As Blur so elegantly put it, “Modern life is rubbish,” and I have to say I somewhat agree. While the world has welcomed smartphones, streaming music, and social media from 2000 onwards, for me, it’s all missing something, that personal touch.
1. The CD and cassette
As a child of the ’90s and 20 something of the ’90s, it was all about the CD and cassette. I still, to this day, can remember the first cassette I ever bought. That feeling of going into town, walking into HMV and not waiting until you get home and taking the shiny wrapper off the CD or cassette to read the minuscule lyrics and check out the album artwork and pictures of your favourite artist. That feeling of playing the music for the first time, provided a rush which Spotify simply can’t contend with. It is also true that songs would stay at number one for unprecedented amounts of time, highlighting the quality of the music back then, as opposed to today, where there seems to be a different number one every week.
2. Real musical icons
In a world where Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift are the hottest artists, more and more artists seem to be coming through every week through YouTube, TV talent shows and various online forums. While this is great for the unsigned artist, it’s not so great in creating a timeless music star. Today, anyone can break through the record industry and that has resulted in more artists than ever before, including some that aren’t necessarily very good. Artists also aren’t developed the way they once were and given the time to hone their talent. Instead, stars are granted almost immediate success through a talent show, hit number one, and then are dropped by their record label when they cannot maintain this standard of hits. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, you could name the biggest stars in the world on one hand and if one album didn’t sell too well, the next one would.
3. A sense of mystery
Social media has brought us many things, from keeping in touch with long-lost contacts to knowing what everyone else is doing every single second of the day. When Facebook first came out, it was an exciting time. I jumped on the bandwagon after putting up an initial resistance. You actually interacted with people on your friends lists and the information people shared was interesting and appreciated, but it’s all changed in the last few years with more and more people growing tired of a world of oversharing and in turn, deactivating their accounts. Before social media hit the mainstream, there was a certain little thing to people you’d struggle to find nowadays, a little thing called ‘mystery’. People were private and when you met up with friends, you were able to find out their latest news, rather than already knowing (along with their other 482 online ‘friends’). And don’t even get me started on the selfie trend!
4. Supermodels were actual supermodels
In the late ’80s and ’90s, supermodels were discovered in shopping malls and your normal unglamorous places and then steered to the top catwalks and magazine covers. Back then, there were the likes of Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer. Today, in a world where nepotism is the flavour of the decade, all you need is a presence on a reality show, famous parents or – better still – both! This has led to a new definition of ‘supermodel’ where it’s not so much about how you look but who you know.
5. There was nothing smart about a phone
Ah, when the only phone someone had was called a landline. Those days of going to school, waiting for a phone call from a friend, and then spending hours on the same call with your parents screaming for you to “GET OFF THE PHONE!” Back then, you would arrange to meet someone and guess what, people actually met. No cancelling at the last minute, plans actually stood for something.