Yves here. Marketing maven Jared Holst is back! Today he weighs in on how the lack of much of anything new in cultural offerings is only getting worse, not just on the Hollywood franchise retread front, but in popular music as well. And now we have a Retro Fan in Chief, with Trump wanting to restore the roaring 1890s, RFK, Jr. out to bring back the world before mass vaccinations, Pete Hegseth yearning for the freewheeling buccaneer era. Go long morning jackets and corsets.
By Jared Holst, the author at Brands Mean a Lot, a weekly commentary on the ways branding impacts our lives. Each week, he explores contradictions within the way politics, products, and pop-culture are branded for us, offering insight on what’s really being said. You can follow Jared on Twitter @jarholst. Originally published at Brands Mean a Lot
Two weeks ago, I saw Avatar: Fire and Ash in resplendent 3D. Some might say the Avatar movie series is big, blue, and bold. Others: boring, banal, and blue. No matter where you may land on the alliterated Avatar spectrum, it’d be a difficult sell to convince anyone the movies’ plots are particularly innovative. An amalgam of our favorite natives versus colonists movies like Braveheart, Fern Gully, Dances with Wolves, etc., what the movie lacks in innovative plot lines, it more than makes up for with 3-dimensional visuals which transport you to Pandora, the series’ fictional, habitable, extrasolar moon in the Alpha Centauri System.
As I write this, Fire and Ash is the top grossing movie of 2026. Say what you will about its derivative plot, Avatar, the first entry in the series, is the only movie since 2000 to top the box office and not be a sequel or come from pre-existing intellectual property.
It’s not just movies. In 2024, ‘Catalog’ tracks, so called because they’re older than 18 months, have a 76% share of the streaming market. Thought of differently, less than 1/4th the streams in the U.S. are what would be considered ‘new’ music. 76% is a 3.3% year over year increase from 2023. Personally, I’ve witnessed a massive resurgence in popularity of one of my favorite bands, Deftones. Deftones formed in 1988 and first went platinum with 1997’s Around the Fur. As of this writing, the album’s #3 on Billboard’s Top Hard Rock Albums chart.
Guess which one I am.
While music and movies don’t encompass all of culture, in terms of eyeballs and dollars, they certainly take top billing. Given where they’re headed, it seems that culturally, whether it be making or consuming, we’re losing interest in trying new things.
Is it really any surprise then that ‘Making America Great Again’, a political movement whose ethos is that the best version of America already happened, is so popular? Many of the movement’s attempts at regression have been successful–abortion bans, de-regulation, a psuedo-gestapo rounding up what it considers undesirable minorities, I could go on. All of these things have already happened at some point in America’s past, albeit within the last century.
What we’re witnessing presently, with Trump’s desire for Greenland, cranks the clock back all the way to the annexation of Hawaii, right before the turn of the 20th century. It marks the last time America invaded and annexed territory to become part of the U.S. It bears mentioning that while similar territorial acquisitions took place in the Philippines and Cuba around the same time, neither became part of the U.S.
The most recent historical analogy to Trump’s desire for Greenland is the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Both Greenland and the Louisiana Purchase involved presidents with land-lust who sought large territories primarily for the sake of their size, and secondarily for their natural resources. For the inhabitants of each, there’s a major difference: Greenland has democratic self-determination, a privilege the colonists and natives living in the Louisiana Purchase lacked.
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” —Heraclitus
This distinction is important because it cranks the clock back even further, potentially to a time outside of American history. A time when the leadership of a nation took something simply because it wanted to and it could. And while some might point to the founding of this country as such an operation, that was instigated by dusty old England.
Understanding the lack of American historical analogies, or even modern democratic analogies, puts into sharp relief how retrograde Trump’s desire for Greenland actually is. This base cruelty, and that there’s support for it inside and outside of government, shows us just how much of an accelerated regression is taking place across America’s cultural and political thinking.
