The Decline Of Millennial Culture and Obamacore

And why no one will be nostalgic for it

Recently, Seth Rogen lit a giant “bowl” at an event called the “Hollywood Bowl” (which is apparently some kind of event where famous weed smokers congregate or something).

This scene was received to mockery by literally everyone, including many on social media. It is of course understandable to see why this elicited so much disgust. A 40+ year old man who makes being a pothead his entire personality is to put it simply, deeply humiliating. It doesn’t help that Seth Rogen is an unhinged man-child for other reasons, but I think what really sets people off is how dated this type of humor is.

I personally never found Seth Rogen to be some kind of comedic genius- I remember when everyone went crazy a decade ago over the 2014 movie The Interview after North Korea hacked Sony Pictures’ database due to the film’s subject matter (assassinating North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un) and even as someone who was between the ages of 12-15 in 2014, I found that movie to be painfully unfunny at best, and unwatchable at worst. And I have never found stoner comedy funny, even as someone with libertarian leanings. What is interesting, however, is the amount of people who claimed that no one ever found this type of stuff funny.

Historical Revisionism

Looking back, it’s interesting to read the historical revisionism about this topic. An example would be (as linked above) the positive reviews by critics of Rogen’s 2016 ‘comedy’ movie Sausage Party (82% on Rotten Tomatoes!), which is one of the worst animated films of all time. If this movie was released in 2024, I suspect the reception would be rather different- but it wasn’t.

I suspect that sometimes people are too embarrassed to admit they liked something. And that’s understandable. I used to enjoy a lot of things as a child and a teenager that I wouldn’t be proud of claiming I liked now. When I was 7 or 8 years old, I thought the then newly released Transformers 2 was a great movie, and when I was 10, I thought the then newly released MCU flick The Avengers (2012) was a masterpiece in cinema. If I tried to re-watch either of those movies today (which I haven’t seen in 15 and 11-12 years respectively), I don’t think I’d make it to the end. But I won’t ever pretend that I never liked those particular movies, even as someone who stopped liking Michael Bay as soon as I turned 12 and who started publicly being skeptical of Marvel as early as 2015/2016 (I remember thinking Avengers 2 was garbage even when it came out 9 years ago, a sign of my immaculate instincts).

I suppose that certain forms of media just age very poorly relative to the advancement of pop culture. 2020-2021 was only 3-4 years ago but aspects of it have famously aged worse than raw milk:

The above video is a bit like peering into an alternative universe. I don’t really want to spend too much time on it, because it’s so safe to mock it nowadays that even the Amazon Prime TV The Boys (another piece of media that will age horribly and become a subject of historical revisionism 5-10 years from now) parodied it. The point is that politically charged forms of media and trends in popular culture always age terribly. You can see the contrast on this with the Summer of Floyd “protests” in 2020 and the pro-Palestine “protests” in 2023 and 2024.

Both the BLM riots and pro-Palestine campus chaos of course featured leftist freaks, although it’s worth noting BLM featured actual blacks and other proles, not just lesbians, and were much more violent due to that factor- as well as the mood of the country due to COVID, and the general public’s outrage over Floyd being far greater than their outrage over the conflict in Gaza. But the BLM movement was widely supported by most Americans, whereas most of the country wants to ban the pro-Palestine protests. And this is all in spite of the fact that the BLM riots were infinitely more violent!

I think part of this is explainable to the fact that Americans care more about blacks than they do Palestinians, due to one being a domestic entity with a long history here and the other being a foreign entity (not withstanding the relatively small and educated diaspora population in America).

But this argument is contradicted by the fact that there are multiple recent mirror images of the Floyd case, and despite attempts by the media and the usual suspects to fan the flames in an attempt to repeat 2020. I think that this is simply due to the fact that we don’t live in 2020 anymore, and the American people being tired of acting like a career criminal and drug addict is the second coming of Christ. Anyone who used social media in 2020 a lot will remember how it became almost imperative to post a black square to support BLM. And it wasn’t just liberals doing this, either- I can remember off the top off my head that many apolitical normies and even some conservatives who would vote for Trump that November posted pro-BLM stuff right after Floyd.

I’d bet that a good quantity of the people who were posting pro-BLM stuff in 2020 would not admit to it now, but I don’t really think that shaming them is a noble goal either. “Normies”, or just normal people are not terminally addicted to politics, and go with trends. That is how these people have always operated in history- on average, most revolutionary movements in history are carried out by a determined, intelligent and ruthless elite who are in the right place at the right time, with everyone else going on for a ride (what the sheep who like to fancy themselves as revolutionaries these days don’t quite grasp is the luck part, as well as severely lacking in the intelligence quotient. And everything else).

