Well, since I was still in the mood for writing about nostalgia, my half-awake insomnia-ridden mind thought that it would be a good idea to ramble about one quality that sets the 2000s (and maybe the late 1990s/early 2010s too) apart from any other time. This is a difficult quality to define, but I ended up coming up with the contradictory term “edgy innocence” to describe it. Again, insomnia.
This was something I ended up thinking about after watching a couple of modern Youtube videos – one was a dramatic montage of old videogame footage titled “Bro wake up it’s 2004” (warning – gruesome/violent images) and the other was a video about old website designs which showed an old Yahoo Messenger screenshot (I used MSN Messenger back in the day, but it’s basically the same thing) which mentioned a band called “Hoobastank”.
For some bizarre reason, all of this made me think of a character from “Saints Row 2” (2008) called Shaundi, who is both a chilled-out hippie-style character and a member of a vicious criminal gang. This mixture between innocence and edginess.
This is a screenshot of Shaundi from “Saints Row 2” (2008). Even though I missed out on this game back in the day and only played it in 2019, this character seems to perfectly encapsulate the quality I’m talking about in this article. She’s an “edgy” character – literally a member of a violent criminal gang – yet she’s also an incredibly fun and chilled-out “hippie” character in a way that you just don’t really see these days.
The 2000s was a truly bizarre decade in some ways, since the past innocence of the 1990s collided with the grim era that began on the 11th September 2001 in a really strange way. From my memories of being a teenager back then, the news was filled with a barrage of dystopian stuff (the more things change...) and the world seemed like utter crap, and yet there was… something… about the decade that I can only really see in retrospect. This paradoxical mixture of edginess and innocence.
It’s why pre-9/11 comedy movies from the very beginning of the decade, like “Dude, Where’s My Car?” (2000) and “Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back” (2001), evoke this completely contradictory feeling of both warm nostalgia and extreme cringe-worthiness at the same time. By modern standards, these films are utterly dreadful on pretty much every imaginable level. Yet, especially if you grew up back then, there’s something to them. A strange innocence and optimism. A chilled-out and rebellious pre-9/11 goofiness that you just don’t see in the comedy genre these days.
Yes, post-9/11 comedy from the 2000s was often a lot more cynical, edgy, bitter and satirical than these older films, but there was still some traces of the old goofiness in comedy films from the time – like “Jackass: The Movie” (2002), “Ali G Indahouse” (2002), “EuroTrip” (2004) etc… This weird mixture of edginess and innocence, which was already starting to seem like something from an earlier age.
Even though a fair amount of the music in the post-9/11 age was riddled with angst – whether angry pop-punk by bands like Sum 41, shouty metalcore music or gothic nu metal from bands like Evanescence – there was often something weirdly generalised and generic about all of this angst. It was often more about the emotion of angst itself, than angst about any one specific thing.
Although I’ve unfortunately only listened to a small amount of hip-hop from the time, the 2000s also appears to be when the genre was often – but not always – less about thoughtful social commentary (such as some of 2Pac’s songs from the 1990s) and more about affluence, designer goods etc…. It’s fun to listen to, but its probably less rebellious than some stuff from the 1980s/1990s was.
Popular music back then was filled with “rebellious” genres like pop-punk, nu metal, emo, metalcore, hip-hop, indie rock etc… and yet a fair amount of this “edgy” 2000s music wasn’t really about anything that edgy. There were obviously exceptions (eg: Quite a few songs by System Of A Down, “American Idiot” by Green Day etc...), but most of it still carried traces of the innocence of the 1990s. It was more about expressing “edgy” emotions (eg: angst, boasting, rebellion, anger, despair etc..) than actually saying anything genuinely edgy. The impression of edginess
Videogames at the time often had a bit of an “edge” to them too. Whether it was the theatrical criminality of the PS2-era “Grand Theft Auto” games, the “edgy for the sake of edgy” games like “Postal 2” (2003), the sarcastic dialogue in 3D platform games of the time, the numerous survival horror videogames, the many first-person shooter games that didn’t focus on realistic military characters etc… Games from this era are famed for their edginess. Whether you look back on this fondly as a “golden age of ‘real’ games” or cringe a bit about it or both, there’s no denying that games in the 2000s tried to be as edgy as possible.
Yet, objectively, they’re often less edgy than modern games. Yes, they might have more innuendos and/or cartoonish gruesomeness, but many of them seem pretty tame and weirdly… innocent… compared to the grimmer and more “serious” games that were released during the 2010s. Not to mention that game censorship, like actual old-school “It must pass a formal ratings board before sale” censorship, was also way stricter back in the 2000s too.
This weird mixture between edginess and innocence really does seem to define things made in the 2000s. The free-spirited rebellious hedonism of the 1990s trying to find its way in the fearful post-9/11 landscape of most of the 2000s. And it would be easy to say that all manner of things “killed” it – smartphones, modern social media, the 2008 financial crash etc… – and, to some extent, they probably did.
Still, the main underlying reason why this fascinating quality seems to have gone away is because the modern age is just more… earnest… than it used to be. Whether it is political polarisation on the internet, a culture of “This topic MUST be taken ultra-seriously at ALL times and in ALL contexts!“, the greater variety of grimly depressing things in the news etc… It can all be boiled down to just one thing. Earnestness.
Popular culture during the 2000s responded to the woes of the age with irreverence, cynicism, generalised angst, hedonism, escapism, rebellion and edginess. The modern world is, in the words of a great playwright, instead all about “The importance of being earnest”.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
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