The Nostalgia Industry

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.