Nostalgia is a bitch. You have
something so personal, so confined to one's own field of view and
one's own experience, and suddenly you find that your nostalgias have
been transformed into commodity, part of the nostalgia machine.
At least that's the way it was the
first time I heard Green Day on the classic rock station, on an icy
day in the mid-2000s on the boom box in my dorm's bathroom while I
was shaving. It was official. An element of my childhood had become a
commodity, or rather, it was revealed as the commodity it always had
been, now hermetically sealed and fitting in comfortably on an FM
radio station for aging boomers, less talk, more rock.
So it was with some trepidation that I
picked up Lizzy Goodman's excellent Meet Me in the Bathroom,
the recent oral history of the New York rock scene from the late '90s
through the late '00s, from its early precursor in Jonathan
Fire*Eater up through around the time I graduated from college, and
the transformation of the Lower East Side and then Williamsburg from
shooting galleries to the sanitized rock and roll theme park they are
today.
It was
almost inevitable reading it that I started listening to albums I
hadn't listened to in years, albums I'd once held very close to my
heart – The Strokes' Is This It?,
Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights,
The Walkmen's Everyone Who Pretended to Like Us Is Gone,
The Rapture's Echoes (while
confirming that I still couldn't stand Vampire Weekend or most of LCD
Soundsystem's discography). Each contained a memory – memories of
dances with vodka bottles in the snow, Nag Champa incense in shared
houses, an empty pack of Turkish Silver cigarettes on a well-worn
Modern Library edition of The Trial,
bags of mushrooms stuffed into empty canisters of Republic of Tea
jasmine green.
I first developed a
musical consciousness of the sort I can actually look back fondly
upon in those heady days when Limewire was the download technique du
jour, and the industry was still trying to peddle garbage albums for
15 dollars at Sam Goody on the strength of one modern rock radio
staple single.
It wasn't a great
time for American pop music. The rock charts were dominated by
inoffensive trash like 3 Doors Down (bands with numbers in the name
tend to suck, from Three Dog Night on through 21 Pilots) and moronic
nu-metal bands, the pop charts were full of hip-hop in its worst
phase, the phase of Ja Rule and “Drop It Like It's Hot”-era
Snoop, and like so many American teens – the sort that now
contribute infinite Youtube comments – I decided that the best days
of music had basically ended with Nirvana, and the heights of the
Beach Boys, Public Enemy, Otis Redding, and the Dead Kennedys could
never be summited.
So when I
discovered the wilder, weirder world of what was going on in New
York, and in Montreal, Oslo, Reykjavik, Athens GA, I went in with all
the enthusiasm that only a 16 or 17 year old can muster.
Of course I was far
too earnest in my disposition to be cool. Which is why I don't want
to let this devolve into yet another meditation by an aging hipster
on sex, drugs, and rock & roll. The world has too much of that as
it is.
And eventually, as
with all things, the wave receded, and I cared more about other
things than about hearing new albums a month before their official
release date, even as much as I might be crushing on the latest album
by Mitski or Angel Olsen.
As
that wave receded, likewise, the music world moved on, with the sort
of rock music that I found particularly endearing becoming less and
less relevant to the discourse. The latest wave of SoundCloud
rappers, themselves remarkably informed by those same shitty nu-metal
bands and Dirty South platinum enthusiasts that annoyed me as a
teenager, by and large do next to nothing for me, with some notable
exceptions, and I realize more and more that I'm not of a demographic
that anyone is interested in, and that's fine. I'm getting older, and
I'm not supposed to like Post Malone. When I was younger I figured
that at a certain age, you stopped caring about musical trends, and
you instead settled in for a long engagement with the past, confined
to your echo chamber, as reactionary as that may be.
Hell,
rock music has itself largely become a reactionary genre, with its
most ensconced forms becoming the soundtrack of the so-called silent
majority that has never been either silent or a majority, with good
times and great oldies! becoming
what is in essence a conservative reaction to newer forms of
predominantly black music. When Jimi Hendrix played his version of
the national anthem at Woodstock, it was revolutionary. Now it would
fit in with Rush Limbaugh throwing the opening pitch at a Cardinals
game, just like how Stravinsky's Rite of Spring
caused riots upon its opening, but not long later was used by Walt
Disney in Fantasia. A
supposed postmodernism eats itself just as readily as a supposed
modernism.
The
fruit of that reaction can be found in the infinite number of
obnoxious “don't make 'em like they used to” Youtube comments
made by soapboxing boomers and gen X-ers (as well as younger
commenters who are upvoted for espousing nostalgia for a time they
never knew, echoes of my own early adolescence there), and my
generation is quickly en route to doing the same.
Now
would be a good time to point out that what I liked about the Lizzy
Goodman book was its refreshing refusal to play the nostalgia game,
even if the nostalgia was probably a salient marketing point for its
publisher.
So
when the nostalgia industry will start using my youth as grist for
its mills in a few years, all I can do is to hold my very individual
memories dear, and tell anyone trying to sell me a variant to fuck
right off.
