On the final night of last week’s Republican National Convention, aging professional wrestler Hulk Hogan took to the stage and demonstrated one of his signature moves: ripping off his tank top.
Revealing the Trump/Vance tank top he was wearing underneath, he called out to the crowd: “Let’s explode Trumpmania, brother!”
Millennials are the last generation to remember the wonder of pre-digital life, the paradoxical freedom of having fewer choices, so it’s no wonder they feel nostalgic for the emo bands they once loved.
As with everything surrounding Trump, liberals and conservatives viewed the moment very differently.
for “The Daily Show” The appearance of a “fallen fake wrestler” at the Republican National Convention was yet another testament to the hopeless tackiness of Trump’s world and its inability to elect anyone with even a modicum of cultural cachet. “I think Trump swept all the teenager votes in 1992,” quipped host Jordan Klepper.
Of course, conservatives got in on the joke, too: The point was a goofy, tongue-in-cheek nostalgia moment, with the Hulkster paving the way for Trump’s big comeback after the assassination attempt. In the world of memes, Hogan nailed it.
Klepper also mocked Kid Rock, who was escorted off the stage at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, by Secret Service and performed a Trump-inspired version of his nearly 25-year-old hit “American Badass,” including a repeat of Trump’s call to “fight!”
Again, Klepper’s criticism was misplaced: Rock was clearly not chosen with the approval of a media outlet like “The Daily Show” in mind.
Still, it’s worth asking: Why all the oldies shows?
Both WWE and rap-rock peaked at the end of the 20th century, which was also the peak of pre-internet American monoculture, and while neither Rock nor Hogan garner the same attention they did in their heydays, in today’s fractured entertainment industry, almost no one does.
The wrestler and the redneck are living embodiments of a different, more unified kind of pop culture, before everything became politicized. Trump himself enjoyed this kind of apolitical fame, most famously through his reality show, but also through his many film and TV cameos before that.
Like Trump, both Hogan and Locke exude a certain cheerful vulgarity that is a far cry from today’s ideologically-driven boasts of “LGBT awareness.”
Hogan is a particularly powerful symbol in this regard. He did something immoral the old-fashioned way, in private (filming a sex tape with a friend and his wife), and it was published by the left-leaning website Gawker, no doubt emboldened by Hogan’s low status among media tastemakers, but then billionaire Peter Thiel seized on Hogan’s story and used it to put cynical hipsters out of business.
Democrats may laugh at the old guard at the RNC congregating around these celebrity dinosaurs, but what would it look like for the GOP to attract a younger generation, especially with an old-school media-type event like their convention? Gen Z has no pop culture, and is all splintered into specialized “scenes” online.
Millennials are the last generation to remember the wonder of pre-digital life, the paradoxical freedom of having fewer choices, so it’s no wonder they feel nostalgic for the emo bands they once loved.
“I wasn’t supposed to be here tonight,” Trump said as he took the stage to accept the nomination. In some ways, those in his opening act were a bit lucky that they weren’t supposed to be here either. But like Trump and many of his supporters the culture has done its best to leave behind, they are survivors, relics of a time when common cultural and commercial motivations united Americans.
