History repeating on you
A Times comment piece on the 00s provokes me into a dissection of a certain sort of columnist's trick.
Previously: Rupert Murdoch Death Party
The past may be a foreign country, but the 2000s are so close that they might as well be the Isle of Wight. The forum threads of 9/11 are still there to be searched, columns by ghouls that still haunt us now remain online — David Aaronovitch particularly loves being reminded of things he wrote then — and the era’s TV news reports are easily recovered from the dustier corners of YouTube to be re-edited into TikTok montages.
Where 90s nostalgia requires a commitment to digging through the analogue, the link-rot-infected remains of the 00s are all over the internet, ripe for reposting. There’s far less excuse for misunderstanding the 2000s than the decades that came before; its spent shells still litter the battlefield and its most prominent fighters refuse to retreat.
And yet…
James Marriott’s Times column this week came with the following headline and deck:
They’re resurrecting the Noughties: how nice
A sudden yearning for the bland affluence of the 2000s is logical but let’s hope it doesn’t last
One measure of a column’s success is whether it provokes a response from the reader. By that metric, Marriott’s achieved its aim with me; since I read it on Wednesday night, it has been rattling around my mind. But as a thesis that stands up to even the mildest scrutiny, it fails, and not only because the writer was 6 when the decade began and 16 when it stuttered to a conclusion.
At first glance, it seems that Marriott’s inspiration for the column is…
… “Y2K nostalgia”, as we are advised to call it [which] refers to an ambient yearning for the culture and atmosphere of the turn of the millennium.
… triggered by an awareness of retro Instagram accounts and magazine shoots reviving the aesthetics of the 00s. But the catalyst is revealed in the third paragraph when he writes:
The years of the turn of the millennium (say, 1997 to 2008) represent a curious cultural dead spot. It was, the Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux writes in her superb memoir of postwar cultural change, The Years, a time of “no particular meaning”.
As a book reviewer for The Times and a former deputy books editor, Marriott’s column is often inspired by things he’s read recently. The week before he filed the noughties piece, he tweeted:
I know it's entirely pointless to tweet about Annie Ernaux as she just won the Nobel prize and I'm the last person in the world to get round to reading her. But this is life-changingly good and I am physically unable to restrain myself from recommending it.
Three words from a newly-minted Nobel Prize winner provide some borrowed heft for the columnist’s argument and he can rightly assume that most readers aren’t going to check his working. But I did.
The lifting of the phrase from The Years is like one of those deceptively cut quotes that posters for bad movies use to remake hatchet jobs as hagiographies. What Ernaux actually wrote was:
The 1990s just past held no particular meaning for us. They’d been years of disillusion. We had witnessed the events in Iraq — which the United States was starving out and threatening with airstrikes, where children were dying for lack of medicine — and in Gaza, the West Bank, Chechnya, Kosovo, Algeria…
That full quote does not remotely support Marriott’s vision of the 00s as bland “compared to our own turbulent decade”, firstly because Ernaux was not talking about the 00s at all, but secondly, because her recollections are more complex and much angrier. Annie Ernaux was 59 when the year 2000 began.
A few pages on from the partial line that Marriott quotes, Ernaux writes of 9/11:
The very few people who hadn’t known the same day were dogged by a feeling of having missed a rendezvous with the whole world.
And everyone racked their brains for what they’d been doing at the exact moment when the first plane hit the World Trade Centre… before we had time to think, fear took hold of us.
When Marriott claims that “what stands out in hindsight [about the 2000s is] a mood of ennui, of an exhausted 20th century up past its bedtime,” he skirts over the fear that Ernaux identifies, the pervasive paranoia, the crack-ups and the crackdowns.
The television that he references to evoke the spirit of the era reveals the confusion of his analysis as a clip show collage:
A strange lassitude was detectable in even the trashiest TV. Compared with the punishing schedule of challenges, confessions and humiliations inflicted on modern reality contestants, the inhabitants of the Big Brother House were subjected to a weird Waiting for Godot-style existence, stranded in a garish living room until they had sex or got drunk or racially abused one another. The best comedy of the era evoked this mood of frictionless, affluent drift. The Office (2001) and Peep Show (2003) are about empty lives. An office where nothing really happens. A south London flat where nothing really happens.