The point of all of this is that trends change quickly and the herd goes along with it. Yet while I don’t think the average person should be shamed for trying to distance themselves from a prior trend, I do object to the historical revisionism surrounding the topic. You have probably seen certain people on the left trying to downplay the insanity of 2020 that they themselves fanned the flames of. And that is the archetype that I’m referring to.

Millennial Culture and Obamacore

I’ve spent enough time rambling about Marvel and politics to address what I’ve indented to in my article. And that is “millennial culture” and the revisionism surrounding it. Yet first I may have to define what it is in the first place.

It’s a difficult task, but I’d argue that it came from two aspects:

1. The sense that the ‘prior’ American society was deeply flawed in some way or an another, in need of radical change, driven by angst over the 2008 financial crisis, but that angst was channeled towards a hatred of the carefree and more politically incorrect 1980’s, 1990’s and 2000’s culture and metastasized itself in the forms of “wokeness” which we should all know and recognize by now. Some of this resentment (over the 2000’s) is justified in my book, as are the criticisms of boomers, but it went in the completely wrong way.

2. A more racialized version of the above phenomenon, headed more by blacks in general rather than liberal white college-educated millennials/others, despite being popular with both. Someone on Twitter came up with the term “Obamacore” to describe it, which is a perfect term, even if not every aspect of Obamacore came from the duration of his presidency.

As Twitter user @CryptoPlainview describes it:

"There was a mid-10s period of "conscious" black cultural output that feels distinct and cringe in hindsight

-To Pimp A Butterfly

-This is America

-Hamilton

-Get Out

Obama-core"

-Cryptoplainview

I of course fully agree with this take, with the caveat that I’d argue that Obamacore spanned somewhat more than black racial issues, despite the primary theme of the era being said racial issues. Before I get into some of the other forms of media mentioned, I will go into the first example of Obamacore and Millennial culture.

Adam Ruins Everything

If you are fairly online, you may have seen this image more times than your eyes would have ever wished to have, even if you have no idea what the context behind it is. Released in 2015, Adam Ruins Everything was a TV show dedicated to “debunking” popular myths, with the main character being the eponymously named Adam played by Adam Conover.

I could delve into everything wrong with the example video I linked above, but I don’t want this article to be the length of a Lord of The Rings novel. It’s incredibly easy to debunk Conover’s thesis in the video- the fact is that the electoral collage was designed to ensure that smaller states were not swamped by the majority and to balance federalism. Or the fact that “swing states” or areas would still absolutely be a factor even if we switched to a NPV method- do you seriously think presidential Republican candidates would start campaigning in SF and Democrats in rural Tennessee if we abolished the NPV? Sure, you may see a Republican campaign more in a place like Long Island or Orange County in deep blue NY/CA and a Democrat more a place like Salt Lake City or Johnson County in deep red Utah/Kansas respectively, but this does not negate the fact that “swing areas” as a rule would still exist, and Adam’s idealistic vision is fundamentally flawed in the first place and based off a total miscalculation of how politics actually works. But what sets it apart from just being another show about debunking myths is the incredibly condescending tone of it.

You get the impression that Mr. Conover has a level of contempt towards his opponents, a sense of a superiority complex if you will. This goes to the point where he feels the need to create multiple characters for the sole purpose of being strawmen in his show specifically to debunk them. And the premise of the show is that the titular character is some kind of genius arbiter of information, which is a total fallacy.

I’ve seen this clip before, but upon revision, it sticks out to you how dependent Conover is on his screenwriters to form an argument. He constantly deflects to anecdotal evidence to prove his points, which is a far cry from the “fact” based character he portrayed on television. It’s also worth noting that he is debating Joe Rogan, who is not some kind of intellectual philosopher (and doesn’t pretend to be, to be fair), but I think it’s fair to say that anyone who can’t hold their own against Rogan in a debate shouldn’t LARP as an arbiter of truth.

This show was arguably one of the best examples of Obamacore, despite not overtly being of a racialized nature (unlike the other examples we’ll get to soon). The show reeked of a sense of resentment towards conservative America and a sense of condensation.

Everyone nowadays mocks this show on social media and pretends they never liked it. I’m not even suggesting most people did, but this show was popular and acclaimed for a period of time. I was forced to watch this during school in 2015/16 and my teachers had to pretend that it was educational. The revisionism around this show is understandable, because no one wants to pretend they liked it, but they did, and they may have even cited him as an educational source years ago. This show has aged worse than rotting milk and will soon be forgotten, a prime example of Obamacore- and no one will even pretend to be nostalgic for it.

This is America

A few days ago was the 6 year anniversary release of Childish Gambino’s song This is America, a chief example of Obamacore. I think that everyone forgot about the existence of the song until its recent anniversary, where seemingly everyone on X took note of how terrible and already dated it was.

