March 5, 2024

I had a dream I turned on the classic rock radio station and heard a song I never heard before. I woke up thinking how boring nostalgia was. As much as I love a good Steve Miller Band single from 50 years ago, there has to be something more to life. Thanks to my 9-year old Swiftie daughter, the car radio is now locked into the Top 40 station. Z100! I know Steve Miller and his Jet Airliner are still there, but we’re in a droptop ride with SZA today.

I’ve now entered the age where I’m surrounded by peers, Baby Boomers and increasingly crotchety Gen Xers, complaining about “kids today” and how much better things were back in the day, music and values and the price of gas. It’s endlessly annoying. Just because Van Halen made “totally awesome” music in 1980, doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of bands making great music now. (I’m writing this as I’m playing the new Bleachers record.) But I’m regularly being beaten over the head by Grumpy Old Men who don’t think any music released this century is worth a damn. They desperately want the world be like it was when they were young and you could ride in the back of a pick-up truck to the drive-in.

Let’s first deal with three important facts.

FACT 1: I love when I read old timers complain that youth today have no morals or respect or blah, blah, blah. They forget that their parents’ generation said the same thing about them. Kids have never had any goddamn respect. Socrates, over 2400 years ago said much the same thing. “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” They might be assholes half the time, but the kids are alright. 

FACT 2: Rock and roll was created in the 1950s for one specific reason, to annoy your parents. The noise of youth creates space for young people separate themselves from adult society. Adults thought Elvis was noise in the 1950s, with his gyrating hips and “negro intonations.” Every year kids have had something to push their parents back, including Hendrix (1960s), Kiss (1970s), Run DMC (1980s), Nirvana (1990s), Eminem (2000s), Beyoncé (2010s), and Doja Cat (now). I remember my father endlessly perplexed at why I preferred Led Zeppelin to Ricky Nelson. “That’s not music,” was the constant refrain. “I hope I die before I get old,” I’d reply. I remember elders thinking Van Halen was absolute garbage when they came out. (I saw them get booed when they opened for Black Sabbath in 1978.) Now grandma and grandpa are in a heated Sammy Hagar versus David Lee Roth debate.

FACT 3: The past always looks great through the rear view mirror, but the past was always a mixed bag. Yeah, it was fun to ride around in the back of a pick-up truck, but a bunch of kids fell out and died. Yeah, there were some great songs back then but there were some super shitty ones, too. Does anyone really miss “Disco Duck”? Yeah, it was fun to play in the streets with your pals, but often you were playing “Smear the Queer.” Whenever someone waxes on and on about the dreamlike good old days, I flash to me holding the TV antenna in just the right position so I could watch the Watergate hearings on one of the three channels we got, while also trying to manage the horizontal hold. I’ll take my Roku, thank you.

Nostalgia was originally defined as a sickness in the 1680s to describe Swiss mercenaries who couldn’t fight because the longed for home. During the American Civil War, nostalgia was seen as a problematic form a depression, melancholia to be cured so the soldiers could wage war. It’s root as a mental disability is not lost on the lives of those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, endlessly caught in loops of their past, unable to engage in the present world in a meaningful way. “If I could just go back to when I was happy.” Odds are you weren’t as happy as you imagine.

There’s a dangerous political aspect to all this hyper-nostalgia, this over romanticizing of the past. It’s the impetus behind all forms of fascism, from Hitler’s mythologizing of Germany’s past or Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. For Trump’s crowd it’s the belief that America was great BEFORE all the various civil rights movements upset the “natural” authority of straight white cis-gender men. The America before pronouns, diversity trainings, and black lives mattering. Make America Jim Crow Again. It’s not surprising that Trump has leaned heavily on 20th century music artists to take his MAGA crowd back to the GOD (Good Old Days). It’s encouraging that dozens of these artists (or their estates) have petitioned Trump to stop using their music, including Aerosmith, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eddy Grant, Elton John, the Village People (!), Everlast, Guns N Roses, Isaac Hayes, The Smiths, Leonard Cohen, Linkin Park, Neil Young, Ozzy Osbourne, Phil Collins, Prince, Queen, R.E.M., The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, and even Nickelback. Just this week, the estate of Sinead O’Connor asked Trump to stop using her version of “Nothing Compares to You.” Fascism requires nostalgia but they are not doing it with Nickelback!

Two Important Points

Number 1: I get nostalgia. When we are young, and the world is in front us, every new experience is massively vibrant, the first kiss, the first time listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Those experiences and their soundtrack are woven into our very construction, like the iron beams that hold up the Empire State Building. Sitting in a smoke field movie theater watching The Empire Strike Back or falling to sleep to Steely Dan on the FM headphones has been fused into our DNA. As we age, and more of our life is behind us instead of in front of us, we start to lean on those iron beams. The Empire State Building, built 93 years ago, might not be here 93 years from now (2117), but it will always remind us of a specific moment in history that was both “great” and horrible.

I can get caught up in nostalgia, just like everyone else. I currently have 955 public playlists on Spotify, most mining the music of my youth. (Playlist #956 is going to be songs from albums released in March 1974, starting with Grand Funk’s “Locomotion.”) If I have any actual hobbies, it’s collecting vinyl LPs and anything related to the Beatles. And I would trade my eye teeth to get behind the wheel of my first car, a ’73 Gran Torino, again. But that brings me to Point #2.

Number 2: Nostalgia can block out our ability to be present in the present. We’re so focused on the past and making America “that” again, we miss out on the wonderful stuff right in front of us. I will never stop listening to Top 40 radio and looking for new bands to obsess over. (Currently, it’s Blood Command.) I love sharing my daughter’s love of all things Taylor Swift and discovering this music with her (Lover is our current favorite album, although I’m starting to get into folklore.) Listening to contemporary music connects me to the present moment, not when America Was Ricky Nelson. Even if for a moment, it liberates me from the endless nostalgia loop. And it’s inevitable that Taylor Swift will be on “oldies” rotation in 30 years and my kid will say, “When I was a kid, we had REAL music, like Dua Lipa. These kids today…” And so it goes.

So enjoy the past. There’s great wisdom in a Crosby, Stills, and Nash lyric and a Jimmy Carter foreign policy. Huey Lewis and Ronald Reagan don’t seem as horrid as they did 40 years ago. And some of our fond memories are shockingly marginalizing now. (If you can’t remember how racist, sexist, and homophobic we were, just watch any 80’s comedy film. Weird Science has not aged well.) But also plug into the present reality. The kids today have both the exact same issues we contended with and so much more. And their world is reflected in their culture, which should not be dismissed as our parents dismissed ours. Their soundtrack is worth a listen.