Portrait of a Decade

I am a nostalgic person. I don’t know what for, but I understand that when I am presented with something, I draw on my past. I know that I remember things not as they were, but as I wish they had been. This is what I understand nostalgia to be. I pick and pull and stitch together images and memories to create a new landscape of my own. And it seems as though we are all nostalgic for something, or some place in time.  

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Music Festival. I bought a Woodstock t-shirt—a replica of an original—because, it turns out, I am a borrower of nostalgia. I stitch together stolen images and then proceed to call them mine. This is my t-shirt, but it doesn’t really belong to me; it is a memory I have only worn.  

When I think of the seventies, I think of leather, suede, fringes, beadwork, oranges and greens, and yellows and browns.  

It seems as though this is all that nostalgia is. It is nothing more than borrowed memory, clouded by pieces and fragments of t-shirts and colours and noise.  

I asked my sister about the decade, wondering if it lived in her imagination as it did it mine. “The seventies,” she said,“were a cesspool”.  

Only in the periphery of my seventies landscape could I find the chaos she’s referring to. I had pieced together these fragmented images, but maybe my nostalgia wasn’t really nostalgia at all— maybe it was a kind of revisionist history. 

In truth, the seventies were a decade wherein psychedelics and presidents and peace intermingled. It is a time when the Manson family ran loose, tainting the golden age with gore. “A cesspool.”  

In spite of this description, my sister added and instructed me to note, she “loves it”.  

Do we forget about the violence? Or does it add to the appeal?   

Maybe this, too, is a revisionist history, but it is clear that a dichotomy exists in cultural memory. The Manson Family members are either hippies or murderers, and we take our pick as to which narrative we like better.  

Even still, half of this narrative is good. Somehow, the violence weaves itself into the story of music and t-shirts and colours, painting a picture of great irony.  

Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, once said: “I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning.” 

This is why madness is so beguiling: we believe that what is damaged is worth doing a double-take on, because that which is damaged ought to mean something more. If the 1970s were a character trope, they’d be the Con Man—confusing, but compelling. Con men beg for our attention—they scream out for it—but in a cheery tune. It is only by listening—by looking further—that a mythology can be formed. It is only by looking further that we are tricked into rewriting history. It is only by looking further that we skew and sensationalize and prod and pull. We “love” these mythologies because we have created them.  

So, we don’t forget about the violence, but we don’t believe that it is senseless. And if we do, we think, at the very least, that it’s poetic. Because everything is poetic in the 70s.  

What it is about the past that continues to draw us back is undefinable. Decades pass and become caricatures; things exist outside of the truth. The enduring appeal of the seventies, to me, lies within this contradiction—the contradiction of the hippies and peace and chaos and disorder. And we love the chaos more than we do the peace, because it makes the past alive—sets it ablaze—more than t-shirts can.  

There is something to be said about the allure that chaos has. It is a dangerous siren song—but in the voice of Jim Morrison.