I’ll have to admit that I had never listened to the song before until very recently. I saw images and memes from the song, but never the whole thing itself. As a fair adjudicator, I decided to listen to it anyways recently to understand what the hype was about.

I had and still have no clue what this song is about. I kind of guessed it was about school shootings and gun violence due to its release date being a few months after Parkland, but I now guess that it might be something about “police brutality” or something. I don’t know, and I frankly don’t care to know, because the song is genuinely one of the worst and most nonsensical I’ve ever listened to, and I was right back in 2018.

This is America
Don't catch you slippin' now
Don't catch you slippin' now
Look what I'm whippin' now
This is America (woo)
Don't catch you slippin' now
Don't catch you slippin' now
Look what I'm whippin' now

This is America (skrrt, skrrt, woo)
Don't catch you slippin' now (ayy)
Look at how I'm livin' now
Police be trippin' now (woo)
Yeah, this is America (woo, ayy)
Guns in my area (word, my area)
I got the strap (ayy, ayy)
I gotta carry 'em
Yeah, yeah, I'ma go into this (ugh)
Yeah, yeah, this is guerilla, woo
Yeah, yeah, I'ma go get the bag
Yeah, yeah, or I'ma get the pad
Yeah, yeah, I'm so cold like yeah (yeah)
I'm so dope like yeah (woo)
We gon' blow like yeah (straight up, uh)

These are the lyrics to the “song”. I don’t understand what Mr. Gambino is trying to convey here, but it has the combined lyrical intellectual capacity and artistic creativity of a Lil Pump song:

Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang (Gucci gang)
Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang (Gucci gang)

Spend three racks on a new chain (Yuh)
My bitch love do cocaine, ooh (Ooh)
I fuck a bitch, I forgot her name (Brr, yuh)
I can't buy a bitch no wedding ring (Ooh)
Rather go and buy Balmains (Brr)

Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang (Gucci gang)
Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang
Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang (Gucci gang)

I don’t see any notable artistic difference between the two songs above, lyrically. Say what you will about him, but atleast Tupac’s rap had actual lyrics and meanings behind it! This is mumble rap tier garbage that conveys no message other than a vague sense of discontent towards something… I guess “racism”? I don’t know, but it isn’t like this is some kind of Kubrickian work of genius. It’s garbage that the media pretended was Kubrickian, as the reception this trash fire got shows: It was apparently ranked the 6th best song of 2018, and was perceived to be so profound that Vice even demanded that the internet stop meme-ing its music video due to the power of the “message” and how the pretentious music video was some kind of high art sending a great message, when in reality, the average Travis Scott song has more creative lyrics.

I think most people by this point have realized that this type of stuff was always garbage and overhyped, but in the face of historical revisionism, you shouldn’t completely forget how people were forced to act like this type of stuff was high art. Don’t forget how the first critic to give the middling Black Panther a negative review got death threats, for instance.

Other examples of Obamacore

Of course, there are yet more examples of Obamacore. The 2017 Jordan Peele horror film Get Out serves as another example of this. This movie was pretty much a “white people bad, black people good” type of film that encapsulated the racial feeling of the country and pop culture from 2015-2021, with the sole catch being that the white villains were wealthy liberals who weirdly idealized blacks and wanted their bodies, not gun-toting rednecks who hated them. Of course, the ultimate message of the movie is that whites are allegedly always bad and will exploit blacks no matter how “liberal” they are, and that no amount of racial tolerance can make this up. Every black character is perfect and angelic, whereas every white (or even non-black) character is either racist or has a dubious motivation. These are very dated themes already- one that seems dated to the early BLM era in particular, where the term “woke” was used unironically by left wingers and not as a pejorative by conservatives against liberals.

While Get Out received rave reviews back when it was released (likely due to the film’s specific form of racial politics), I don’t think it will be remembered in the same vain. While I dislike the movie and its political message, the premise wasn’t as dated in 2017 as it is now, where it seems to be almost tired. It doesn’t help that the movie itself isn’t very well written from memory- it is extremely predictable and not particularly well written, humorous, or frightening- but those aspects combined with the dated and hackneyed message ensure that it won’t be remembered very well at all.

The play Hamilton is also cited as another example of “Obamacore”. To keep it the summary short, the entire premise of the play it that it’s a musical about the American founding fathers that is sung and rapped through, whom are also all played by non-white actors. The show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda described Hamilton as about "America then, as told by America now."

The premise of an entirely race-swapped play about the American founding fathers rapping sounds like a parody in itself on its face. It really just sounds like the premise of a satire or a comedy film of some kind, but Hamilton’s main problem is that it isn’t really a satire or a comedy, but an earnest re-imagining of history with some comedic elements to it.

