Nostalgia: A Gateway Drug to Entropy (Foreword)
So I was thinking today about why I really don't care for the song "American Pie" by Don McLean. And it's not just because when some drunken frat boy (or group of frat boys... they can't seem to do anything individually) sings it at karaoke, there goes the next ten minutes that could be better served by some seemingly shy girl belting out "Total Eclipse of the Heart", followed by a bridal shower's rendition of the Spice Girls.
That song seems to conjure up the impulse of just about every serious music listener to hearken back to "a better time" when it comes to music. A recording professor of mine once told me that the music you listened to from your teens to early twenties will forever be the best music you ever hear in your life. And while I agree that there will forever be a soft spot in my heart for the early 90s grunge and college rock that I cut my teeth on, I refuse to join my peers in claiming that the 90s (or the 60s, 70s or 80s for my older friends and family) was the height of musical perfection, and that everything afterwards was all downhill, and that most things before were just a lead-up.
One of the topics I constantly have rattling around in my head (and it gets more airtime lately, as the currently dismal job market has left me with very little to occupy my mind) is the idea that nostalgia is a frighteningly dangerous thing. It can be a killer of creativity, and also a blinder to what is going on currently. Nostalgia is like that story in "The Martian Chronicles" where the astronauts get to Mars and there's the old hometown, with its Main Street USA and porch swings and lemonade and all their dead relatives. But, secretly, all those things were just machinations designed to lure them in and then kill them. Memory is a deceptive little beast, and it lies. But the lie is good.
Nostalgia as entropy is a way to look at music being made today as well as the canonization of "classic" rock (in which the window of time in which something becomes "classic" seems to shrink every year). That's what I hope to discuss here (not solve, not finalize, but discuss) over the next weeks and months: that nostalgia can shift from soothing and familiar to something that slows the creative process down to a standstill.
Incidentally, McLean's famous refrain at the end of each chorus is "This'll be the day that I die", sung by the "good old boys drinking whiskey and rye". It's sad, not just because their levee is dry, but because they would rather lie down and die than fill it back up again.
That song seems to conjure up the impulse of just about every serious music listener to hearken back to "a better time" when it comes to music. A recording professor of mine once told me that the music you listened to from your teens to early twenties will forever be the best music you ever hear in your life. And while I agree that there will forever be a soft spot in my heart for the early 90s grunge and college rock that I cut my teeth on, I refuse to join my peers in claiming that the 90s (or the 60s, 70s or 80s for my older friends and family) was the height of musical perfection, and that everything afterwards was all downhill, and that most things before were just a lead-up.
One of the topics I constantly have rattling around in my head (and it gets more airtime lately, as the currently dismal job market has left me with very little to occupy my mind) is the idea that nostalgia is a frighteningly dangerous thing. It can be a killer of creativity, and also a blinder to what is going on currently. Nostalgia is like that story in "The Martian Chronicles" where the astronauts get to Mars and there's the old hometown, with its Main Street USA and porch swings and lemonade and all their dead relatives. But, secretly, all those things were just machinations designed to lure them in and then kill them. Memory is a deceptive little beast, and it lies. But the lie is good.
Nostalgia as entropy is a way to look at music being made today as well as the canonization of "classic" rock (in which the window of time in which something becomes "classic" seems to shrink every year). That's what I hope to discuss here (not solve, not finalize, but discuss) over the next weeks and months: that nostalgia can shift from soothing and familiar to something that slows the creative process down to a standstill.
Incidentally, McLean's famous refrain at the end of each chorus is "This'll be the day that I die", sung by the "good old boys drinking whiskey and rye". It's sad, not just because their levee is dry, but because they would rather lie down and die than fill it back up again.
Labels: American Pie, Don McLean, entropy, introduction, nostalgia
posted by Dan Drago at 3:33 PM
1 Comments:
For me the autobiographical lyrics in "American Pie" are the strongest- dancing in the gym- because I can buy a dude looking back at his own life. It's the jester/king angels/devils thing that loses me, trying to fit cultural change into a fairytale.
I don't have a lot of patience for 50's nostalgia in general. Segregation, red scares, back-alley abortions, nuclear panics. Not really the Cleaver fantasy (it produced some great sci-fi, though!) White musicians loved Chuck Berry but he was born and raised under Jim Crow and at first couldn't even get a contract on the same label. I can't really muster up any nostalgia for that.
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