The reason why these sorts of ego-driven land grabs haven’t happened much in the past 100 years is because a certain amount of isolation is required for success. Slower communication and travel, and a lack of trading dependencies and global political norms all meant an invasion would have fewer and narrower repercussions. This makes even more sense as America, through the Trump administration’s work, recedes further from the world’s stage to focus on regional boondoggles like kidnapping Maduro or blowing up seafarers at will in South and Central America.
While I doubt we’ll soon all be listening to Mozart and his contemporaries en masse anytime soon, or books retaking television’s throne, I do suspect that for as much as we feel history is happening ever more quickly, it’s in many ways slowing down. Wherever this takes us, I’ll still be listening to Deftones.
I occasionally listen to today’s popular music, out of curiosity and an attempt to stay up-to-date. Sadly, I find most of it pretty lame: Little in the way in the way of instrumentation, canned drums and bass, mainly simple dance music, all beat and not much else, usually topped by young forgettable divas singing—-often—in breathy little girl voices. Not my cup of pekoe.
Sometimes I wonder though. Am I showing my age (74)? Am I just an irremediable prog-rock and metal lover, a dinosaur stuck in the tarpits of the 70s and 80s, impervious to anything new? Maybe. But to my aged ear, there’s little talent, complexity, or musicality on display in much of today’s music.
Adding to the record. Had the US not grabbed Hawaii, the British Empire would have. As to the Louisiana Purchase control of both banks of the Mississippi and even more important New Orleans meant that the trans-Appalachian west had a means to send and receive goods. I think is also true that Napoleon would have taken it back if things had gone his way and as the Battle of New Orleans in early 1815 demonstrates the British were setting about at a minimum bottling up the US using control of New Orleans as the cork.
Totally agree,just compiling a 60th reunion to celebrate being 16 in England in 1966 – a period of overwhelming musical creativity.Kinks,Stones,Animals,Who etc hitting their stride, Obviously the Beatles,Beachboys,Dylan etc.with gound breaking stuff.Hendrix,Cream,Velvet Underground,Beefheart. et.al. breaking cover with Soul music in the meddle of it greatest decade,HDH plus Stax, Otis,Supremes and countless others providing endless pleasure.Country just as rich,was there ever a better female singer than Karen Dalton,J.H.Christ I think you could spend. PHD on just richness and diversity of this one year alone.
There’s actually more new music out there then ever before but it requires people to actually look for it.
Of course if you only listen to mainstream pop streams or “whats trending” than its a bunch of mass produced crap like its been forever.
If you actually dig around on Bandcamp or other more independent sites There’s an endless amount of brilliant original music.
Alot of the problem is no one can be bothered to put any effort into it, algorithms are expected to just know what you want, but most people don’t put in any effort to discover anything new and then complain when corporate algorithms serve up corporate crap.
I always remember as a child, the first time I saw my Dad encounter a Beatles song. It was not pretty. That image has stuck with me all my life past 40 as I encountered the music of the younger generations. I found it often quite bad – but I also realized – I am now old – I remember how my Dad looked back then – and maybe this is part of getting older.
Imagine my surprise of the past 5-8 years or so. Everywhere we go, in our local little towns, in the nearest big cities, the faraway megacities – I mean everywhere – the soundtrack in public places is ALWAYS and I mean always – 70s metal like Led Zeppelin, late 60s CCR or Three Dog Night or their compatriots, disco, and the entire decade of the 1980s. That is it. The tourist traps all around us are the same. The hospital I work and therefore my clinic are all 80s all the time. Absolutely nothing else is played. When my kids bring their friends for dinner – everyone insists on the 80s music in the background – and they are enchanted by all the stories I tell of when I heard Prince or Madonna or Fleetwood Mac live. They have zero desire to listen to anything modern other than a few Taylor Swift hits. When we go to their events and dances at school – all 70s and 80s with a little bit of stuff like Macarena and Britney Spears thrown in.
I would say this is completely different than when I was their age – when it was all our own music from the 70s and 80s – with a bit of Elvis and the Beatles.
I have no idea what has caused this – other than the fact it seems to me that modern music and culture is such crap that not even the young people want to have anything to do with it. The same goes for movies and TV. Just the other night when we had 8 or so teen young men over – they wanted to watch an Indiana Jones film.