Nostalgia!

Glyph

Glyph is worse than some and better than others. He believes that life is just one damned thing after another, that only pop music can save us now, and that mercy is the mark of a great man (but he's just all right). Nothing he writes here should be taken as an indication that he knows anything about anything.

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14 Responses

  1. NewDealer says:

    Disco 2000 by Pulp and Come Dancing by the Kinks are great would be nostalgia songs.

    The type of nostalgia I feel is the one of Disco 2000, the kind of feeling that you get when it seems like everyone is advancing in their lives and you are just staying place. The strong feeling that you need and want something to change but nothing is happening yet. Kind of like in the song above when he talks about how is dates that summer came to nothing…..Report

  2. Glyph says:

    The lines in this that get me the most are the ones where he alludes to/elides future and past catastrophes:

    “The only question left to ask was what would happen after everything familiar collapsed”

    “as if none of the intervening disasters and wrong turns had happened yet.”

    There are stories outside this story. It amazes me how complete and whole *this* story manages to feel, despite its brevity.Report

  3. Chris says:

    I’m having trouble thinking of songs that are about nostalgia of anything more than the personal sort (“Remember when our lives were more fun?”), but there are of course whole bands and even genres (60s folk) that are all about returning to an earlier, simpler time.

    Obligatory dhex-enraging mention of The Decemberists here.Report

  4. dhex says:

    it’s nostalgia for a past that never quite was, which may be closer to the original definition of nostalgia except the remembered homes were never inhabited by its practitioners.

    in that sense i liken the decemberists to tgi fridays’.

    i am generally against nostalgia, much in the way someone is generally against a disliked food or bigoted belief.

    on the other hand i listened to this recently:

    http://igloomag.com/features/david-elsewhere-amalgamix

    and it’s a good encapsulation of what ’99 to 2004 sounded like to me.Report

    • Glyph in reply to dhex says:

      Did I tell you about the time my friend, a huge Jega fan, got really drunk and started heckling Jega while standing just a few feet from him?

      Not his proudest moment.

      Of course, whenever I bring this up, he brings up the time I was quite intoxicated at the Goldie show, and was going nuts, pogoing etc. which got us the stink-eye from some gangster-toughs.

      All *I* remember is that Goldie was brilliant and I had an epic time.Report

      • dhex in reply to Glyph says:

        ha, junglist thugs. i remember when that was a (distinctly watered down) thing in ny. apparently it was different in london?Report

      • Glyph in reply to Glyph says:

        @dhex I was by no means in London, but was in my own backwater town, which makes it weirder…but I guess there was a sort of crossover between the hip-hop thugs and the junglist thugs everywhere? Like I said, I don’t even remember the issue, but apparently my friend was getting pretty nervous about it.

        I DID see Grooverider in London. That was pretty fun.Report

      • dhex in reply to Glyph says:

        ahh, no, i know you’re no denizen of perfidious albion – more like there were genuine gangs into drum n’ bass. which i mean i tend to think of the beginning of that ali g movie when i think of “junglist thugs”. i remember a lot of “thugs” in the conceptual sense at dnb nights at concrete jungle the few times i went.Report

      • Glyph in reply to Glyph says:

        Now I am trying to picture roving gangs of fans of other electronic music subgenres.

        IDM fans, whacking innocent bystanders with rolled-up graph printouts and such.Report

    • Glyph in reply to dhex says:

      BTW, that mix is pretty good (and yeah, very, very familiar).Report