Nostalgia & Art - Music - Forums : Best Ever Albums

BARDAMU

I was reading an article this morning in the London Review about Mark Fisher and his collected "k-Punk" shit. The author mentions Fisher's pretty hardline standards wrt nostalgia. I'll just straight up quote all that here:

Jenny Turner in the LRB wrote:

[of Mark Fisher:] ‘Music that acknowledged and accelerated what was new’ in the world around it was a force for good, but music (and art and literature, e.g. Sebald) that looked backwards in a spirit of pastiche and/or nostalgia was bad. So Kraftwerk, dub, funk and punk, disco and post-punk, techno and hip hop, were good, because they embraced and furthered technological, cultural and generic innovation. Exemplars of badness would be Amy Winehouse as produced by Mark Ronson, and ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ by the Arctic Monkeys, both of which used supremely up-to-date technology to make music (and videos) that sounded (and looked) fake-old.

It’s not that you’re not allowed to look backwards. Looking backwards is encouraged, so long as you do so with the proper historical awareness, leaving the gaps and distances and losses as you found them: the crackle of old vinyl in the found-music collages of Burial, Leyland Kirby, the stuff you get on the Ghost Box label; ‘the metallic excrescence’ of 1990s jungle, ‘when samples were slowed down and the software had to fill the gaps’.

I've been thinking about this all day, and it's something my friends and I have talked about before -- I think I agree with him in some ways (although I admit I don't know the full context or breadth of his opinion on this), like, Greta Van Fleet definitely sucks, and a big part of that is, I think, because of unreflective nostalgia. But there are forms of critical nostalgia I quite like -- one album I think about a lot in this regard is David Bowie's Young Americans, which, while in a no doubt "nostalgic mode," seems to be a whole album bent on criticizing nostalgia (the soul-smooth title track describes a man in a midlife crisis lusting after a young woman; Bowie sings at one point asking whether or not you "even remember... yesterday?," which seems to a pointed reminder that the repackaged past is often one of glaring omissions). Billy Joel (of all people) I think does this with quite a bit of intention as well; most of his "nostalgic" music seems to be "about" the act of reminiscing rather than reminiscing itself.

But what are the other implications of this sort of opinion? If listening to "fake-old" music is bad, is it possible to argue that listening to "real-old" music is ALSO bad if we don't approach it from a "historical" perspective? And aren't the "selective" powers of nostalgia STILL the mechanism that determines which albums stand the "test of time" and come into the present?

What are your thoughts, BEA?

Yann

The problem is not nostalgia, as a talented artist can create a great album out of nostalgia (in the theme, or the music itself, or both).
But a mediocre artist would be too complacent about that lovely feeling and that would end up with a sort of pastiche, at least regarding the music.

TimeLion

The distinction between “fake-old” and historically aware seems... well, fake. Oldness doesn’t cause bad music, it’s just one of its common traits. An artist who doesn’t put much care into their creation will be prone to creating cheap imitations of things past. But this isn’t due to a lack of music history classes, it’s just poor artistry.

What’s more, forward-looking music can only really be distinguished in retrospect, at which point it stands out because it’s a precursor to something that came later. But that doesn’t mean that it’s better in some absolute sense, just that it survived a few passes through the sieve that is our rapidly changing zeitgeist. To see an example of “backward-looking” music that became beloved over many generations, just look at one Johannes Sebastian Bach.

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

TimeLion wrote:

The distinction between “fake-old” and historically aware seems... well, fake. Oldness doesn’t cause bad music, it’s just one of its common traits. An artist who doesn’t put much care into their creation will be prone to creating cheap imitations of things past. But this isn’t due to a lack of music history classes, it’s just poor artistry.

What’s more, forward-looking music can only really be distinguished in retrospect, at which point it stands out because it’s a precursor to something that came later. But that doesn’t mean that it’s better in some absolute sense, just that it survived a few passes through the sieve that is our rapidly changing zeitgeist. To see an example of “backward-looking” music that became beloved over many generations, just look at one Johannes Sebastian Bach.

Well said.

Also there's a literary theory of the Oedipus complex with artists, that rings true time and time again. The killing of the father is something a great artist has to do to become autonomous in their own realm of artistry. It's a common repeat across time. But the good artist does it in a way as you suggest. Bach himself borrowed from his forefathers, but he did it in a way that connected with humanity deeper than many.