Is steampunk over? The great Lileks thinks so. I used to like him.
In his “Bleat” (which I did not read in its entirety) Lileks talks about pop cultural things that are recycled or “rebooted” over and over again and says we need some new things. I agree with that but I do not think steampunk is in that category.
According to Mitchell though (the first link) steampunk might be approaching the point of being “no longer cool because too many people like it.” That might be true and if so it’s perfectly okay with me. I have no interest in the kind of “cool” that requires extreme exclusivity. What good is coolness if it can’t be enjoyed by everyone?
October 14th, 2010 - 10:19 am
I never got the “too many people like it now” mentality. I will admit to having stopped liking some things when they got politicized, or when some new strain of lunacy was injected in them (e.g., when the male and female lead of a show wound up just happening to fall into bed together).
I don’t think steampunk is overdone; I’d be willing to bet the vast majority of people don’t even know what it is. I think this is one of those echo chamber issues, where a small group of people assume that what their group thinks and knows is what everyone knows.
October 14th, 2010 - 8:49 pm
I have no interest in “cool” at all. I like what I like. If it’s popular, okay; if it’s not, okay.
In any case, I’m surprised Lileks even noticed Steampunk. It doesn’t call back to his favorite era — the post WW2/50s/Mad-Men-pre-Summer-of-Love 60s, the whole Mid-Century Modern Googie thing. (BTW, I’m into that era’s style myself; I’m glad Mad Men — which I don’t watch — made it popular, but I’m pissed that it’s getting impossible to find any more bargains in my parents’ era’s furniture. Now everything is priced for Don Draper fanatics.)
October 14th, 2010 - 8:53 pm
(Continued) I agree though that vampires, zombies, and virus movies are over. They’ve been over for years, only no one wants to let go for some reason. I have avoided zombie stuff and disease-based horror films but Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of my favorite novels, and I like the original (1930s) Dracula movie. Some of the goth vampire stuff that came out in the 80s and 90s was okay but by then I was already tired of the whole thing. I never could get into Buffy. Twilight was the final hunk of dirt on the coffin of vampires in popular culture — once the monster is nothing more than a drooping teen love interest you can say the genre is pretty much dead — deader than zombies.