So even before I've written this, as you can see above I've yet to settle with a title, so this may well be a chain of thought that I won't communicate well, or which won't really resonate with anyone...but here goes.
There's a perception out there that the Entertainment Industry has become increasingly reliant on old names and old brands. Whether or not that's strictly true, for that and other reasons I think it's fair to say "Nostalgia" as a concept has really been under the microscope over the past 10 years or so. Is it good, is it bad, is it OK in moderation and what exactly is it? I think the current understanding of the term is that nostalgia is people in someway reliving or revisiting their own past, particularly their childhood, teen or maybe very early adult years. I think it goes beyond that and that a lot of Nostalgia can be for a time or place that you didn't live through, tourism in the foreign land that is the past. Some of this might be experiences that were happening just out of your view at the time; say finally buying that PS1 that failed the coin flip with the N64, or finally watching that film you remember all the TV spots for. But I think a lot of it can simply be a fascination with a time you didn't live through. I don't think you need to necessarily think you would have been happier living through the era or that it was a "better" time exactly, just that there was something there that was interesting.
But at a certain point, if you were enough into your own nostalgia, and enough time passes do you start to develop a nostalgia...for your own nostalgia?
I'll talk about where I've been feeling it recently. In my core teen years (I would say peaking when I was 15, in 2002) I got really into 80s pop, in particular British "Electro/Synth Pop" and the related New Romantic movement of the very early part of the decade, but I was kind of fascinated by the whole package really. If it could have appeared on the first dozen or so Now! That's What I Call Music albums or the less well remembered (though apparently still going?) Hits Album series, there's a good chance I'd be interested even if I wouldn't necessarily think it was great. I've never lost my fascination with a lot of this music really, and over the last 15 years with a lot of reunions and album anniversaries and such I've even seen a lot of these bands live. But I've been revisiting a lot of it recently and when listening to Talk Talk's first album and looking at its borderline self-parody very New Romantic era album sleeve I was hit with a palpable sense of, well, there's no other word for it, nostalgia for how this kind of music and the associated imagery made me feel when I was a teenager, that particular kind of relationship many would say you can only have with music when you're a teenager. It was surely no different from how someone else my age would feel about an album that was released in 2002 that they listened to regularly at the time. And now about as much and in some case more time has passed since my teen years and when this music was actually new, so it’s sometimes easy for me to almost trick myself into think I really did live through it’s release…but of course I didn’t. Still in its own way 2002 was as distinct an era from now as it was from the early-mid 80s, or at least the way I accessed music was. If I were 15 now, as long as I had easy access to YouTube, I could devour a band’s entire catalogue in a quiet weekend or in the background over a few nights of homework.. In 2002, it was very different, we were still on dial up internet (semi-related trivia note; the modem dial up sound can be heard in George Michael’s not particularly SFW 2002 single Freeek), I would read about albums and songs with no way of being able to immediately hear them. I would catch glimpses on retrospective programmes, episodes of Top of the Pops 2 (the “archive clips” version of the show that was like the UK’s American Bandstand), other than that, and some hand me downs from my family, it was a matter of finding this stuff for myself. CDs from the bargain bins and resale shops, cassette tapes from outdoor and indoor markets, pre-revival vinyl from Charity Shops/Thrift Stores, compilation VHS tapes from all of the above and shops that were transitioning to DVD. There’s a lot to be said for being able to access something as soon as you heard it, and of course I was a bit spoiled by being able to buy a dozen or whatever cassettes or CDs for the price a new one would have cost, but it could also be said that having to wait and dig a little did make me appreciate this stuff a little more.
In some threads recently (like The 13 Deaths of Cartoon Network) we’ve been talking a bit about how Golden Age Cartoons used to be discussed online, this too has been “double layered nostalgia” for me.
There is also a wider cultural representation of this phenomenon. Something like Star Wars was already kind of nostalgic to begin with, being a throwback to 1930s and 40s serials, which wouldn’t have been new when many of the primary creative architects (including George Lucas) saw them as kids. So the current revival of Star Wars is revival of a revival of a revival; and that’s the short version!
