Fetish for retro authenticity intensified precisely amid plastic poptimism

Evidence

Retromania depends on older works feeling more valuable than contemporary ones. Baby boomer nostalgia played some role, flooding the market in the late 1980s and early 1990s with revivalist content like the Freedom Rock compilation and shows like The Wonder Years. Yet the longing for twentieth-century authenticity seemed especially acute in a plastic, poptimist era. Where cool detachment remained aspirational, younger generations gazed back at the archetypes of rebellion: James Dean’s brooding defiance, the sixties counterculture, punk’s anarchic chaos, and the swagger of eighties hip-hop. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 386

Categorization

• QUESTION: Marx leans on ‘poptimist era’ as frame — is this the signature blankness his counter-arguer needs to interrogate?