Nostalgia: Selling Records Today By Hatin' On Today

I was flipping through channels last night, watching Obama on Letterman (name me the last in-office president who appeared on a late-night talk show), and jumping back and forth to Conan, who had Lynrd Skynrd on. Immediately surprised (a. Lynrd Skynrd were still writing new music and b. they would be on Conan), I actually watched most of their song. And maybe it was the juxtaposition of the leader of the free world on one channel and an aging, right-wing Southern rock band on the other, but the actual content of Skynrd's new song "Simple Life" just really made me unhappy.

I'll post a link to the lyrics here so I don't have to list them all out. Open them in a new window as reference material (possibly the first time Skynrd lyrics have ever been referred to as "reference material") and we'll keep going along.

In keeping with my distaste for pretty much all things nostalgic in rock music, this song ranks right up there. It's whole thesis seems to be that the "simple life" and "the way things used to be" is fading away, becoming obsolete and may in fact be under attack by the younger generation. Here are things the singer would rather do: go fishing, watch the sunset, watch The Andy Griffith Show, ride his Harley around on a Sunday. How on Earth can it be explained that you can't do any of these things? What crazy, liberal-biased conspiracy could possibly exist that is robbing Americans of any of this? And what in the life of a massively popular "classic" rock band lacks the freedom to do any of these things? Or for that matter, the life a regular American? What unseen attack on your values is occurring? We still have Harleys, we still have roads and fish and re-run television. Go to it, Skynrd!

"Wait a minute, Dan!" I hear being shouted from somewhere. "Aren't you just bringing in hysterical, anti-right wing politics in an attempt to demonize the other side of the political spectrum that you have denounced time and time again?" My answer is... (admittedly) yeah, sort of. One of my English professors made a comment when I was in school: "All literature is about economics." This sparked a good-natured and friendly debate between him and one of the professors who taught the "classics". I was definitely on the side of economics, being a young punk who had read far too much post-structural/post-modern text at that point. Later, I realized that it was just a breaking-in point, that Dr Marzec didn't believe that everything he read was about economics and solely that. And I don't believe that every song I listen to is about politics and only that, although it is a fun and thought-provoking approach that keeps me looking at the subtext.

The second stanza of the song is as follows: "Young people are sayin'/'We're changing for the better'/Well, that don't interest me". This, to me, is possibly the most loaded section of the song in terms of both context and subtext. The "changin' for the better" can be seen as the events of the past year, most importantly the election of an African-American president and the general undercurrent of a country working to change for the better. The idea that change for the better would not interest the singer reinforces the right-wing ideology of "leave me and mine alone". And also the use of "young people" instead of just "people" reinforces the nostalgic thread, as "young people" wouldn't know anything about the "good ol' days" and are therefore irrelevant or inconsequential in such a return.

This is yet another example of rock n' roll (and the American psyche in general) glorifying a composite memory of the time vaguely referred to as "back-then". And it's an example of art working in a political fashion to impress upon us the idea of a return. Some of history's more unseemly periods are based upon the idea that nostalgia and memory can be recreated now, and it's apparent in periods like the Nazi's yearning for the "Volk", Reagan's glorification of 1950s family ideals and even the masculine reaction to feminist deconstruction of the patriarchy.*

Yeah, I know I've just taken the simply written lyrics of an aging rock band to places that may seem ridiculous. And I'm comfortable with this. Nostalgia is not only dangerous because it chokes off progression, but also because it creates a composite memory, or a false consciousness of the past by what it omits . Art does the same thing: it picks a point of perspective and presents it. The problem is when that perspective never shifts, never looks around and only sees the information that serves itself. The "simple life" in the Skynrd context suffers that problem in that it can only look back, and when it looks forward and sees nothing that fits in the context of nostalgia, it rejects it.

*Berger, James "Cultural Trauma and the "Timeless Burst": Pynchon's Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland" Postmodern Culture - Volume 5, Number 3, May 1995