At any rate... has anyone else experienced the sensation of remembering the good old days when they discovered the good old days?
There's a perception out there that the Entertainment Industry has become increasingly reliant on old names and old brands. Whether or not that's strictly true, for that and other reasons I think it's fair to say "Nostalgia" as a concept has really been under the microscope over the past 10 years or so. Is it good, is it bad, is it OK in moderation and what exactly is it? I think the current understanding of the term is that nostalgia is people in someway reliving or revisiting their own past, particularly their childhood, teen or maybe very early adult years. I think it goes beyond that and that a lot of Nostalgia can be for a time or place that you didn't live through, tourism in the foreign land that is the past. Some of this might be experiences that were happening just out of your view at the time; say finally buying that PS1 that failed the coin flip with the N64, or finally watching that film you remember all the TV spots for. But I think a lot of it can simply be a fascination with a time you didn't live through. I don't think you need to necessarily think you would have been happier living through the era or that it was a "better" time exactly, just that there was something there that was interesting.
But at a certain point, if you were enough into your own nostalgia, and enough time passes do you start to develop a nostalgia...for your own nostalgia?
I'll talk about where I've been feeling it recently. In my core teen years (I would say peaking when I was 15, in 2002) I got really into 80s pop, in particular British "Electro/Synth Pop" and the related New Romantic movement of the very early part of the decade, but I was kind of fascinated by the whole package really. If it could have appeared on the first dozen or so Now! That's What I Call Music albums or the less well remembered (though apparently still going?) Hits Album series, there's a good chance I'd be interested even if I wouldn't necessarily think it was great. I've never lost my fascination with a lot of this music really, and over the last 15 years with a lot of reunions and album anniversaries and such I've even seen a lot of these bands live. But I've been revisiting a lot of it recently and when listening to Talk Talk's first album and looking at its borderline self-parody very New Romantic era album sleeve I was hit with a palpable sense of, well, there's no other word for it, nostalgia for how this kind of music and the associated imagery made me feel when I was a teenager, that particular kind of relationship many would say you can only have with music when you're a teenager. It was surely no different from how someone else my age would feel about an album that was released in 2002 that they listened to regularly at the time. And now about as much and in some case more time has passed since my teen years and when this music was actually new, so it’s sometimes easy for me to almost trick myself into think I really did live through it’s release…but of course I didn’t. Still in its own way 2002 was as distinct an era from now as it was from the early-mid 80s, or at least the way I accessed music was. If I were 15 now, as long as I had easy access to YouTube, I could devour a band’s entire catalogue in a quiet weekend or in the background over a few nights of homework.. In 2002, it was very different, we were still on dial up internet (semi-related trivia note; the modem dial up sound can be heard in George Michael’s not particularly SFW 2002 single Freeek), I would read about albums and songs with no way of being able to immediately hear them. I would catch glimpses on retrospective programmes, episodes of Top of the Pops 2 (the “archive clips” version of the show that was like the UK’s American Bandstand), other than that, and some hand me downs from my family, it was a matter of finding this stuff for myself. CDs from the bargain bins and resale shops, cassette tapes from outdoor and indoor markets, pre-revival vinyl from Charity Shops/Thrift Stores, compilation VHS tapes from all of the above and shops that were transitioning to DVD. There’s a lot to be said for being able to access something as soon as you heard it, and of course I was a bit spoiled by being able to buy a dozen or whatever cassettes or CDs for the price a new one would have cost, but it could also be said that having to wait and dig a little did make me appreciate this stuff a little more.
In some threads recently (like The 13 Deaths of Cartoon Network) we’ve been talking a bit about how Golden Age Cartoons used to be discussed online, this too has been “double layered nostalgia” for me.
There is also a wider cultural representation of this phenomenon. Something like Star Wars was already kind of nostalgic to begin with, being a throwback to 1930s and 40s serials, which wouldn’t have been new when many of the primary creative architects (including George Lucas) saw them as kids. So the current revival of Star Wars is revival of a revival of a revival; and that’s the short version!
At any rate... has anyone else experienced the sensation of remembering the good old days when they discovered the good old days?
