to the tabloids, the Gallagher brothers are in talks about meeting to discuss the prospect. One step at a time, lads!)
And thanks to Busted, this year cements the resurgence of fun and frothy turn-of-the-millennium pop and rock; the trio will kick off their “greatest hits” tour in September, with support from Hanson. Last year, Blue reunited for a tour, with B*Witched and Atomic Kitten in tow, plus Steps continued their extremely successful embodiment of camply polished pop.
It’s no coincidence that the era is resurging: reunion tours are big business. Unlike fans eager to relive their youth, the music industry isn’t operating out of misty-eyed nostalgia – shows by older acts are particularly lucrative: Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe were all among the highest-grossing touring artists of 2022.
Busted have already added six extra dates to their tour – including a second night at London’s 20,000-capacity O2 – the healthy sales figures likely a result of their target demographic: millennials who loved the band the first time round. As tour shows become more expensive to stage, ticket prices have rocketed in tandem, meaning gig-goers in their 30s and 40s are far more reliable potential consumers than students and teens with little disposable income.
Is this a bad thing? Yes and no. You can’t blame bands for cashing in at a time when the music industry offers the vast majority of artists a meagre living from the paltry returns of digital streams. Neither can you blame punters keen to retreat into chirpy early 00s pop culture during hard times. In fact, the renewed appreciation of acts such as Busted and Steps – critically dismissed and widely mocked at the time – feels like a welcome corrective. In the last decade, music coverage has dissolved the serious-unserious binary that was so firmly in favour of white men making “authentic” rock, for the better.
Even so, there’s no way nostalgia tours bode well for the culture industry at large, which seems to become more meekly risk-averse with each passing year. Old music now makes up 70% of the US music market, with the music industry’s leading area of investment not the next big thing, but the back catalogues of the ageing (or dead) stars of yesteryear – and, of course, the readymade fanbases that accompany them. New music isn’t just a risk in terms of the lack of an existing audience: original songs come with the looming threat of copyright lawsuits (Ed Sheeran has been taken to court twice for this reason).
Film and TV are also in the bet-hedging business. Comic strip franchises still dominate Hollywood, and plots based on true stories are inching out invention. On TV, the totally original new drama seems like an increasingly rare beast: shows are often based on novels, podcasts, films, news stories or other TV shows in order to ensure some level of inbuilt recognition for the public. Comedy, an artform that relies on novelty, is duly suffering, with the BBC having slashed the hours of new comedy by around a half since 2010.
This unmooring of pop culture from the now brings with it an existential threat. If we are continually regurgitating the past, what does that mean for the present? “Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening all again at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel,” wrote Reynolds in Retromania. When we look back at the 2020s, will it have its own flavour? Or will it only taste of the musty dregs of culture past?
I’m not quite as pessimistic – partly because when I reminisce about Reynolds’s Retromaniac 00s, I think of the thrilling innovation of Dizzee Rascal, the Streets and MIA, not the Led Zeppelin comeback gig. That said, the fact that the big, trailblazing music success story of 2022 was Abba Voyage – a virtual restaging of the band as they appeared 45 years ago – really does test the optimism. Maybe I need to adjust my expectations sooner rather than later – and accept that the year 3000 might be a lot more pop-punk-heavy than I’d hoped.
Rachel Aroesti is a freelance writer specialising in pop culture
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