Well, after feeling nostalgic for 2005, I thought that I’d talk about the year. For context, I was about sixteen or seventeen back then and was living in southern England.
One of the first things that I will say is that this is very much nostalgia rather than history. 2005 was probably one of the last years when the world seemed “smaller” or “less connected”. The internet was obviously a thing – and the very first Youtube video was posted in April 2005 – but I didn’t even hear about Youtube until autumn 2006.
And this sort of thing wasn’t exactly uncommon back then. Whilst I listened to some contemporary music – such as Judas Priest’s amazing 2005 album “Angel Of Retribution” (and I actually saw them in concert in London back then) and a few random indie bands I found on a site called “Purevolume” – whilst I watched a few contemporary movies at the cinema and whilst I read a few relatively contemporary novels (like a couple of Dan Brown’s thriller novels from earlier in the 2000s), I mostly looked at older media back then. This was the age of physical media, and this meant that second-hand books, videos, CDs etc… were often cheaper than new ones.
One of the interesting things about 2005 was, with less of the comparison culture of modern social media (Twitter wouldn’t exist until 2006, and Facebook would only be opened to the public in 2006…), older media didn’t seem that “old”. Like, yes, you could tell that it was written or made decades ago but it didn’t matter as much. It still felt “new” to you.
If a DVD or VHS tape of a film or an old paperback book that you found in a charity shop was interesting, then you just enjoyed it. There was no “showing it off on social media”. The world seemed smaller then, but that privacy also gave you more of a chance to learn about your own sensibilities and find things that you enjoy without worrying about the opinions of others or what was “trendy”.
There was more serendipity back then as well. Whilst online shopping was a thing, you were more likely to discover interesting new things by wandering into physical shops and stumbling across something interesting which you’d either never heard of before or had only vaguely heard of before. In Britain, “Wetherspoons” was a thing back then too, but more traditional pubs were a bit more common.
The old sat alongside the new a lot more comfortably in 2005 than it does in this trendy hyper-connected modern world.
And this is probably why a lot of my personal nostalgia for 2005 is way older. It’s “Sherlock Holmes” books, it’s “Blade Runner” (1982), it’s “Quake” (1996), it’s a Deep Purple tribute band I saw etc… Because this was still an age where, whilst your immediate circle of friends might have also been interested in the things you enjoyed, random strangers didn’t really care. The world felt smaller back then.
Mobile phones were certainly a thing back then – I had a Nokia 1100 – and, yes, people back then were still using “low-end” phones like this. Ones with “Snake” and Game Boy-style LCD screens. Ones where “text messaging” was still an exciting new feature, and you had to type out your messages in abbreviated telegraphese on a numerical keypad. Portable entertainment often required multiple devices, with MP3 players being well-established enough that you could get cheap “USB stick”-style off-brand ones if you couldn’t afford an iPod.
Cinemas also thrived back then, and people used to visit them more regularly. Whilst I can’t remember all the films I saw at the cinema back then, they included “The War Of The Worlds”, “Constantine”, “The Ring Two”, “The Dukes Of Hazzard” and “Saw II” (the only “18 rated” film I managed to see at the cinema under-age).
Yes, I have more cinema nostalgia for 2002-2004 than for 2005, but cinemas were definitely more of a thing back then. And they had a better variety of movies as well since – whilst superhero films existed back then – they wouldn’t even start to become an all-consuming ultra-popular genre until about 2008-9 at the earliest.
As for fashions, the most uniquely “2005” one I remember was that people started wearing “boho chic” tiered skirts (like the ones in this photo from 2006) and, of course, there was more goth and emo fashion back then – people with hair swept over their eyes, people wearing baggy hoodies etc…
People – including me – still used 56k internet back then, even though broadband was becoming more popular. The Playstation 2 was still just about a contemporary games console and most towns had shops that sold second-hand games for it. There were still physical magazines about videogames, often also containing demo discs as well.
But, most of all – like a lot of my memories of individual years – my nostalgia about 2005 is more of a mood. It’s the overall sense of the year – one of paperback books, bright summer days paired with an old gloominess, heavy metal music. It’s both “cringe” and also weirdly relaxing at the same time. It’s an entire context, which is difficult to sum up in words. If it was a colour, it would be a sort of red-orange. It’s weird to think that it’s almost two decades ago, because I can still remember it so vividly.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting