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CA Dreamin
Gender: Male
Location: LA 
- #1
- Posted: 10/09/2015 19:04
- Post subject: The effect of nostalgia on your chart
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Recently there was a thread that touched upon the subject of nostalgia. Here are a couple quotes from the user who started that thread:
| louisjwyatt wrote: | | As a longtime music lover, I've gone through a lot of phases and there are a lot of albums I loved when I was younger, though I can't even bare to listen to them anymore because of how much I've worn them out. I'm sure lots of you have had similar experiences. |
| louisjwyatt wrote: | | I've heard it so many times now, though, that there's just nothing there anymore. Of course I have a soft spot in my heart for those albums |
When I started collecting albums, my mother warned me this would happen, that I would eventually become indifferent towards music I once loved. I didn't want to believe it, but now I see it happening. Ten months ago, I was sick as a dog and couldn't get out of bed for a day. So I had nothing better to do than lie there and listen to music. I played several albums from a certain artist, an artist whose albums I first got into a decade ago when I was in high school. (I won't mention which artist because it doesn't matter.) I hadn't listened to them for a couple years so I was overdue to revisit them. And it was a depressing experience. None of the albums did anything for me. The magic and euphoria I used to feel when I listened to them were gone. Tried listening to them a couple times since, same thing. I hope to be engaged by these albums again some day, but I'm not sure if it'll happen.
So now I want to ask you longtime listeners who've had this experience: What you do with these albums in regards to your chart? Do you keep them where they are for nostalgia's sake? Do you keep them where they are because you still think they're great albums, even if they don't do anything for you anymore? Or do you gradually lower them over time? Or do you remove them completely?
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zdwyatt
Gender: Male
Age: 46
Location: Madison WI
- #2
- Posted: 10/09/2015 20:45
- Post subject:
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My charts reflect my current opinion, give or take a few months. I couldn't stop listening to Debbie Gibson's Out of the Blue when it came out, but I don't have it on a chart at the moment. (Although, I might should, because "Foolish Beat" is a damn good pop song.) I certainly don't keep an album high up on a chart for nostalgia's sake. That being said, I think nostalgia factors in in a different way. Take these two albums:
Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.
Nevermind by Nirvana
Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.
Ten by Pearl Jam
I was 13 when those albums came out. And, as I wrote in my review of Nevermind:
| Quote: |
It's so hard to evaluate this album fairly. I was at exactly the right age for this release to blow my mind. And when I put it on today, I still love it, from start to finish. Is it overrated in some objective sense? It might be. But I can't say for sure because I never get tired of it. |
The same goes for Ten. Those are both 5-star albums for me. They sit at #1 and #2 on my 1991 chart. If I were 13 now and I heard those albums for the first time, I don't know what I'd think. I doubt I'd like them as much as I do. I am sure some part of my love of those albums is their total familiarity. I listened to them over and over and over and when I hear them now, I am taken right back to that time.
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Applerill
Autistic Princess <3
Gender: Female
Age: 31
Location: Chicago
- #3
- Posted: 10/09/2015 20:57
- Post subject:
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I think there are two extremes you can take as a chartmaker on BEA. You could have your overall be an all-time hall-of-fame, noting the albums that have made the most personal impact over the longest period of time. Users ranging from Romanelli to Hayden seem to be good examples. On the other extreme are those who use their overall chart as their "current playlist" of what they're currently obsessed with. Precedent's a great example of this latter extreme. Either extreme taken too far can almost make the point of your chart redundant, but we all are somewhere on the spectrum.
The reason I bring up this dichotomy is because nostalgia is both something we all face and something we all have the choice to not feed into. A lot of my favorite albums are based on nostalgia (Souljaboytellem.com, for instance, was the very first hip-hop album I bought with my own money), but I try to add new albums to the bottom of the chart whenever I can.
Also, if your problem with nostalgia is just that it overshadows "objective quality" or something, then you suck.
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- #4
- Posted: 10/11/2015 02:55
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my chart is my favorite albums, not a bunch of albums that i listened to once upon a time and don't give a shit about anymore. there's enough albums that i love from when i first started getting into music 7 or 8 years ago that still hold up now that i see no reason to just slide in a bunch of stuff i liked back then and liked for multiple years even though it doesn't hold up for me now.
