PinkPantheress’ unreal Britain

The year is 2026, and we are stuck inside a Rubik’s cube. Its colours and shapes are redolent of a mid-2000s Big Brother house, which is all the better because Davina McCall is actually there, and in gigantic form. This is not a strange experiment from the final days of television; it is a music video for “Girl Like Me”, the final single from PinkPantheress’ Britain-themed mixtape, Fancy That. The song features two samples from turn-of-the-millennium electronic outfit Basement Jaxx, as well as sound effects from a Yamaha keyboard that went on the market in 1998. One of the video’s CGI-generated sets comes from a 2009 music video by cult J-pop group Perfume. Everything else is from Britain. But it is a very specific Britain – one that announced itself in the mid-60s, shuddered to life during the Blair premiership and died, painfully, with the austerity of the coalition government. The actors are dressed like walk-ons from an early series of E4’s Skins. The bouncy animations look like something from an early E4 ident. The sets are littered with twee, optimistic signifiers of Englishness, like Mini Coopers, Buckingham Palace footsoldiers and lawn tennis.

For PinkPantheress – real name Victoria Beverley Walker – almost none of this is an expression of real-life nostalgia. The singer-producer is 25, which places her soundly out of reach of the Skins era but means she came of age within a major revival for 2000s fashion and music. The rest of the mixtape is a similar exercise in almost-historical pastiche. It features a USB stick’s worth of barrel-aged samples, a Sugababes cameo, an entire Vivienne Westwood wardrobe, and several nods to Lily Allen’s 2008 video for “The Fear”. The first of two music videos for hit song “Stateside” was seemingly shot, compressed and upscaled again, as if to approximate the look of a real turn-of-the-century artefact uploaded to the depths of YouTube.

Walker’s historical approach might have angered the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who wrote gloomily in 2014 of the “strange simultaneity” of her favourite era. Time wasn’t passing the way he remembered it. His youth featured regular “mutations of popular music,” but the 2000s brought an overload of formal nostalgia. Amy Winehouse hovered between 2006 and the 1960s; the Arctic Monkeys were new on the scene and somehow aesthetically stranded in the 1980s. This glut of old forms was so prevalent as to be almost unnoticeable. Fisher quoted Derrida, who was quoting Hamlet: cultural time was out of joint. It had “folded back on itself.”

“It doesn’t feel,” he said, “as if the 21st century has started yet.”

He wondered why. Perhaps neoliberal capitalism, with its gig economy and shrunken welfare state, meant nobody had the time or energy to think of anything new. Perhaps the associated leap in mass communication had sped everything up to the point of a counterintuitive cultural inertia. He went back to Derrida, who had piloted a concept called hauntology. “It could be…” said Fisher, “…that there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.” Instead, we were surrounded by the ghostly reminders of realities we could have had, if not for globalised capitalism, surveillance and the internet. Fisher thought he could see them manifest in horror films like The Shining, and in electronic acts like Burial, whose work was characterised by heavy sampling and static.

Pop’s eventual answer to the hauntology concept was Lana Del Rey, who spent the 2010s building a young female audience around a wavery idea of historical America. A varying corpus of sounds, symbols and namedrops placed her songs and videos firmly anywhere between 1945 and 1979. Her hipster contemporaries were waging an aesthetic revolution, taking the place and time out of vinyl, blackboards, exposed bulbs and taxidermy. A single, sanitised version of midcentury modernism spread to coffee shops and coworking spaces all around the world. Del Rey overcompensated, submerging viewers and listeners in waves of abstract historical texture. Her music featured the grit of the 1970s without the economic anxiety, the strings and reverb of the 1960s without the racial anxiety, and the apparent romance of an abusive relationship without the ramifications for personal safety. It was a version of the sensual past with almost no people in it apart from her, and she was mysterious and subjective enough to be a ghost herself.

Del Rey’s fans say her music makes them nostalgic for things that have not happened. Ironically, a decade later, nostalgia no longer seems to work the same way. Fisher might have been interested in “Girl Like Me”, with its nostalgia-as-puzzle-cube metaphor and its prominent samples. But the larger PinkPantheress project sits contrary to Fisher’s thesis. The Blair-Brown-Cameron period manifests in her work as a discrete aesthetic entity, subject to the same quotation and evocation as any span of the 20th century. It seems Fisher was living in a graspable present, although one only graspable 20 years later.

Walker’s Gen Z listeners look to her corpus for sunny escapism. It’s a pre-Brexit utopia, with a sense of cultural flourishing and central patriotic spirit that was arguably last on display during the 2012 Olympics. “Britain if everyone voted Green yesterday,” wrote one X user above a repost of the “Girl Like Me” video. The urge makes sense: in a second display of post-Fisher irony, everything else in our culture appears to point to the terminally depressive 1970s. Poverty and crime dominate the news cycle. Women, and their eyebrows, are getting thinner. Dance music and art-rock are making simultaneous comebacks. We even have the default “look” of the 1970s; a glut of brutalist music videos feature grain, wood panelling, wall-to-wall carpeting, dismal colour palettes and surreal bits of blocking that might have come from the period’s European arthouse circles.

The actual 1960s and 1970s were preoccupied by camp culture, which manifested as a mass obsession with exaggerated personae. In that era, the cult focus was on a semi-serious revival of larger-than-life Classic Hollywood actresses, whose public identities were formed decades earlier by dedicated publicity departments, scriptwriters and stylists. The whole thing might be contra-Fisher; with persona-worship comes a worship of hierarchy and procession, and with this comes a new conceptualisation of historical time.

Today’s film industry is too insecure, and too obsessed with versatility, to support a similar effort. Our equivalent moment is dominated by pop stars. The “pop queen” and “pop princess” epithets have become deadly serious, with successful legacy acts granted proverbial “daughters.” To stake a claim to fame in 2026, one must solidify a constant persona. Nostalgia is an easy way in. Swedish pop star Zara Larsson built a sustainable career out of démodé Jess Glynne-isms in the 2010s, making the kind of grindingly inoffensive music you might hear in an ad for package holidays. But she only rocketed to international fame last year after remaking herself in the two-dimensional but remarkably consistent image of a 2000s fashion illustration. At the same time, PinkPantheress stopped being a TikTok-era bedroom producer and became a girl in Blair’s Britain, or, in Sontagian terms, a “girl” in “Blair’s Britain.”

Walker and Larsson appear together in a music video for their “Stateside” collaboration, which is really an exercise in flaunting the stability of a pop persona. Each figure gets her own film set; Walker’s features a shelf of commemorative coronation-style crockery bearing her own face, which more or less summarises the whole mixtape. Her Anglophilia is something to show off to American onlookers the way you might show off a kitschy antique. Her version of British history is structured along the lines of her own camp inheritance, with Davina McCall, Lily Allen and the Sugababes acting as influential forces. The reality of Blairite optimism is less important than her lineage in the pop superstructure, which stretches far past Blair and into the previous century. We will be able to live in it until the cultural moment ends. Then the ghosts will come back.

[Further reading: Olivia Dean’s definition of love]