Pop stars of every generation love to reference art that came before them, but we’ve reached a critical mass with Gen Z. Addison Rae and Tate McRae are constantly paying homage to Britney Spears. Gracie Abrams is an open book about Taylor Swift’s outsize impact on her songwriting. Benson Boone’s whole schtick seems directly lifted from Freddie Mercury. But even outside the sphere of pop stars, every new trend, every fashion movement, every new “aesthetic” is copied or reworked from that of a previous decade. We’ve been consuming “Y2k style” for much longer than we lived through it. The 90s are somehow always in style, but so are the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, the 50s, and so on. Has culture folded in upon itself to an irrecoverable degree?
The hallmark of Gen Z is that they’ve never known life without the internet. They grew up with constant access to it, and even if they opt out of social media on a personal level, it shapes every inch of their world. Most of them have spent a lifetime consuming content at a breakneck pace, flooding their synapses with images and ideas. The cumulative effect of this might mean a lack of originality in the generation’s art. It’s hard to divine something new if your headspace is consumed by the work of others. When everything is immediately reflected back to us, where is the room for contributing anything new? Culture folds in on itself until everything is a refraction of a refraction, endlessly looping and meaning nothing.
Every generation takes cues from the previous one. We take what we like and leave what we don’t behind in the annals of history. But with Gen Z, no past decade has been left untouched, even the 2010s. Gen Z yearns for 2014 Tumblr even though most of them lived through it only a decade prior. The speed at which we reflect culture is exponentially growing, and soon, there will be nothing left to consume. We’re nostalgic for eras that aren’t even over yet, and this lack of original viewpoint doesn’t go unnoticed.
via @chckpeass
The influencer @chckpeass expressed a version of this viewpoint on TikTok and it resonated with a wide audience. In an answer to her rhetorical question, “Why is no one in Gen Z cool?” she posits, “You're being told this is cool, and so instead of that being something that you develop organically, it's something that you see and replicate, and someone else sees it and replicates it.” She displays an image of Gen Z pop star Addison Rae copying Lindsay Lohan’s nail art to drive the point home. The video garnered over one million views, and commenters all agreed. One commenter wrote, “Everyone’s too scared to be perceived as weird or cringe and it’s killing creativity.” Another wrote, “The cool people are not online.” Whether it's a fear of cringe or a lack of fresh ideas, the reviews are in: Gen Z aren't great at originality. The online sphere is an endless cycle of consumption and re-consumption, and for a generation that lives online, they've lost touch with their inner sense of taste.
On the other hand, artists have always referenced and paid homage in their work. Sure, Olivia Rodrigo’s alternate album art for Sour may have borrowed from Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This (and Courtney Love called her out for it), but Hole’s original album art borrows visual language from the 1976 film Carrie, by Courtney Love’s own admission. Artists have borrowed from artists since the beginning of time. There are only so many new ideas, and inspiration can take many forms. There is a difference, though, between taking something, transforming it, and folding it into your own identity, and referencing something for the sake of reference.
The key question here shouldn’t be “What is Sabrina Carpenter referencing in her new music video?” but “Why did Sabrina Carpenter choose these references, and what does it say about our current moment?” It’s obvious that the “Tears” video is a riff on The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but why did she choose that particular film as her primary source? Does the 1975 film have special relevance to a Gen Z audience? Is Carpenter recontextualizing it to say something about, for example, queerness on screen and camp aesthetics as it relates to 2025, or is it simply a pastiche? That’s for the viewer to decide.
One of the most important things about art is how it reflects our current time, and these Gen Z artists do just that. However, what are they reflecting? Is it something new and particular to their generation, or are they just spitting back out the images they’ve consumed like some kind of large language model? This is the most poignant statement that Gen Z can possibly make about itself. They’re defined by their reflection of others. But it’s hard to build a generational identity on negative space. It’s time they fill it with creativity that is distinctly their own.