As I drive along heading south on Highway 99, letting YouTube videos play on random selection, I’m always struck by the fact that the absolute worst music imaginable, the cream of the crap, will invariably have comments from people saying things like “They just don’t make music like this anymore,” or “This song saved my life.”
Meanwhile, I’m thinking to myself that I am really glad they don’t make music like that anymore, and that this song actually made me want to end the person’s life who created it.
I’ve also spent a great deal of my life admiring the art, music, style, and architecture of the postwar period, from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s. Rockabilly music, cars with tailfins, and Googie architecture with flying boomerangs and cantilevered roofs. Flying-saucer-shaped lamps. Pink-flecked gabardine suits. Asymmetrical men’s watches. These are the things I think represent the pinnacle of art and creative industrial design. And yet I know most people think the era of design that I like was cartoonish and silly.
All this led me to the realization that somewhere, at some time down the road, there will be a group of nostalgic thirtysomethings obsessing over the early years of AI graphic art design.
Just as there is someone currently leaving a comment on a video by the Captain and Tennille, saying the song saved their life, at some point there’s gonna be a young adult pining away for the good old days of 2026. The time when those AI flyers were slightly wonky and generic looking, and that will bring about some form of nostalgia for that person. It will bring about a pleasant, warm, and fuzzy feeling in their gut, when they see vintage AI slop from 2026.
That’s just bizarre and inconceivable, and yet I know it will be true.
