Hi, I'm Robin.

Let me use some words to a paint a picture for you. It's late at night, you're browsing videos on YouTube, just watching whatever seems interesting. You are tired, the glow of the screen in front of your eyes just barely keeping you awake. In the corner of your eye, right on the recommended side bar, you see a video titled "Toto- Africa (playing in an empty shopping centre)" and you think to yourself, "Ok, this is ridiculous. I need to watch this." So you click on the video, and it's exactly what it says it is. A still image of an empty mall of some kind that looks to be from around the 1980's with the song "Africa" by Toto playing with an echo and slight static, as if it were playing on the intercom. For some odd reason, you feel a relaxed, calming sensation. The music, the location, it's so oddly familiar to you, as if you had been there and heard that song being played.

In that moment, you are experiencing false nostalgia. At least, that's what everyone is calling it. The only place I could find a solid definition for the term was on Urban Dictionary, a place that houses definitions for slang terms and phrases like "dumbphone," "touch some grass" or "conflirtation"- needless to say, not the best resource for "official" definitions, but it gets the job done. the definition they give for false nostalgia is as follows:

"false nostalgia- The longing for or reminiscence of an era which you did not actually grow up in, having only experienced the era through it's movies, TV shows, music, etc; not based on actual life experiences."

This weird phenomenon is something I myself have felt watching and listening to videos like this. This odd sensation that I've been to the place in the picture when I was a kid, combined with the odd, uneasy feeling of seeing the location empty. You're so used to seeing a mall with a lot of people in it, it feels wrong in a way seeing it so desolate. I feel the same way way listening to and seeing art from an online genre known as "vaporwave," a genre that people like to say is dead because of some dumb memes a few years back. If you're interested in learning more about vaporwave, I highly recommend you watch Fredrik Knudsen's Down the Rabbit Hole episode on the topic. I find it interesting how much I enjoy these types of songs and videos. A lot of those mall videos are easy to make- just grab an image and make a song sound echo-y and boom, 100,000 views. I was born in 2000, 25 days after Y2K to be exact. I have no real nostalgic attachment to these locations or even a lot of these songs. Yet I feel an odd sense of familiarity. Like I've heard them and been to the places far away in the distnat past, when I was a young boy.

In an article from Psychology Today called "The Two Faces of Nostalgia," Hal McDonald talks about the two types of nostalgia- the good and not so good nostalgia, as it were. More specifically, restorative and reflective nostalgia. Restorative is the desire to relive past moments whereas reflective is more about accepting the past for what it is and wishing to savor the emotions it brings us. In my experience, false nostalgia has covered both types of nostalgia. Watching a mall video often triggers the restorative nostalgia as I desire to be a kid in a shopping mall once again, walking around with my family and looking at the comic book store and Build-a-Bear Workshop while begging my parents for one of those huge and ridiculous candy apples covered in chocolate sauce and Oreo cookie crumbles but settling with the Baskin Robbins ice cream in the food court. Something like a vaporwave remix of old Pokemon songs or a painting of a boy surrounded by old electronics and piles and piles of board and video games I find tend to trigger a more reflective nostalgia in me. I remember the first time I ever played Pokemon Platinum Version on my Nintendo DS Lite, picking Turtwig, naming her BUDDY and journeying with her across the Sinnoh region- slowly coming to terms with the fact that I'll never be able to experience that ever again.

YouTuber J.J. McCullough in his video "Middle Class Millennial Nostalgia Art" deep dives into this weird art scene, looking at how it portrays consumer culture as opposed to art of the past. In his video, J.J. shows off various artists, notably highlighting Rachid Lotf in the beginning of his video. This man's art has become so well known, he has been commissioned to make art for PlayStation Magazine, Universal and CAPCOM- all of whom own the intellectual properties often depicted in his works and he proudly displays this on his official website. I find a similar feeling of nostalgia in Lotf's artwork, particularly in the piece shown below titled simply "Otaku Room." As J.J. says in his video, it is a bit of a "spot the franchise" game in a way, but I feel like that adds to it rather than takes away. I spot the poster for Spirited Away and fondly remember the first time I watched the movie. I see shoes and jeans of the person in the picture and fondly remember wearing similar shoes and jeans when I was in middle school. I recognize one of the figurines as being from the anime Neon Genesis Evangellion and that makes me think about how I still need to watch that show. Stuff like that. Looking at Rachid's art is more like a fun trip down memory lane.

("Otaku Room" by Rachid Lotf)

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and I understand that. False nostalgia isn't really a good thing in my opinion as it's a seemingly unnatural extension of regular nostalgia. I'm sure I'm not the first person to tell you that it's dangerous to constantly be walking down memory lane, never looking towards the future and barely acknowledging the present. Allowing your fond and/or bittersweet memories of days gone by to consume you can be incredibly detrimental, and in my opinion that's even more so the case if those fond and bittersweet memories never even existed in the first place. Hell, one of my friends made a game where the main character is often going on nostalgia trips rather than noticing the breaks in reality before him. I completely understand that allowing nostalgia to consume you is a bad thing.

That being said, I don't think that nostalgia- even false nostalgia- is bad every now and then. The entire time I've been writing this, I've been listening to more of those mall videos I mentioned earlier. The soft echo of the music in the background occasionally skipping or getting stuck on a loop is oddly nice and comforting to me as I type down my thoughts. I like Loft's art because in a way, it reminds me of the I Spy books I used to look at in elementary school. I love seeing the interesting artistic renditions of these old architectures and intellectual properties and seeing them distorted into something wholly unique. I welcome the occasional feelings of nostalgia even when I know they could be fake because just for the moment, it feels nice. And to me, that's all nostalgia should be- a fleeting moment. Art likes captures that fleeting moment in a way I can't really find the words to describe. I'm sure many are cynical about this art that invokes a sense of false nostalgia and I can't really blame them. It is kind of concerning to me, but at the same time I don't really think it's the end of the world.

The feeling I get when playing Minecraft and hearing the song Sweden kick in after a few minutes of playing is comparable to the feeling I get when watching Big Iron in an Abandoned Mall. I won't deny that. Yet they're not the same feeling. Somehow, I understand that. I recognize how one is a real memory and the other isn't, but I know for others it's not the same. The human brain is an interesting thing in how messy it can be storing memories, but that's a subject for another day.

What do you think of these mall videos? What about this nostalgia art scene? I'm interested to hear your thoughts. Until next time, I'll see you all later.

-Robin.

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