Big Brother was an invention of the 90s — created in 1997, first broadcast in the Netherlands in 1999 — that had its British premiere in July 2000. The Office began its initial run in July 2001. Both series owed more to the aesthetics and ideas of the decades past than the decade to come. In the Slough of The Office, the 90s barely seem to have arrived, let alone the 00s.
Similarly, Peep Show, the only post-9/11 production in Marriot’s list, was almost cancelled after its third series due to low viewing figures. It wasn’t seen as a “classic” until much later in its 9 series run. Its characters do not experience “frictionless, affluent drift” but the consistent friction of foolish ambition crashing into limited talent and shrinking opportunity.
In Marriot’s sketch of the 00s, only indie music exists…
This is what stands out in hindsight: a mood of ennui, of an exhausted 20th century up past its bedtime. The derivative guitar bands of what came to be dismissed as “landfill indie” dressed in the sorts of clothes guitar bands had worn for 30 years and wrote songs in obvious imitation of better music written decades earlier.
“Landfill indie” as a concept only arrived in around 2006 and a perspective on the 00s that ignores the huge amount of brilliant pop music being released as well as what was happening in hip-hop, garage, grime, dubstep and beyond is myopic in the extreme. But that’s a necessity for this kind of column; once the thesis has been defined, any element that might distract from it must be ruthlessly excluded.
So Marriott paints a picture of a decade where:
Politicians were dull and managerial. The economy bubbled along. The general elections of 2001 and 2005 saw the lowest turnouts of the postwar era. There was no youthful rebellion to compare with the 1960s or the 2010s. The culture-war fires of the 1990s burned low and the generations rubbed along in eerie harmony.
Every part of this is like magnolia paint over a wall of graffiti; with the power of hindsight how can anyone claim that “the economy bubbled along” — the years leading up to 2008 were the economy beginning to boil over. The vast anti-war marches of 2003 make no appearance in the column, the word “Afghanistan” does not appear at all, and student protests only began in 2010 in this retelling.
Far from “the culture-war fires… [burning] low”, Muslims, the poor, and many young people were particularly targeted in a concerted culture war prosecuted by the media and government. It was the era of “name and shame”, 'Winterval” scares, phantom plots and insistent calls for tougher laws. Only someone who was a literal child during that period could imagine that “the generations rubbed along in eerie harmony”.
Again, the Ernaux quote that Marriott uses to support that assertion is deceptive:
“The young were sensible,” Ernaux writes, “for the essentials they shared our way of thinking. They didn’t challenge the curriculum, the rules, or authority.”
But placed back in context, that passage comes between Ernaux writing about the Walkman (“We could live inside music, walled off from the world.”) and a strange mishmash of recollections from the 80s and 90s:
[The young] spent hours at a time on Playstations or Atari consoles, and playing role-playing games. They raved about home computers and begged us to buy the first model, Oric-1.
The Oric-1 was released in 1983.
Marriott belongs to a class of columnists that can impress passing readers with neat phrasemaking, superficially impressive quotations, and an iron assurance wrapped in a pretence of modesty. An assertion like…
The emerging traumas of the 21st century — populism, deglobalisation, misinformation, the retreat of the western middle class, the culture war — can be traced to the end of the first decade of the 2000s, with the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and the financial crash of 2008.
… appears compelling until you start to pick at the seams and examine the stuffing. This isn’t even Lego thinking; it’s playing with Duplo — big concepts slotted together with many of the smaller pieces missing. The iPhone was an accelerant; the financial crash was the conclusion to a very long story.
Chiding the ‘public intellectuals’ of the 00s — what a grim category that is — Marriott writes, with the shaky confidence of a man with a deadline, that:
So much was missed or misunderstood. Writers wondered how long it would take for China to become a democracy, and whether the internet would expedite the final downfall of authoritarianism.
