Nostalgia/familiarity VS the music itself - Music

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

I've been thinking a lot lately about why I like the music I do.

Sometimes I stumble onto an album I've never heard before and I'm like... HOLY SHIT why did I not know this before. This is AMAZING.

Othertimes I'm like... NEXT... and quickly move on from it and don't think much about it ever again.

Then I also think about... hmmm... if I didn't know this album since I was 5 years old, would I still have fallen for it?

I listened to this album today and think it is top notch, but I also can see how someone that doesn't have any history with the album think, eh... it's ok.

What have your experiences been/thoughts on the matter?

I think this might be a sub thread to the staying power album thread we had a while back, but with slight different questions/attacking from different angle.

Allabaster

In listening, the music never works alone.

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

Allabaster wrote:

In listening, the music never works alone.

I can agree with this. This goes along with Reader Response Theory... meaning words on a page don't exist until they are interpreted/read. When they are read/interpreted, our "baggage" weighs heavy on the interpretation, pleasure, excitement, etc. of music.

Applerill

Autistic Princess <3

Gender: Female

Age: 31

Location: Chicago

Yeah, maybe I personally worship the zeitgeist a little too much as a music nerd, but I've always found the "music by itself" complaint to be a tad anti-intellectual (for goodness sakes, this was Kanye's explanation of the Yeezus release, and we all know how narrative-driven that was). Plus, I feel like using it in this context seems way too close to talking about "objective music" or whatever.

While nostalgia can certainly be an unhealthy thing to chase after if done in excess, I don't think there's a problem in the short-term. I was just listening to Rob Thomas's "Lonely No More", a song I heard all through middle school assuming someone like Akon did it. I now can see as an adult that it's not perfect, but that chorus still bangs as plutonium-hard as it did ten years ago.

....Yeah, sorry, but I don't know how to interpret this question in any way that isn't "objective".

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

Applerill wrote:

Yeah, maybe I personally worship the zeitgeist a little too much as a music nerd, but I've always found the "music by itself" complaint to be a tad anti-intellectual (for goodness sakes, this was Kanye's explanation of the Yeezus release, and we all know how narrative-driven that was). Plus, I feel like using it in this context seems way too close to talking about "objective music" or whatever.

While nostalgia can certainly be an unhealthy thing to chase after if done in excess, I don't think there's a problem in the short-term. I was just listening to Rob Thomas's "Lonely No More", a song I heard all through middle school assuming someone like Akon did it. I now can see as an adult that it's not perfect, but that chorus still bangs as plutonium-hard as it did ten years ago.

....Yeah, sorry, but I don't know how to interpret this question in any way that isn't "objective".

Good point about not clarifying what is meant by the music itself. I guess what I meant was that there's little conscious effort to like something simply based on nostalgia or some other external reason than the music itself.

Sigor Ros for example... I feel I have ZERO nostalgia for that band. I don't understand anything they are saying and have no real external connection to their music... it's more the fact that it's frickin' awesome. Now I'm not saying that my previous musical tastes, etc. didn't play a role and the music truly did live in a vacuum when I listened to it... that's just stupid. But I am saying is I have no real ties to it other than the music itself and my reaction to it BLOWING MY MIND.

Anyway... on a similar thought... sometimes my wife is listening to Britney Spears or something awful and if I were still 15 years old I'd like get a divorce over it. Now I actually kind of have some kind of nostalgia reason for not immediately breaking every Britney Spears album... that was my early/mid teens and well stuff happened to that shitty music in my life. In other words something that I normally would vomit on now has some kind of nostalgia to it that I still don't consider great by any means, but it kind of means something to me.

Space-Dementia

One album I loved when I first heard it was Right Thoughts Right Words Right Action by Franz Ferdinand. It was one of the five or six albums, along with American Idiot, Black Holes and Revelations, Oracular Spectacular, and Empire by Kasabian, that introduced me to alternative rock, and I hadn't really heard anything like it before which was probably why I loved it so much. Now, returning to that album, it just feels weird hearing songs that I used to think were so unique and crazy that are actually just kinda odd indie songs. But yeah I definitely get a tinge of nostalgia listening to that album.
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These are my favorite albums right now.

Anti

I Dream of Drone

Age: 29

Location: Somewhere in Ohio

A lot of albums in my top twenty are heavily influenced by nostalgia. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, especially since it's unavoidable for me to associate an album or song with a particular event in my life. I grow out of some albums, but usually when I tie a significant event to it, it makes a lasting significance for the album.
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...and for dessert!

RoundTheBend

I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

Anti wrote:

A lot of albums in my top twenty are heavily influenced by nostalgia. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, especially since it's unavoidable for me to associate an album or song with a particular event in my life. I grow out of some albums, but usually when I tie a significant event to it, it makes a lasting significance for the album.

Fo sho.

I don't think there's anything wrong with Nostalgia either. But I do sometimes wish I could hear an album for the first time instead of my 5 year old ears if that makes any sense.

Having said that, if I were to watch Encino Man again, a movie I thought was AMAZING when I was whatever age... I probably wouldn't like it now. So to say I liked something when I was 5 and I still do now just means it is just that good.... maybe.