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Tap
to resume download
Gender: Female
Age: 40
- #5
- Posted: 10/11/2015 05:56
- Post subject:
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Yeah I'm of the opinion that nostalgia is a gateway to an excess amount of calcification of taste that prevents it from continuing to grow (because you need at least some, for the bones), and I'm working on my year charts right now so that I can sync up the overall and decade charts at the end of the year and diminish the influence of nostalgia. It's a bit more complicated for me than albums I don't enjoy anymore. Those are easy to knock down. It's the ones I do have an affinity for that are giving me the most trouble, figuring out the value of those albums in relation to ones that do not have the benefit of sepia-tinged memories, that's been tough. But I'm thinking it's time to be brutal.
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Infinity183
Gender: Female
- #6
- Posted: 10/11/2015 12:33
- Post subject:
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For the most part, my charts are not nostalgia-influenced because I didn't listen to very many classic or quality albums growing up. For a while, before joining this site, I gave high marks to The Offspring's catalogue (even considering Smash one of my five favorite albums at one point), but they've since fallen into the "good but not the best" category since I've discovered hundreds of other musical acts and their albums.
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Applerill
Autistic Princess <3
Gender: Female
Age: 31
Location: Chicago
- #7
- Posted: 10/11/2015 13:23
- Post subject:
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I dunno, I think nostalgia is fine in small doses, but you need to make sure that you hearing a song when you were five isn't the only reason you like it. Going back to Souljaboytellem.com, I obviously have a lot of good memories with it, but I can name a half-dozen "objective" reasons why it's one of the greatest albums ever made. I don't think you need to be "brutal" with our former favorites as much as we need to find out why else we're drawn to them.
Devin Faraci has a really good piece on this topic that even quotes Proust in the beginning.
| Quote: | | Nostalgia is a conversation killer. When you like a work of art for nostalgic reasons - you saw it as a kid, your sick dad showed it to you before he died, it evokes memories of a magical time in your life - you’re not actually talking about that art anymore. You’ve left the art behind, just as Proust has left the madeleine behind. That quote makes for a shitty review of a cake, but it makes for a good discussion of the writer's childhood, and that’s what you’re doing. You’ve taken the conversation away from the art and made it squarely about you. |
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2014/06/24/...eat-itself
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alelsupreme
Awful.
Gender: Male
Age: 28
- #8
- Posted: 10/11/2015 14:43
- Post subject:
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Yeah I don't really put any emphasis on nostalgia. Probably helps that I've very few memories attached to many albums - why reminisce over being sat at a computer and looking something up on spotify/downloading a torrent somewhere?
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- #9
- Posted: 10/11/2015 15:00
- Post subject:
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| blacksaintsinnerLAD wrote: | | Yeah I don't really put any emphasis on nostalgia. Probably helps that I've very few memories attached to many albums - why reminisce over being sat at a computer and looking something up on spotify/downloading a torrent somewhere? |
*"Good Riddance/Time of Your Life" plays during a tasteful montage of several years of LAD's life spent staring at a computer screen with headphones on*
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jhuik
BOSS
Gender: Male
Age: 60
Location: K-Dubz, just west of the 6ix, ON 
- #10
- Posted: 10/11/2015 15:51
- Post subject:
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As one of the oldest people on this site I'm an expert on nostalgia. To a strong degree, my decade charts attempt to reflect what I liked during those decades, although I look back and edit my nostalgia out, too; I am also influenced by what I've come to like in the meantime and I think those picks should also be in there. My overall chart is a best attempt to reflect what I personally think are the best (you know... my favourite, a lot of the time) albums.
On my overall chart I just popped in... then popped out, an album I loved when I was 15ish because I thought it still held up to a degree and I thought it coud stand in for a lot of other similar albums.... but then I thought, no this just does not fit into a 'best ever' chart.
I often defend some choices (e.g. U2) by saying if you weren't there when it came out you can't understand why it is still great imho... I don't know if that's nostalgia so much as just respect for the past.
_________________
Top Canadian songs, keyless entry remotes, home care, whatever...
Last edited by jhuik on 10/11/2015 15:59; edited 3 times in total
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