The year is 2026, and we’re stuck inside a Rubik’s Cube. Its colors and shapes are a mix of the mid-2000s Big Brother house, which is all the better because Davina McCall is actually there, and in giant form. This isn’t some weird experiment from the last days of television; is a music video for “Girl Like Me”, the latest single from PinkPantheress’ Brit-themed mixtape, I love him. The song features two samples from early-millennium electronic outfit Basement Jaxx, as well as sound effects from a Yamaha keyboard released in 1998. One of the CGI-generated video clips comes from a 2009 music video by cult J-pop group Perfume. Everything else is from Britain. But it is a very specific Britain – the one that announced itself in the mid-60s, faltered during Blair’s prime ministership and died, painfully, under the austerity measures of the coalition government. The actors are dressed as walkers from an early E4 series leather. The bouncy animations look like something out of an early E4 id. The sets are filled with twee, optimistic indicators of Englishness, such as Mini Coopers, Buckingham Palace soldiers and lawn tennis.
For PinkPantheress — real name Victoria Beverley Walker — almost none of this is an expression of real-life nostalgia. The singer-producer is 25 years old, which makes her a long way off leather era, but it means she came of age within a major revival for 2000s fashion and music. The rest of the mix is a similar exercise in quasi-historical pastiche. It contains a USB’s worth of barrel-aged samples, a Sugababes cameo, an entire Vivienne Westwood wardrobe, and a few nods to Lily Allen’s 2008 video for “The Fear.” The first of two music videos for the hit song “Stateside” was shot, compressed and remastered again to approximate the look of a real turn-of-the-century artifact uploaded to the depths of YouTube.
Walker’s historical approach may have angered the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who wrote bleakly in 2014 about the “uncanny simultaneity” of her favorite era. Time was not passing as he remembered it. His youth regularly featured “mutations of popular music,” but the 2000s brought an overload of formal nostalgia. Amy Winehouse hovered between 2006 and 1960; Arctic Monkeys were new to the scene and somewhat stuck aesthetically in the 1980s. This excess of old forms was so pervasive that it was almost invisible. Fisher quoted Derrida, who was quoting Hamlet: cultural time was outside the union. It had “folded back on itself”.
“It doesn’t seem,” he said, “like the 21st century has begun yet.”
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He wondered why. Perhaps neoliberal capitalism, with its gig economy and shrunken welfare state, meant that no one had the time or energy to think of anything new. Perhaps the associated leap in mass communication had accelerated everything to the point of a counterintuitive cultural inertia. He turned to Derrida, who had pioneered a concept called hauntology. “It may be…” said Fisher, “…that he no longer has any gift to understand and articulate.” Instead, we were surrounded by ghostly reminders of the realities that we can they would have, if not for globalized capitalism, surveillance and the Internet. Fisher thought he could see them appearing in horror movies like brightnessand in electronic acts like Burial, whose work was characterized by heavy, static samples.
Pop’s ultimate answer to the concept of hauntology was Lana Del Rey, who spent the 2010s building a new female audience around a shaky idea of historical America. A diverse corpus of sounds, symbols and name-drops placed her songs and videos firmly anywhere between 1945 and 1979. Her hipster contemporaries were making an aesthetic revolution, leaving the place and time of vinyl, blackboards, exposed lamps and taxidermy. A single, sanitized version of mid-century modernism spread to coffee shops and co-working spaces around the world. Del Rey more than made up for it, immersing viewers and listeners in waves of abstract historical texture. Her music featured the grit of the 1970s without the economic angst, the strings and sounds of the 1960s without the racial angst, and the palpable romance of an abusive relationship without the ramifications for personal safety. It was a version of the sensual past with almost no person in it but her, and it was mysterious and subjective enough to be a ghost itself.
Del Rey’s fans say her music makes them nostalgic for things that never happened. Ironically, a decade later, nostalgia doesn’t seem to work the same way anymore. Fisher may have been interested in “Girl Like Me,” with its nostalgia-as-a-puzzle-cube metaphor and prominent samples. But the larger PinkPantheress project stands at odds with Fisher’s thesis. The Blair-Brown-Cameron period manifests itself in her work as a discrete aesthetic entity, subject to the same quotation and evocation as any period of the 20th century. Looks like Fisher it Was to live in a graspable present, albeit graspable only 20 years later.
Walker’s Gen Z listeners look to her corpus for sunny escapes. It’s a pre-Brexit utopia, with a sense of cultural flourishing and a central patriotic spirit that was last seen during the 2012 Olympics. “Britain if everyone voted Green yesterday,” wrote user X on a repost of the “Girl Like Me” video. The request makes sense: in a second display of post-Fisher irony, everything else in our culture seems to point to the ultimately depressed 1970s. Poverty and crime dominate the news cycle. Women and their eyebrows are getting thinner. Dance music and art rock are making simultaneous comebacks. We even have the default “look” of the 1970s; a number of Brutalist music videos feature grain, wood trim, wall-to-wall carpeting, stark color palettes, and surreal jam pieces that may have come from European art circles of the period.
The 1960s and 1970s were preoccupied with camp culture, which manifested itself as a massive obsession with exaggerated personas. In that era, the focus of the cult was on a semi-serious revival of classic Hollywood actresses, whose public identities had been shaped decades earlier by dedicated publicity departments, screenwriters and stylists. All of this may be against Fisher; with the worship of the person comes a worship of hierarchy and procession, and with this comes a new conceptualization of historical time.
Today’s film industry is too insecure and too obsessed with versatility to support such an effort. Our equivalent moment is dominated by pop stars. The epithets ‘queen of pop’ and ‘princess of pop’ have become deadly serious, with successful legacy acts being given the proverbial ‘daughter’. To have a claim to fame in 2026, a consistent persona must be strengthened. Nostalgia is an easy way in. Swedish pop star Zara Larsson built a steady career out of modeling Jess Glynne-isms in the 2010s, creating the kind of remarkably inoffensive music you might hear in a package holiday commercial. But she gained international fame only last year, after remaking herself in the two-dimensional but remarkably stable image of a 2000s fashion illustration. At the same time, PinkPantheress ceased to be a TikTok-era bedroom producer and became a girl in Blair Britain, or, in Sontagian terms, a “girl” in “Blair Britain”.
Walker and Larsson appear together in a music video for their collaboration “Stateside,” which is really an exercise in showing the stability of a pop persona. Each figure gets its own movie set; Walker’s features a coronation-style commemorative vase bearing her face, which pretty much sums up the entire mixtape. Her Anglophilia is something to show off to American viewers like showing off a stylish antique. Her version of British history is structured along the lines of her camp heritage, with Davina McCall, Lily Allen and the Sugababes acting as influential forces. The reality of Blair’s optimism is less important than its pedigree in the pop superstructure, which stretches back far beyond Blair and into the last century. We will be able to live in it until the cultural moment is over. Then the ghosts will return.
(Further reading: Olivia Dean’s definition of love)
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