Forever 2002

Twenty three years ago, most of the restaurants in Assembly Food Hall didn’t exist. Bridgestone Arena and the Preds had just passed the half-decade mark. The Titans had a whole two years under their belt after shaking off the ill-fitting Oilers moniker. This was the version of Broadway that born-and-bred Nashvillians sanctify even if then, as now, they avoided visiting when they could. 

But on Wednesday night, anyone who traversed downtown’s tourist hub during those years could close their eyes and go right back to the Summer of ‘02. At Bridgestone, metal rockers Incubus thrilled millennials and their middle school offspring as they played their 2001 record, Morning View, in its entirety. A mile away at the CMA Theater, indie rock singer-songwriter Aimee Mann celebrated the 22 1/2-year-anniversary of her 2002 album, Lost in Space, by recreating one of her most-loved works note for note. 

While the crowds who listened to Incubus and Mann didn’t mix all that much in the halls of high schools where some of us watched 9/11 live in our AP Statistics classrooms, music fans of all stripes have had the chance to tap into 2002 for the past couple of years. Two summers ago, The Flaming Lips went on the road for a Barnumesque celebration of their magnum opus, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Last summer, Pitchfork darling Ben Gibbard pulled double duty on a tour with his bands Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, replicating early 2003 classics Transatlanticism and Give Up in cities across the world, including a sold-out stop at Bridgestone.

In the time of Stranger Things, the VHS Renaissance, and rows of Nicktoons tees at Target, it’s no surprise that the nation is awash in brute nostalgia–hamfisted attempts to take us all back to a simpler time. Yet, in most ways, we’ve never left the Summer of ‘02. Iterations of more than half of the year’s top ten television shows are still on the air in some form. Friends remains the crown jewel of streaming. The Pitt, HBO Max’s megahit medical drama starring ER’s Noah Wylie, was so similar to Michael Crichton’s NBC primetime titan that his estate sued the producers. The Scrubs reboot is on the way. 

At the multiplex, the live-action version of 2002’s Lilo and Stitch is the summer’s biggest hit while Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, a follow-up to his fast zombie touchstone from the same year, is the month’s best reviewed movie. Those looking for a beach read can pick up the summer’s buzziest book–the latest from James Frey, whose early-aughts semi-memoir, A Million Little Pieces, earned the ire of Oprah when she realized much of it was fabricated. 

At this point, the proclamation that 9/11 changed everything has become a maxim. Armchair psychiatrists everywhere see the stickiness of 90s nostalgia as a response to post-9/11 trauma. It was the official end of the 90s when Y2K panic finally got its outlet and the halcyon days of Clinton’s neoliberal globalist alliance with a conservative Congress reached its logical conclusion. When Chuck Klosterman posited in his recent bestseller The 90s that the 2000 election had a far greater cultural impact even though, “the memory of September 11 is deeper and the emotional toll was greater, and it temporarily made much of the previous ten years feel superficial,” readers and reviewers alike took one of our keenest culture writer’s more obvious insights as the book’s most groundbreaking revelation. 

In truth, 9/11 didn’t change that much in Americans’ day-to-day. Of course, we went back to basics as we latched on tighter to the carefully cultivated worlds of reality TV, clung to superhero origin stories, and embraced the rootsy garage rock that The Strokes and The White Stripes typified. Still, we continued to ride the wave of Big Tech and easy credit that began while scored to Alanis and Snoop Dogg long before the hijackers picked up their plane tickets. What it changed was the definition of nostalgia itself. 

To marketing firms and aesthetes, nostalgia is a mood loosely colored by history. One can’t trace the rise of Nickelodeon orange or their first spin of Nevermind to a particular year, merely to the general feeling of growing up in a time of security tinged with corporate-sanctioned irony.  However, our cultural obsession with the aughts resides within a very clear 12-month timeframe: the summer of 2002 to the summer of 2003. The weeks after the attack were steeped in mourning and confusion as the nation stumbled toward regaining its equilibrium. Fueled by uninterrogated unity and the triumphalism that came with fending off the seemingly inevitable future terror attacks for the better part of three seasons, it was time to cut loose. 

We were a nation of outsized protectors like Spider-Man who fought fictionalized Osamas with aplomb. And then the scattershot assaults of the Iraq quagmire, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis ground that supercharged version of America to a halt. As Colette Shade writes in Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on a Future That Never Was):

“What defined the Y2K Era as an era was the unquestioned rule of American-led global capitalism, which began after the Cold War ended in the early ’90s and the dot-com bubble inflated in the late ’90s…In this chapter, America was still the hero, and shopping was still the most important part of citizenship. In this chapter, we stalked the global village in our ‘Never Forget’ hats, waving our flags and hunting for blood.”

Shade sets out to follow in Klosterman’s footsteps as she diagnoses the enduring power of the aughts, hoping for the same notices that met her predecessor. However, her book has a fatal flaw besides the expected liberal pablum and millennial entitlement: the few aughts cultural artifacts to which she pays ambivalent tribute all belong to that window between the first post-9/11 summers (the other objects of her odes linger on from the 90s). As a result, Shade quite disproves her central premise. We aren’t nostalgic for American trauma’s gap year. We’ve just never moved on.

Thanks to a combination of quick production turnaround and allegorical potential, the horror film has proven a consistent cultural barometer and a sign of things to come. Following the attacks, the genre was quick to abandon the postmodern winks that rose to prominence with the success of Scream and its imitators. In its place was a fascination with the ghosts and zombies at the center of breakout movies like The Ring, Resident Evil, and 28 Days Later–entities long buried whose return of the repressed dovetailed nicely with the abandonment of irony in favor of Freudian psychoanalysis as a cope.

But the genre quickly took its cues from Operation Iraqi freedom in late 2003, embarking on the endless stream of remakes and sequels to well-known IP: Freddy vs. Jason, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, even the return of the return of the return of the repressed with a new riff on Dawn of the Dead. It was the beginning of the end and the rise of the remixed nostalgia epidemic that is the ultimate symbol of America’s managed decline. 

Writing for The New Yorker in 2017, novelist Michael Chabon characterized nostalgia as, “The emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of meeting the people you missed knowing, of sipping coffee in the storied cafés that are now hot-yoga studios.” The year that kicked off the Long Summer of 2002 was a brief respite from our country’s tendency to repeat its past mistakes, a time when, just for a few months, a perpetually failing liberalism that extended the 2008 recession well into 2016 found itself unable to capitalize on the Red/Blue divide. 

For a moment, the nation had merged the clear-eyed  prosperity of the 90s with a long neglected embrace of American ideals. But that glimpse into what things could have been was shortsighted as we refused to make good on the promise, falling into a web of groupthink, giving in to fear over freedom, and allowing utopian faux-populism back into the fold to do what it has always done. As the sounds of Nashville last Wednesday indicated, some of us strive to make that summer endless. We aren’t stuck in the past. We refuse to give in to nostalgic sentiment. We simply saw what America could be and refuse to give up on getting there.