"So Old School"

Sydney.

It's a rainy Wednesday night and Puma are throwing a launch party to celebrate a new shoe line at the new MTV studios here in Sydney. Never one to pass up a free drink, this Xplorer made a beeline to the beer queue. It was just another Gen Y-party, as half the room remained in perpetual pose, each camera flash followed by laughs and squeals as everyone congregates to see if their photos are "Facebook quality". 

The theme was "old school" (in the hip-hop sense) and as DMC gave way to the Beastie Boys, it occurred to me that most of the crowd weren't even born when these songs were recorded. Even more mysterious was the fact that the crowd seemed to genuinely reflect upon 'the good old days' as if growing up in suburban Sydney circa-1994 was anything remotely like Brooklyn in the 1970s and 80s. 

Truth: Pop-culture is a permanent, moving mash-up of cultures and time-periods. There is no longer a linear path to 'what's hot right now'. Instead, we live in a universe of infinite 'mainstreams' that make it hard to pin down what really is 'cool' amongst young consumers. 

I quizzed several people about their favourite songs and the response was an eclectic - if not baffling - mix of pop, rap, rock and everything inbetween. Nisha, a proud Punjabi-Australian was channeling British rapper M.I.A. with her mix-and-match assortment of early 90s Reebok Pumps with her ksubi jeans. A browse of her Nokia N-Series music library read like a 'Best of the late 90s' compilation: a little Britney, a little *NSYNC, even a Trisha Yearwood single (how embarrassment). Nisha was at the party with her "gay husband", Joshi, who lamented the lack of any Notorious B.I.G. tracks from the DJ. "I have them on my iPod, I should just go up there and tell the DJ to put my iPod in!", Joshi screamed, downtrodden that he didn't know the lyrics to the song that was playing.

Suddenly, just as Joshi thought the world was to end, the DJ spun onto "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems". Nisha flung her purse at me, took Joshi straight to the dancefloor as they joined a rabble of teens and twentysomethings delicately lip-sync the rap lyrics. Suddenly, the crowd became a sea of digital camera flashes as the second genre of Facebook photos ('the mid-dancing, two-fingers in a v-shape pose') started to take shape. 

Over the course of a few hours, I had seen a phalanx of digital products being used (digital camera, mobile phones, Bluetooth devices... even the DJ was working off a pre-mixed iTunes playlist on his MacBook Pro), but it was all incidental to the partygoers. As far as Nisha and Joshi were concerned, they had photos and videos that would tell the story of their night. Joshi would forget about the songs he didn't like, Nisha would forget about the fact that a girl spilled raspberry vodka on her expensive jeans. What they would keep in mind are the hot photos they took of each other and the good time they had at the MTV party their friends couldn't go to.

Opportunity: Consumers - especially those born after 1985 - are using digital products to create and augment their self-identity. Allow consumers to tell the story they want to tell about themselves. Let them invent and re-invent themselves in the digital space.