The clips arrive nightly: a twenty-two-year-old in thrifted leopard print, lip-syncing "That Don't Impress Me Much" to two million strangers, none of whom were alive when it charted. The algorithm did not invent this affection, though it accelerated it. Something in the catalogue — the wink, the self-possession, the hooks engineered like suspension bridges — reads to a new generation as both camp and completely sincere.
Revivals usually flatten their subjects into aesthetic. This one has been shrewder, partly because its subject has. She duets with the kids covering her, headlines festivals booked by people who discovered her through their phones, and treats the irony with the good humour of someone who was underestimated the first time and remembers it.
The lesson for the business is about durability: songs built on craft outlive their eras and wait, patiently, for the feed to find them. The lesson for the rest of us is simpler. The twenty-year nostalgia cycle is now a five-year one, running constantly, in all directions. Nothing beloved stays buried. Man, I feel like a catalogue manager.
