Eve is here. Marketing guru Jared Horst is back! Today, he opines about how the near lack of cultural novelty is getting worse, not only on the front lines of retreading Hollywood film franchises, but also in popular music. And now President Trump wants to bring back the tumultuous 1890s, RFK Jr. is out to restore the world to what it was before mass vaccination, and Pete Hegseth longs for the free-spirited Buccaneer days. Wear a long morning jacket and corset.
A weekly commentary on the impact branding has on our lives from Jared Holst, author of Brands Mean a Lot. Each week, he examines the contradictions in the way politics, products and pop culture are branded to us, and provides insight into what’s actually being said. You can follow Jared on Twitter @jarholst. Originally published in Brands Mean a Lot
Two weeks ago, I watched Avatar: Fire and Ash in glorious 3D. Some may say the Avatar movies are big, blue and bold. Others: Boring, mediocre, and blue. No matter where you land on the alliterative Avatar spectrum, you’d be hard-pressed to convince anyone that the film’s plot is particularly innovative. A combination of some of our favorite Natives vs. Settlers movies like Braveheart, Fern Gully, and Dances with Wolves, what this film lacks in innovative plotlines it more than makes up for in three-dimensional visuals that take us to Pandora, a fictional habitable exomoon in the series’ Alpha Centauri star system.
As of this writing, Fire and Ash is the top-grossing movie of 2026. Say what you will about its derivative plot, but Avatar, the first film in the series, is the only movie since 2000 to top the box office that wasn’t born from a sequel or existing intellectual property.
Proof: Highest-grossing domestic film of the year since 2000. Source: boxofficemojo.com
It’s not just movies. In 2024, “catalog” tracks (so called because they are older than 18 months) command a 76% share of the streaming market. To put it another way, less than a quarter of streams in the U.S. are considered “new” music. 76% is a 3.3% year-over-year increase from 2023. Personally, I’ve seen a huge resurgence in the popularity of Deftones, one of my favorite bands. Deftones formed in 1988 and earned their first platinum album with 1997’s Around the Fur. As of this writing, the album is at number 3 on Billboard’s Top Hard Rock Albums chart.
Try to guess which one I am.
Music and movies aren’t the be-all and end-all of culture, but they definitely make up the top billing in terms of eyeballs and dollars. When I think about where they’re going, culturally it seems like we’re losing interest in trying new things, whether it’s making or consuming.
Is it really any surprise, then, that “Make America Great Again,” a political movement whose idea is that the best version of America is already here, is so popular? Many of the movement’s attempts to regress have been successful, including abortion bans, deregulation, and quasi-Gestapo roundups of people deemed to be undesirable minorities. All of these things have already happened at some point in America’s past, albeit within the last century.
What we are witnessing now is that Trump’s desire for Greenland turns the clock back to the annexation of Hawaii just before the turn of the 20th century. This was the last time the United States invaded and annexed territory to become part of the United States. It should be mentioned that similar territorial gains were made in the Philippines and Cuba during the same period, but neither became part of the United States.
The most recent historical analogy for Trump’s desire for Greenland is the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Both Greenland and the Louisiana Purchase involved land-hungry presidents who sought vast territories primarily because of their size and secondly because of their natural resources. For each population, there are significant differences. Greenland had the right to democratic self-determination, a privilege that the settlers and natives who lived in the Louisiana Purchase did not have.
“No man steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” —Heraclitus
This distinction is important because it moves the clock back even further and, in some cases, to an era outside of American history. A time when national leaders took things away simply because they wanted to and could. And some may point out that the founding of this country was such an operation, one instigated by dusty old England.
Understanding America’s lack of historical parallels, or even modern democratic parallels, highlights how regressive Trump’s aspirations for Greenland really are. This despicable atrocity, and the support for it both within and outside of government, shows how much of an accelerating regression is occurring across American cultural and political thinking.
The reason this type of ego-driven land grab hasn’t happened much over the past 100 years is because it requires a certain amount of isolation to succeed. Slower communication and travel, reliance on trade, and lack of global political norms meant that invasions were less impactful and narrower in scope. This makes even more sense as the United States, through the efforts of the Trump administration, moves further away from the world stage and focuses on regional outrages such as the Maduro kidnapping and the willful bombing of sailors in Latin America.
I doubt we’ll all be listening to the music of Mozart and his contemporaries in unison any time soon, or that books will reclaim the throne of television, but as much as it feels like history is moving faster than ever, I suspect it’s slowing down in many ways. No matter where this goes, I’ll continue to listen to Deftones.