It’s the kind of line that someone who might find themselves having their own work quoted to them in 20 years’ time should perhaps be wary of writing. When he goes on to list the “intellectual fights” of the 2010s and 2020s…
Student activists contested the value of free speech. Ancient ideas about gender were overturned. Younger voters were rejecting capitalism. Conspiracy theories spread among the economically disenfranchised. Strong men prospered. These are fraught times but — thin consolation, perhaps — interesting ones.
… there is a disconnect at work. The columnist, beholden to word count, wants a decade to exist as a discrete unit. But the idea that the 00s were not themselves fraught or “interesting” is a child’s perspective still held dear by an adult man. The 00s were a simpler time for James Marriott because they were largely his CBeebies-era.
That could be almost endearing if his tone was one of gentle nostalgia rather than historical certainty. But when he writes that the 00s were “an age unaware of the strange privilege of its untroubled prosperity”, he sweeps away the experiences of a lot of people who neither look like him nor benefit from his own “strange privilege”.
When I first read the column, I tweeted a less-considered response to it across a series of irritated tweets:
This is such ahistorical horseshit in James Marriott's Times column on the apparent 00s revival. It's a column that mentions Iraq once — not in the context of protest against the war — and Afghanistan not at all. On the home front, tuition fee protests make no appearance either.
The premise that the 00s was an age defined by "the strange privilege of its untroubled prosperity" only works if you ignore whole swathes of the population, particularly those people demonised as chavs and held down by ASBOs.
I entered the 00s aged 16 and left them aged 26. It was an anxious, unsettled and often terrifying decade that was a prelude to a lot of what we’re neck deep in now. The shallow optimism of 1997 was long gone even before 2001.
The tone of that article reminds a lot of Dominic Sandbrook books; sweeping generalisations that create an impression that reads as at best wildly partial and at worst entirely wrong to anyone who was actually fully engaged in living during the period in question.
Relying on Annie Ernaux — as astounding a writer as she is — to argue that the 00s were “a time of ‘no particular meaning’,” is weak too. Ernaux was 60 at the turn of the millennium. Of course she’s not going to consider the 00s to be a fascinating decade.
I know I’m effectively ranting here. But it’s a column on the 00s that doesn’t address the spectre of terrorism, the politics of amplifying that fear, the 2008 economic crisis, the existence of any music beyond “landfill indie”…
Subject this performance of wisdom to even the lightest analysis and it collapses like a gateau in a hailstorm.
I also shared a link so that people could draw their own conclusions.
James Marriott replied:
I do think you're being a bit unfair. A column has to have an angle and it can't take in every event that comprises the subject in question. The idea is surely to approach something in an interesting or unusual way to bring out themes or ideas that might have been overlooked?
…
You are of course entitled to disagree — though I did think "horseshit" did seem a bit aggressive. I don't think its a malicious column.
After perennial ‘good Tory’ and Alastair Campbell podcast co-host, Rory Stewart, shared the column calling it “[a] beautiful provocative analysis of the Noughties,” and declaring Marriott “a very powerful analyst of our age”, the historians Dr Robert Saunders and Professor Simon Schama popped up in the thread beneath the tweet:
Robert Saunders: Interesting - but is it true? This was also the decade of 9/11, the War on Terror, war in Iraq & Afghanistan, the disputed US election of 2000, the rise of the BNP, the SNP doubling its vote at Holyrood, civil partnerships & a transformation in gay rights, then the crash of 2007-8
Simon Schama: … and 2005 London bombings so all in all .. not at all true
But then neither of them used the word “horseshit”, so it’s fine…
I was attempting to play the ball rather than the man despite the robustness of my tackle. My issue is not with Marriott individually but with this genre of column in general. The problem is baked into the excuse. In his reply to Dr Saunders, Marriott says, “… in my defence a decade is more complicated than it is possible to express in a 900-word column.”1 And trying to do so is hubris.
This column in particular stayed rattling around in my mind because it encourages false memories of the noughties at exactly the same time that the media’s own “Y2K nostalgia” is a demand for Keir Starmer and Labour to play the Blairite hits.
The aim of that kind of column is to have the reader clap and exclaim at your brilliance in pulling the rabbit out of the hat. It gets uncomfortable if they start asking how it got in there in the first place and if, in fact, it’s still breathing.
Thanks for reading.
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