Nostalgia as my culture
The local newpaper has been running a series for the last few days on nostalgia. So right! For a person who hasn’t already forgotten what day it is, the thought of yesterday (so many of them to work with) is good fun. I know, that’s not really a complete sentence, but most memories are like that; incomplete… phrases.
I’ve been watching a PBS broadcast of the Monterey Pop festival from 1967 this evening. Songs that risk turning into earworms for the rest of the week. Musical phrases that have been “there” since before I even knew what yogurt tasted like. Faces as familiar as the people that were in the back row of my classes in high school. Forty years and the songs still sound good to me.
I wonder (probably this has been going on for as long as there have been younger generations listening to near-music) whether “their stuff” will still be listened to four decades from now. I might be here to do the test. Let’s see… will 50 Cents have inflated to a dollar? Will anybody really know what time Britney got home? How about Sum 41; will the rest of the equation be revealed?
It’s hard not to be pompous when the music from the sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties was so much better than the stuff offered up in the Oh-ohs. Although Feist might still be worth spinning (I’m sure the industry will have evolved far beyond anything in a circular format real soon now). Linear storage for the next decade.
As I was saying, the Monterey concert “rocked”, and that Jimi Hendrix dude can sure play a mean guitar. How about that girl Janis? What about the Mamas and Papas (not many of them left anymore). Still, the concert is more than a historical footnote. It provides fodder for my generation to have an attitude, as we evolve into grouchy old men.
