A lot of nostalgia is bullshit. Dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, we imagine the times that came before as being simpler: problems were more manageable or food was better tasting or whatever. We hearken back to when we were children, when our parents were children, smear some Vaseline on the lens and gaze wistfully into a lost epoch when gas was cheap, love was true and the world was more pure.
It's harmless escapism, of course. The problems of the past can seem more manageable largely because we already know or don't need to care how it all worked out in the end.
One of the most common types of nostalgia among music fans is the notion that the music you listened to around the time you came of age was somehow the most important music ever made in the history of the world, and that nothing that came before or since can hold a candle to the artists who shone a light into your soul and sang about your pain and your triumphs in a way that helped you form your identity.
As a dj who traffics in nostalgia—my Rock Per Annum sets on Wednesday being the largest and most concrete manifestation—it's not my job to tell anyone they are wrong. In fact, where musical nostalgia is concerned, I tend to think the opposite is true: everyone is correct. Given someone with a remotely similar taste in music and the right mindset, I can totally hear how the music of someone else's formation is unique to them and special in a way that no other music could ever be.
Today, I'll be hosting a Sock Hop at Velvet from 3-7, playing nearly a hundred songs from the early rock era before the Beatles hopped a flight and changed everything. This is music from long before I was born, and yet I can hear within it something that I cannot hear in the music of later periods.
And I don't just mean the saxophone.
Maybe it's just because the music of the late 50s and early 60s was unapologetically aimed at teenagers, or maybe it's some sort of Baby Boomer osmosis due to exposure through other media my whole life, but the music of that era seems to have a certain purity. The lyrics are straightforward, devoid of irony and cynicism and often kind of dumb, but all these artists seemed to want to do was make people feel good (or make people feel good about feeling bad) and that's a pretty fun way to spend an afternoon.
I hope you'll join me.
Pffttt. Most of the shit that came out in the 90's was pretty mediocre now that I think about it, compared with the amazing innovation of the 80's and 70's punk scene. - Aleksei
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