The Year Remixed

2014 was the year of the meddle; the year where nothing with a past was left alone. Original states were no longer good enough. Everything was remixed.

First came the Disney Princesses. Belle, Esmerelda, Jasmine, Cinderella. Up until recently they were either regarded with nostalgia or forgotten in our adulthood — until, of course, someone had a brilliant idea.

“Hey, I know,” said this person who was probably high and inspired by her childhood bedsheets. “I’m gonna re-imagine Disney Princesses as the cast of High School Musical.” After that, all bets were off.

Disney Princesses quickly found themselves in a whole variety of situations: recreating scenes from Mean Girls and Homeland, having their heads replaced with Nicolas Cage’s, being digitally manipulated to look like real humans, redrawn in the style of Anime. Pick a scenario — literally any scenario (someone once rei-magined Disney Princesses as piles of rocks) — and these long-haired heroines have been there, done that.

Not too shabby for a bunch of cartoon characters whose original claims to fame were attending balls.

Then came the Art Renaissance renaissance. People suddenly remembered that once upon a time they received an art history minor, and they’d be damned if they didn’t make use of their very expensive education. They realized that oil paintings and Ikea furniture go together like fine wine and aged cheese, that today’s lexicon far better summarizes a masterpiece than whatever a museum’s audio tour could tell you, and that Renaissance babies were kind of ugly.

Nothing was sacred. Wes Anderson was affixed to Kanye West. Law & Order became one with food. The poetry of Pablo Neruda accompanied photos of stoic cats, and even we outfitted Joan Didion in today’s clothes. Every song got a remix. If it didn’t get remix, it was synched with an unrelated video. Careers required backslashes, animals got agents, parodies were parodied and Tumblr memes were reenacted on Vine.

Leandra noted that we’re witnessing it in fashion, too. The whole ’90s redux is hardly a redux seeing as those chokers (which were adopted from the Victorian era) are being worn today in earnest. Flared jeans that hit right at the ankle, paired with training sneakers a la School House Rock are no more ironic now than they were when they belonged to Marsha Brady. Yet the modern iteration isn’t really a “take on the ’70s,” either. It’s not an interpretation. It’s…confusing.

2014 wasn’t the first time these “meddlings” occurred. Kanye Wes Anderson is old. The ’20s have come in stylistically before; so have the ’40s, ’50s. And ’60s. Creative property became fair game as soon as the Internet was made public, and Disney Princesses were going through sex changes before we were aware that Tumblr existed. But it was the year that we craved these renderings with such insatiability that new takes on the old classics began to blur timelines and beg the question, “What is actually defining right now?”

If nothing else, 2014 solidified what we already knew: that everything old becomes new again, that trends are cyclical, and that we’re creatures of nostalgic habit. But it also makes you wonder: what will a college party look like in the year 2055 where instead of “The ’80s,” the popular theme is “2015”?

Probably like a Disney movie. Set in the Renaissance age, scored by Justin Bieber and directed by the Coen brothers.