Will people look back at 2024 with Nostalgia the same way we do with the 80s say? Is there anything nostalgic about todays music.
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The comeback of shoegaze and garage bands, Louis Cole, Sophie’s work… the past few years have a lot to look forward to looking back to.
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Nostalgia will never go out of style. What people feel nostalgic about will change via demographic replacement - newer birth cohorts are nostalgic for newer things.
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Nostalgia was better in my day
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I felt that way about the 2000s when there was a lot of 80s revivalism going on. Culture is too fragmented these days for any specific nostalgia to be possible. There’s a kind of generalised nostalgia that zoomers have for the 90s that they never experienced as exemplified by this photo:
It’s good enough to fool you at first glance, good enough for Instagram likes, but small details give it away (uniform A4 computer printouts, generalised 90s icons from years apart, 2014 Arctic Monkeys poster 
). Compare it to an actual 90s bedroom scene:
I doubt there will be much to build a nostalgia on about nowadays. Maybe in 20 years people will find it funny that everyone had to listen to music with their ear bones instead of having it beamed direct into their brains through an implant. Who knows. Maybe AI will make it all irrelevant.
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people nostalgic about 90s music…
90s music:
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fondly memb’ring or memory fondling?
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Founding members member fondling?
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This. 90% of the creative output of any decade was garbage. Nostalgia is definitely a blurred vision and false memory type of experience. I notice this alot with the concept of “boom bap”. First of all 90s hip hop was commercial af, and dominated by Sean Combs and Jermaine Dupree produced crap. DJ Premier invented the term “boom bap” to describe HIS music, nobody else makes or made “boom bap”. Also if you look at the top 10 tracks from any week of any year of any decade you will find a bunch of songs that nobody remembers and are terrible.
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When I was a teenager in the 90s, I remember quite a few songs getting into the mainstream charts that led me to a long journey of musical discovery: Teardrop by Massive Attack, Ain’t Talking About Dub by Apollo 440, Hey Boy Hey Girl by Chemical Brothers … and then other hits by Portishead, Air, Beastie Boys, Fatboy Slim to name some others. In the 2000s and 2010s I struggled to hear anything capable of making such a strong impression on me. BUT I was 20, then 30 and nowhere as receptive to music as before. Are there any interesting artists and songs hitting today’s charts or Spotify playlists, filling young teenagers’ lives with joy and excitement while creating musical blueprint for future artists? I really don’t know.
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…lots and lots of nostalgic associations come from those memory moments of the best days of ur life and first real relationship sparkling…which usually takes place for every generation between early teen to mid twentie state of conciousness…
and since music and popculture always plays a big role for triggering such flashbacks, every generation will have the same basic experience of nostalgic alongside with the music that was part of those personal periods in their lifes…
and sure, ever<thing is in constant progress and everlasting change, so the trigger points will all differ but do in essence the same trick…
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my pet theory is that digital technology started to flatten time in many ways after Y2K. although there have been incremental leaps in tech (2000 CGI was orders of magnitude better than 1990 CGI) those increments became less meaningful over the next 20 years (Avatar 2, while technically impressive, isn’t as obviously “better” a filmgoing experience than Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogies were in 2002). and it doesn’t help that Hollywood keeps wanting to recycle the same 20 franchises and TV shows over and over again ad nauseum
although there is a pre-iPhone/post-iPhone divide from 2007 on, the smartphone experience itself has largely remained static despite the device itself becoming slightly more sophisticated with each iteration. the homogenization of music with the adoption of DAWs for studio production means a track created in Logic etc. 15 years ago is not going to sound much different than one created with the most current DAWs (to my ears anyway). even by the 80s, analog recording tech had gotten good enough that, other than the equipment they might have been using at any given moment, e.g., the Fairlight or Synclavier, it’s impossible to hear a recording and fix it in time. unlike the difference between records from the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.
it’s harder to be nostalgic for a specific era of the past when the whole culture has been stuck in a kind of digital loop for two decades going on three
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Yes and yes!
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Impopular maybe, but I am nostalgic of early days of global lockdown.
That sensation of near ending put everything in perspective.
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I think there will always be nostalgia from music. I sometimes get nostaligic for music that I wasn’t even a fan of back then, because it puts me at a specific time and place in my life. Artists fade in and out, music styles do shift and change even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes. These will end up being part of someone’s roadmap in their life, and they will have memories tied to maybe a Taylor Swift song, a Chemical Brothers track, or a Pavement album.
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I recall one time when someone posted a pic of a magazine stand filled with her on the cover! Can’t remember where though!
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I think the newness of cultural trends is the aberration, not the norm. The last 80 years or so have been pretty batshit as far as that goes, but now that technology has grown to match the population size culture can remain relatively flat and static (as people tend to prefer it), since everyone can remain more or less connected with everyone else (in a “the world is flat” sort of way, but not quite how Friedman meant it).
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I think it’s gone. For example, 2004 was 20 years ago. In the 1980s the 1960s were 20 years ago. I remember people had a lot of nostalgia for the 60s in the 80s. And nostalgia for the 70s in the 90s. The same can’t be said for the early 2000s now.
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These “It’s not like it used to be” threads makes me feel like I’m hanging out at a senior center!
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