Wrote this post spontaneously because I had some thoughts in the middle of the night. This is going to be stream of consciousness and I don’t know where it’s going. If you want to see some photos from my Japan trip and get some recommendations for things to do or where to eat, check out my blog posts about Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka.
All over my social media feed I see people yearning for a 2026 where we unplug more and romanticise life to help us appreciate the little things. This is in response to a couple of news stories that seem like trivial slow news day things, but are really a reflection of how lost we are. One of them is Merriam-Webster naming “slop” as the 2025 word of the year. The other is Pantone’s 2026 colour of the year being the bland Cloud Dancer, which as you can imagine is white. How dull! How uninspiring! No wonder I’m so depressed.
How did we fall off so hard? I really don’t want to live in a world of slop and enshittification where quality, creativity, and originality are on the back burner. Everything is a subscription that’s trying to bleed you dry. I feel like in some ways, it’s worse than the Gilded Age. At least in the Gilded Age we had beautiful architecture and little decorative details peppered throughout houses and buildings. Now it’s all bland beige concrete boxes with windows. What happened to striving for better and not being complacent? Seems like everything’s going the way of air travel, which has been awful for decades with all the nickel and dime charges optimised to make you pay high prices for bare bones service. And now we’re having AI pushed everywhere we go online. It’s more obnoxious than Clippy from Microsoft Office.
One way I see thought leaders in the classic rock fandom promoting this unplugged lifestyle is to return to physical media. I scroll more on my feed and I see us millennials turning into our boomer parents, reminiscing about the good old days, when everything had more character and intention whether it’s shopping, the internet, or pop culture. These weren’t just things you do, they were events and moments. In my head I hear MGMT’s “Little Dark Age” and I think about those memes people post about how they hate the present and want to go back to the past. It’s a form of escapism. When I want to escape from my humdrum surroundings, I think about different places and eras.
Time travel isn’t possible, so my escapism is travel, my second love after classic rock, of course! When I go out I make it a point to not just make it a day out, but an experience. That includes getting dressed up and styling myself in vintage clothes, wearing my 60s makeup with a 70s glam twist: colourful eyeshadow, bold eyeliner, pale pink lipstick, and lots of sparkles. Style is part of my escapism. Style and dress sense to me is art. Art is what makes life beautiful, and you should do as much art as possible in any way that you can. Putting on a nice outfit cheered me up at the lowest points in my life, like when I was chronically ill. Life wasn’t beautiful while in pain, but my outfit is!
I think about all the places I’ve travelled in my 31 years on this planet and I can easily name my favourite and that’s Japan. Ever since I visited in September 2024 to celebrate my 30th birthday I couldn’t stop thinking about Japan. My husband and I declared it, our goal in life is to be able to go to Japan every year. Ever since I was six years old watching anime on Cartoon Network, I knew there was something special about Japan. It wasn’t just a holiday, it was a transformative experience. There are many things I loved about Japan, but the one thing I loved most is how it’s all about the experience in Japan.
There are themed cafes and pop ups for all sorts of characters and media. Branding was top notch and iconic, turned up to 11. I remember Sanrio stores when I was a kid and these specialty shops made trips to the mall so much fun. It was so cool to see entire shops dedicated to Sanrio or Pokemon or a whole anime series. People queued up like crazy in Harajuku for some idol merch launch or something. You still got paper tickets for things and they look nice and are keepsakes. Shops put thought into their displays, business cards, and carrier bags. Advertisements, usually something I ignore and groan at, were engaging and fun. I turned these mementos into a collage and it’s in my room. Japan perfectly combines futurism and retro things.
Even then, travel for the most part hasn’t had that same magic since pre-pandemic times. I miss the small businesses and the unique character of each city I’d visit. Now everything’s so homogenous. This whole thing makes me think of how the internet has changed along with our world. I remember the old days of the internet when you had dedicated fan-created sites for anything you can imagine, message boards for anything, the internet truly felt more democratic then. Now we just gravitate towards the same few very corporate sites, everything’s an app, everything asks for your information. It’s now an oligarchy: Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Discord, rinse and repeat.
My trip to Japan made me think of all the times I went to Disney World. The experience at Disney was the differentiator, turning an outing at a theme park from something good to great. Disney brings its movies and characters to life in a theme park like Roger Waters would bring The Wall to life at his concerts. It’s immersive and that’s what makes it memorable. It’s all about the attention to detail. Having a theme park with exhilarating rides is one thing, but making the theme park into an experience is another thing entirely. The characters, shows, parades, the themed areas in between the rides, the layout, the façades of the buildings. I grew up about 10-15 minutes away from Six Flags Great America. I’d go every year as a kid, and as fun as the rides were, it didn’t have the Disney experience, not even close! I really think that every marketing student should take a trip to Japan and to a Disney park to really see what great marketing and branding is all about.
Coming home to England, I see so much potential for this but it conflicts with our modern day values of greed and throwaway culture. While I don’t think anything can top American culture as an export, Britain has exported a lot of pop culture that is loved by billions of people worldwide. Imagine if we had heaps of themed trains, cafes, and immersive experiences for them like in Japan.
What does this have to do with classic rock? Well, earlier today I was doing my fortnightly 60s show with my friend Grant from Grant’s Rock Warehaus. It was a great show, I mean how could it not be, we’re talking about The Hollies, some of the best harmonies and intros I’ve ever heard in rock and roll. Grant was wearing a hoodie with the logo of the record store Peaches on it and in the chat people were talking about their memories of the old days of going to the record store and buying magazines to find out what the latest releases are and what’s worth buying. Very different from music news being spoon fed to you via a social media feed or push notifications. Everything revolved around physical media. You had paper tickets, magazines you could flip through, and of course vinyl records. Putting on a vinyl record is like a ritual. It’s not an ordinary listening experience, it’s an occasion. There’s intention behind it, walking up to your shelf, picking out a record, looking at the sleeve, pulling out the record, putting it on the turntable, and dropping the needle. It feels like magic every time. The best part about physical media is you’ve bought it, you own it, it’s yours, and you get the full experience as the artist intended it. In this day and age, so much is disappearing from the internet, so it’s important to save things you love and have your own archives and libraries.
Technology has the tendency to get smaller as it becomes more advanced and similarly music formats kept shrinking from the LP and 45 to the 8 track, cassette tape, and CD. While I mainly stream my music, I think there’s really nothing like vinyl. Because it’s larger, you can do so much more with the cover art and it has a much more prominent role. It’s key to make a great impression with album art in the vinyl years, so you had great artists like Hipgnosis and Roger Dean designing iconic covers. You had gatefolds, coloured vinyl, picture discs, shaped vinyl, cutouts, posters and stickers that come with the records, large lyric sheets, and booklets with lore that create an incredible unboxing experience. In the days of MTV, you had artists going all out with music videos, creating an incredible experience that would have totally broken the internet, if it had been a thing then. These days with everything going digital, cool all the music’s at your fingertips, but where’s the experience, where’s the atmosphere, where’s the moment? It makes me sad seeing the arts being deprioritised in favour of AI and making the most possible profit to create shareholder value.
Bringing it back to Japan, while Tower Records isn’t a thing in America anymore, it’s very much alive in Japan and there’s really an appreciation of physical media. Even buying used records, people in Japan keep their records in immaculate condition and record stores aren’t just shops, they’re like museums. I loved looking through the crates to see what cool things I could find. And I can’t wait to go back in a couple of months! And I’ll be going there in style with my dandy and other vintage outfits.
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