From The Editor: What’s Old Is New Again

In this issue, we feature not one but two events that combine opera and drag. I’ll admit: before reading these stories, I had not spent much time considering going to the opera. Isn’t opera just musical theater but louder and harder to understand?

However, the parallels drawn between opera and drag by An Opera Theater’s Divas and Drag and Minnesota Opera’s Glam Jam opened my eyes. The bravado and drama that make opera unique aren’t stuffy and old-fashioned, as the popular conception of opera dictates — they’re some of the very same qualities I enjoy most about drag.

Following this realization, the dots began to connect themselves in my head. The rap music I grew up listening to isn’t just inspired by jazz and soul; it is made by recycling and reimagining snippets from those classic records. The more I go back and listen to them, the more I enjoy them just as much or more than the contemporary music they’ve inspired.

Physical media is cool again. Decades-old fashion trends return like they never left. So many of our popular stories in media are ones we’ve been telling ourselves for thousands of years, updated for modern audiences with more familiar places and faces.

I’m sure you’re all well aware of these trend cycles. However, I’m less sure many of you think of opera as trendy and cool.

I’m now trying to find more things from the past that aren’t trending, but are more relevant to our modern lives than I thought. Do I have any discoveries to report? No, but I’ll keep my eyes open. If you catch me at a future First Thursday dressed like a Golden Age pirate, you know how it happened.

So, if you’ve got the time to do some historical research (scroll through Pinterest or hit the shuffle button on Wikipedia), consider making something old your new thing. Or, maybe, your new new thing isn’t as new as you thought. Time is, after all, a flat circle.