If someone made a comedy movie about Martin Luther King Jr. with the catch being that MLK was played by Ryan Gosling (I guess to mock Netflix adaptions), I think the resulting product could potentially be funny (if only under the right director). But if someone made an earnest movie about MLK or some other famous historical black figure with the ‘catch’ being that the actor was white, it’d just be weirder than anything. I think that’s essentially what’s wrong with Hamilton and everything else I mention- it’s too earnest, and as such just feels bizarre. It’s the product of a time that was hyper obsessed with race and other topics that nowadays just looks weird, aged well past its critical acclaim.

The backlash against woke in media is just a backlash against Obamacore

“But Poster Tubs” you might add “Everything you described is still widely present in media!”.

I never denied that it was. Famous characters are still race-swapped in movies due to diversity quotas. Beauty standards have declined, although perhaps there is a resurgence in audiences wanting normality. Many sequels and remakes with such themes have flopped. This has led some commentators to note woke is on the decline.

I think that when people complain about “wokeness” in movies and TV, they really mean millennial culture and Obamacore. The only difference now is that while you’d be called a reactionary for disliking this kind of stuff 7 years ago, it’s now popular to act like these works were never critically acclaimed.

Millennial vs Zoomer comedy

Another way Millennial culture has vanished from society (and I’ve noticed no one really talks about this) is the complete vanishing of millennial humor from the internet during the mid 2010’s. Allow me to compare an example of two parody videos by popular YouTubers, one from 2011 and one from 2016, and one being millennial humor and the other Gen Z humor.

The above video is by College Humor (now known as Dropout) and the bottom video is from PewDiePie. Both videos were only released 5 years apart, but they might as well be from entirely different centures!

The 2011 College Humor video is a parody of a scene from the 2008 movie The Dark Knight where instead of capturing The Joker, Batman captures a Birthday clown instead. The entire execution and setup of the joke is very blatant, with no irony, and the video has aged poorly. You may also notice that the punchline of the joke is the fact that the film is parodying the movie itself, not the idea of it (Batman even directly quotes lines from the real movie after the punchline). This is fairly similar to Friedberg and Seltzer movies:

I don’t know of anyone who has laughed at this kind of humor since 2012. College Humor is (along with Funny or Die videos) a great encapsulation of millennial humor- kind of blatant, missing irony, and heavily focused on parodying the actual subject matter itself, rather than the idea of it.

The 2016 PewDiePie video, though made by millennials, is a pretty good example of older Gen Z (or late millennial) humor. It’s a parody of YouTubers flexing their “supercars”, with PewDiePie (the then biggest YouTuber on the platform) flexing a 1990’s Nissan Micra. It’s heavily ironic, and despite being blatant, does have a self-mocking tone to it. The inclusion of hard rap songs about Lamborghinis and a song about PewDiePie being a “child rapist” is surrealist, which I think differentiates it from stuff like the College Humor video. It’s mocking the idea of what its parodying, rather than what it s mocking itself.

The reason why I used these two videos as examples is because despite being released only 5 years apart, and the PewDiePie video being from 8 years ago, the latter video could be released today and no one would realize that it was from 2016, whereas the CollegeHumor video would feel dated. I think that’s the distinction I’m trying to draw at here, not blindly bash millennials and act like Gen Z culture is some form of high art (it really isn’t).

On a side note, I’d also argue that Joss Whedon/Community style comedy (aka Marvel humor) is an example of this trait from the 2010’s, but that’s an entirely different topic altogether.

The Conclusion

Every generation, decade, or era has aspects that age well and that don’t. As said above, the point of this article isn’t a bitter Gen Z-er trying to blindly bash millennials, but rather to point out how people online have recently realized that parts of pop culture in the 2010’s have not aged well, and analyze said phenomenon.

The late 1990’s and early 2000’s for instance featured a wide variety of rom-com or comedy movies that haven’t stood the test of time:

If you’re my age, you’ve probably never heard of those movies, and I don’t know many older people that claim nostalgia for any of the titles above. But all of those movies were box office hits, yet no one remembers them in 2024! I actually had to look these movies up to even remember they existed or learn about them.

You will probably see more examples of this in the future. A lot of people online (chiefly Gen Z and some millennials) have been mocking the “Skibidi Toilet” meme and the larger trend of brainrot that is popular among younger Gen Zers and members of Gen Alpha (2012-).

I’m sure that many people in middle school right now will frantically deny ever admitting liking Skibidi Toilet and watching Kai Cenat rizz gyatts on his fanum tax in 2032. But if you’re reading this right now, now’s your reminder to bookmark this post as proof to counter their arguments.