Once we've burned through this current boom of early-'00stalgia, though, the future of the past gets a bit fuzzy. Years from now, when we finally gaze back at the pop highlights of this modern age, will any of us even be looking in same direction? But a 10th-anniversary retrospective on Clipse's Hell Have No Fury? Wamp wamp! Will I find time this week to finally catch up on Season 3 of (the genuinely great) Better Call Saul? Probably not. For editors and readers, nostalgia is a sticky salve: When there are so many modern-day screen gems to keep up with, and when consuming pop-culture feels more like a profession than a passion, it's easy to default to knowable, already-lovable past. And because it's hard to stand out when there are only a handful of mass-audience pop-topics left-we all should have bought when we had the chance-the entertainment-blog complex now relies on nostalgia as a semi-reliable traffic-stabilizer (even WIRED likes time-traveling to the past now and then). Our art-absorption metabolisms have been sped up by the web, which often feels like a borderless 24-hour culture klatch, full of non-stop pop-convos about The Stuff We Love. Yet the simplest reason for this earlier-than-expected revival is the fact that, in the all-digital era, two decades is waaaay too long to wait anymore. And it's all the more surprising when you consider that, for a long time, nostalgia-runs arrived with locust-like predictability, always operating in 20-year cycles: The '50s resurfaced in the '70s via Grease and Sha Na Na the '60s were excavated by '80s hits like The Wonder Years, Rambo, and Freedom Rock and a posthumous fondness for the '70s led to some of the best work of the '90s, from Dazed and Confused to Britpop. It's not quite arrested development, but it is a remarkably specific pop-culture spree, and if you were responsible for an even semi-successful movie, TV show, or album released during the Bush II administration, you may want to review your IP deals at this point, we're only two months away from the announcement of Twyla Tharp's The Pianist. Our art-absorption metabolisms have been sped up by the web, which often feels like a borderless 24-hour culture klatch. The simplest reason for this earlier-than-expected revival is the fact that, in the all-digital era, two decades is waaaay too long to wait anymore. And just last week, the story of a beloved, Bluth-enterprising early-'00s network sitcom once again being revamped by Netflix. (I'll be reading it in the back room of the Cherry Tavern all summer.) The ads for *Baywatch *(a franchise launched in 1989) being anchored by DMX's "Where the Hood At" (a song from 2003). An entire book, out this week, about the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and their downtown-NYC peers. There's also a forthcoming James Franco-directed biopic about The Room, which was one of two beloved 2003 movies about a long-haired, gibberish-spouting rapscallion (the other, Pirates of the Caribbean, unveils a new sequel this weekend). Shortly after that, a casting notice appeared for Tina Fey's forthcoming *Mean Girls *musical, which will open next year on Broadway (where it will likely join another early-'00s-indebted stage effort, School of Rock). Not that you needed another reminder, as the last few months have seen a sudden, near-cyclonic amount of early-'00s revivalism-one that's especially fixated on the years between 2000-2006, when albums still went multi-platinum, streaming was just a glitch-ridden daydream, and the phrase "prestige TV" meant, "Hey, I just saw an ad for *The Prestige *on TV!" LCD’s return, for example, took place the same week that Interpol-once the dapper downers of New York City’s post-9/11 scene- announced dates for a tour in celebration of its 2002 debut album. Alien: Covenant Proves ‘Franchise Fatigue’ Really Means ‘Boring Movies’ Arrow
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