Some thoughts on nostalgia in art/culture, especially music
Of course nostalgia is weaponized to sell you back your youth and defang any revolutionary aspects of your chosen counterculture, everyone gets this by now.
But we also live in a temporally flattened aesthetic environment, meaning all prior eras of art exist equally in the present through digital mediation, outside of commercial retro marketing cycles. So your youth genres sit as part of an enormous network in aesthetic space
🧵
(fwiw any gen X or older person trying to understand younger people's taste needs to think about what it's like growing up in that space)
Sturgeon's Law - one of the Iron Laws of the universe - states that 90% of everything is crap. The corollary is that 10% is good! Taking the numbers loosely and applying them to genres that means there's good shit in every era and genre, including your nostalgia genres. So it's valid to enjoy that stuff as long as it's not the only thing you enjoy. 🧵
The main thing a nostalgia relation to a given aesthetic or style does is excuse or allow enjoyment of kitsch and camp, as part of a healthy relationship to your own younger self. Let's face it: we were all ridiculous when young, not that we aren't now, but we really were then, and we liked some cheesy shit. The ironic, self aware form of nostalgia lets you enjoy that material in earnest while also seeing it for what it is, and laughing at yourself and parts of your own taste and history 🧵
The key, obviously, as always, is the ever-ephemeral "authenticity." Are you enjoying a thing because it brings you joy or because it's being sold and marketed to you as a proxy for your youth, a shibboleth of belongingness to something that probably doesn't exist anymore? But that same question goes for everything now. In practical terms I think it comes down to whether you're still open to new art, whether newly created or new to you older material. If so, you're probably fine
FWIW, this came out of me wondering why it's socially acceptable for a young person who is exploring that flattened, always-on network of existing music to hit on, say, late 70s E-funk, 80s goth-pop, early psytrance or whatever, but someone who grew up on that music is supposed to be done with it. The key distinction is that that younger person probably enjoys that as part of a broader (tho sometimes shallower) set of preferences and not exclusively - I'm sure there are exceptions tho
@mrcompletely I feel like one aspect of why it’s socially acceptable for young people to like ‘bad’ music (regardless of its newness in real world terms) because it’s all new to them, the bubblegum hasn’t lost its flavor yet if you will.
@richkny that's definitely valid, and that's how I landed on that relation to cheesiness/camp/kitsch as being the main characteristic of nostalgic enjoyment. It extends that youthful allowance for absurdity of that kind by reconnecting you to your own youth.
@mrcompletely Interesting, I never thought of it that way, just a more general sense of nostalgia for events / memories from my life, but you’re right, when I throw on some shitty music I liked in the past, there’s definitely a major element of just appreciating the absurdity.
@mrcompletely now i’m trying to imagine the kind of person who only listens to one hyperspecific genre of music from before they were born, throughout their entire life
@exchgr I know a guy in his early 30s who only listens to electro-swing and actual swing jazz, so that's half there...oh...and I def have met young dub/reggae heads who are really only into roots shit...but most of the young fans of old genres are in genres where there is new material coming out too (bluegrass, jazz, jambands/Deadheads etc) so there is something of their generation to connect to even if the genre is basically "old"
@exchgr I am fortunate to have a lot of millennial friends & my kid is a music head zoomer...I see a lot of ppl search from genre to genre for things they like, obsess on some of them exclusively for a bit, then settle back into a broader taste with that new thing as part of the mix...my kid mostly listens to new music but has been thru deep Madonna, Fiona Apple and Joni Mitchell phases & still has them all in the mix. FWIW this basically how I relate too: search, find, obsess/learn, repeat
@exchgr I think it's a beautiful and powerful way to relate to art/cultural history and more confirmation that the 10% of Gen X that is my true cultural cohort (neophilic early internet adopters alienated the from Reagan era mainstream) is really the leading edge of a slowly building cultural shift. That is to say my little group & I feel like we fit more with subsequent generations than our own, much less previous ones. We also grew up under looming apocalypses, another similarity
@exchgr some of them were, that's true. Again, the leading edge, I think in that group an even smaller percentage but out of a much larger total cohort. I was lucky to be raised by and around those kinds of boomers, most of whom never did sell out, and I have a lot of respect for them. They basically took the "choose your own adventure" style of life the beats & such pioneered and and made it much more the norm compared to living entirely within socially/family directed constraints
@exchgr boomers as a whole catch a lot of shit and in some ways it's deserved but the exceptions are such cool people, so deeply and profoundly awesome, that the generalizations & stereotypes are really unfair to them. Being a true free thinker coming out of the 50s sounds like no joke. Most of their leaders got straight up murdered! They really did move things forward a lot
@mrcompletely that’s really awesome. i wasn’t as lucky, although i have managed to drag some family members towards the left over the years. others, not so much
@exchgr my family is split, my mom and her people are all radical left, they were sixties activists, civil rights marchers in the south, stepdad was a card carrying communist etc. I grew up in the seventies in the back to the land movement & around those kinds of people, politically active counter culture freaks. It was far from a perfect upbringing but it did have huge advantages. Being pro queer, feminist, antiracist, suspicious of cops and all forms of power - that's all held up pretty well
@exchgr I have plenty of right wing and conservative family but my mom taught me early on that they were just backwards and we needed to either not talk about some stuff or be ready for a long running argument lol
@mrcompletely I'm GenX and my clique HATED the 80s. The production techniques, the clothes, Ronald Reagan. Still don't like it. Millennials started embracing that era. They didn't have to live through it.
@noirlover yeah for the most part my friends and were in that 10% that is now thought of as emblematically Gen X even though we were a minority. My 80s music nostalgia is mostly punk, metal and early rap, plus some bands like Talking Heads that have held up, and I always dug Prince and have never wavered there. Mainstream MTV pop was anathema to me & I still despise a lot of it. But like the Clash, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, plus Iron Maiden & similar, that's the stuff I dug at 13-15
@mrcompletely There's something about 80s music that resonates with millennials. Maybe similarly there was something about the 60s and 70s that sounded good to us in the 90s (still does). We had boomer parents record collections to roll j's on. They have Spotify and no cultural fault lines. Disliking 80s era of production...puzzled how Toto's Africa became a millennial anthem. Maybe the 2010s tech boom referenced 80s consumerism / careerism. Or things just go in cycles.
Add comment