My love for 80s/90s/early 2000s American pop culture as a guilty pleasure

[Lucas88]

As many of you know, I'm one of the biggest haters of the Anglosphere here on this forum. I despise my own country of the UK and find its aesthetics, energy and general vibe obnoxious and disgusting. I think that contemporary US and Canadian culture is whack. Other Anglophone countries such as Ireland, Australia and New Zealand don't even figure on my radar. I also believe that most varieties of English and especially the British variety are absolutely ugly and insufferable (for me, North American English is the somewhat more pleasant exception).

What cultures do I love? I'm a passionate lover of Hispanic and Mediterranean culture. I am intoxicated with Spain and Latin America's vibrant aesthetics and infectious vivaciousness and believe such cultures to be culturally superior to the likes of the US and the UK. Moreover, I speak fluent Spanish, regard Spanish and other Romance languages as both aesthetically and morphologically superior to English and other Germanic languages, speak nothing but Spanish for months at a time whenever I'm in Spain or Latin America, and really have no interest at all in contemporary Anglophone culture. I'd be more than happy to cut all ties with my native culture if it weren't for certain family members and friends.

However, there is one weakness in my hatred of the Anglosphere and desire for separation, one thing that keeps me bound to it. That one thing is my infantile love for 80s/90s/early 2000s American pop culture, a culture I grew up with and which captivated my heart, something which now exists only in old media recordings and our collective memories.

Growing up in the early 2000s, I always found UK pop culture completely boring and a bit cringy and obnoxious but at the same time the US pop culture from that time period and earlier absolutely fascinated me and brought joy to my soul. Back then the US was far ahead of everyone else and produced most of the best stuff.

To this day I'm obsessed with US pop music from the 80s. I can listen to totally mainstream Post-Disco or some less well-known tracks and artists from genres as diverse as Funk, Soul, Freestyle, etc. and find myself totally enraptured. That time was something special. I feel like I was really there even though all of that happened before I was even born.

I love so many 80s and 90s US movies and TV shows. Even some from the early 2000s were good too. So many memorable classics were made. Things like The Karate Kid, Rocky, Kickboxer, Scarface, Miami Vice, Chucky, Showdown in Little Tokyo, American Beauty, Kill Bill, etc. Too much to choose from.

Then there are videogames. GTA is my favorite videogame series of all time and it's a parody of America in certain places and time periods. For example, Vice City is a parody of 80s Miami with all of its glitz and glamor and organized crime and is largely inspired by Scarface and Miami Vice, GTA 3 is set in a fictionalized version of early 2000s New York and draws inspiration from Goodfellas and Sopranos, and San Andreas is supposed to reflect LA during the 1992 riots. Those games among others marked my childhood. The US knew how to make the best games.

In the early 2000s I was hooked on American pro wrestling too. I loved the WWF/WWE back when it was cool and baddass and enjoyed watching Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock as well as Chris Benoit and Kurt Angle and the "Nature Boy" Ric Flair! Woooo! I loved all of the divas too like Trish Stratus and Jacqueline Moore with their "puppies"! Wrestlemania X7 was the best Wrestlemania of all time! Wrestlemania 19 was also off the chain! Man, I used to get so pumped up watching wrestling!

And the UFC was pioneered in America. I remember all of the old-school events from the 90s when there were almost no rules and every event was a freak show and anything could happen. The sport of MMA developed the most in the US, much more so than in other countries such as Japan, Brazil and the UK.

As I remember it, US pop culture was absolutely awesome from around 1980 to somewhere around the early 2000s and that period still remains with me in my heart but then from around 2005 it really started to go downhill and became totally whack and uninspiring.

That period of US pop culture is literally the only thing I like about the Anglosphere and I still hold onto it with nostalgia. But now that that phenomenon is long gone and nothing more than a distant memory, I feel no love for the Anglosphere at all and prefer to immerse myself exclusively in Hispanic and Mediterranean culture.

What do you guys think?

[Natural_Born_Cynic]

@Lucas88

We know you do.

And I agree.. the American pop music in the 80's to early 2000's really kicked ass and they are timeless.
I listen to some of them too! The current mass entertainment, music, culture, art are all trash!

[gsjackson]

I stopped paying attention to American pop culture circa 1987, and as a consequence have been aged out of pub quizzes, a former leisure-time activity. I'm loaded for bear on '80s and earlier, but the quiz masters now are children, who go back only to about where I stopped.

[Lucas88]

The whole point is that, even though I fervently despise the Anglosphere by and large, paradoxically one particular aspect of it absolutely fascinates me and keeps me attached to it in some form. It's like the yin-yang symbol in which the yin still includes a small portion of yang and vice versa. Even within my dominant hatred for the Anglosphere there is still a certain touch of intense love for that one part of it, even if that one part that I intensely love is now undoubtedly passé.

How can this be? Well, I think that America has a substantially different overall vibe from the UK despite belonging to the same cultural bloc. America's energy is more upbeat (at least on the surface) and dynamic while the UK's energy is more melancholic and more stagnant. This difference can be seen in the cinema which these two nations produce. US cinema is by far more imaginative, fantastic, adventurous and epic as well as full of grandiosity and pomp while British cinema is comparatively mundane (exceptions exist, of course, but this is generally the case). The 80s in particular were a decade of great creativity and, with America at the forefront of power and technological innovation at that time, the country was able to use its natural dynamic energy to create some of the most inventive content in cinema, TV, music and all other areas of pop culture while the naturally more mundane and stagnant UK and other countries were unable to create the same kind of inventive content. A lot of pure gold came out of the US in the 80s and the decade and half that followed.

However, I've begun to tentatively suppose that a reversal is taking place. US pop culture which was once the absolute best is now in the gutter (especially since the 2010s) while some other non-Anglo cultures are beginning to produce significantly better pop culture than before. For example, US cinema today might be terrible with its constant rehashing of old franchises with the forced inclusion of "woke" themes and such but Korean cinema on the other hand is pretty good with some of its bizarre and twisted releases that stimulate the intellect and fascinate in a morbid kind of way. The recent Squid Game comes to mind. Likewise, I've been watching some recent Latin American cinema. I watched a Honduran horror movie called Regreso de la Llorona and a Colombian crime movie called Perseguida and thought that they were really good (especially the latter) and they kinda reminded me of how US movies were in the early 2000s. Now these countries that were previously extremely poor now have the technology and funds to create high-quality cinema.

Just a thought of mine.

[Aarav]

I stopped paying attention to American pop culture circa 1987, and as a consequence have been aged out of pub quizzes, a former leisure-time activity. I'm loaded for bear on '80s and earlier, but the quiz masters now are children, who go back only to about where I stopped.

Your work illustrates a curious transition in pub quiz dynamics, in which your wealth of knowledge from the 1980s and earlier may outweigh younger quiz masters' acquaintance with pop culture after 1987. It introduces a new dimension to the trivia environment.original magic 8 ball