Author: Whistling Al McKenzie
Funny how music becomes much more than the sum of its parts - even the music you love to hate. Recently, during my many idle moments in the workplace, I've found myself whistling horrors like 'Suicide Is Painless,' (apt under the circumstances), 'Nine To Five' (The Easton and The Parton), 'Chanson L'Amour,' and 'Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?' (none of my colleagues responded to that last one, ironically or otherwise). Yes, gentle, expectant reader, I know; you're telling me that my brain has been raddled by all those long office hours spent eavesdropping on endless conversations about diets and Wife Swap, and you're right. But then, the pain of hearing any of R Stewart's oeuvre is equalled only by the pain of making cuts on my fingers and putting them in a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, and I've never felt a sudden compulsion to do that during work time. No, the root of this odd behaviour lies in nostalgia, and those of us old enough to remember editions of TOTP featuring Jonathan King as a harmless joker suffer from the involuntary donning of rose-tinted spectacles more than most. For nostalgia, you see, is a virus. Caught from false memories, it attacks the brain from within, leaving it as weak and defenceless as a newborn; and just as the innocent and trusting tot has no natural resistance to measles, so the brain is vulnerable to spectacularly bad ideas - the idea that Boney M were a Good Thing, for example. If only a vaccine could be developed to protect the modern 30-something from the lasting damage inflicted by childhood bouts of Razzmatazz.
The one consolation when faced with this debilitating illness is knowing that today's smug juveniles will become tomorrow's fellow sufferers. Arguably, some of them already display alarming signs of the onset of Chronic Nostalgia - how else do you explain someone declaring that 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' is the greatest pop song ever? (I made a mistake there, confusing nostalgia with plain bad taste - it's so easy to do.) Whatever The Greatest Pop Song Ever is, it certainly ain't that, but neither is it any of the Woganesque fodder I've listed before. My point is, these vapid tunes from yesteryear have a habit of entering my head unbidden during moments of extreme stress or boredom or both, purely because they remind me of childhood, when life seemed simple yet wondrous, when you didn't have to worry about urban violence and the rising house prices, and Pleasant and Exciting Things were always around the corner. (He's just being nostalgic again; his childhood was actually filled with pain and fear. - Al's Stepdad) You could hardly accuse 'Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?' of being pleasant or exciting, (although I'm sure it was exciting for Roddy to have a wet dream about himself in public), but it's what you associate the music with that matters, not the music itself; whenever I hear that song, it reminds me of my 10 year old self giggling at a very silly Kenny Everett TV sketch, in which Sir Ken paraded around as Rod in his tight leopardskin kecks, his arse expanding to balloon-like proportions as he mimed the number. So the song has an effect on me - it doesn't mean I have to own or like the record, but the keyboardy-intro bit seems so much more whistleable these days than when I was 10, and I lay the blame for that fairly and squarely at the door of Ol' Mother Nostalgia.
Similar principles apply to the music we actually like, to the point where it's impossible to tell how good something really was. Were the Fabs that great? (Sgt Pepper certainly isn't.) Are they rated so highly for their melodic and lyrical craftsmanship, or because theirs was the first serious pop music in many listeners' lives, thereby gaining bonus nostalgia brownie points? Were they just the 1960s equivalent of Busted (at least in the beginning), and we're all too blinded by nostalgia to realise it? If I was the age I am now in 1969, would I dislike The Velvets as much as I dislike Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in 2004? Do I like them because they fit my image of 1960s coolness, and it's much easier to be nostalgic about an era you never actually lived through? I knew I was infected by the virus after watching Pop Idols with some friends; I went off on a rant about how contrived pop music has become, and how no-one rails versus the corporations anymore like the Sex Pistols did. They laughed at my naivety, arguing that the Pistols were as much a product of the industry as Will Gates is, and I could see their point, yet I still get hairs on the back of my neck from the opening riff to 'Pretty Vacant,' while I genuinely can't remember anything performed by S Cowell's brainchildren. As Burt Reynolds says in Boogie Nights, 'If it looks like shit and it tastes like shit, it is shit.'
Nostalgia isn't just about the personal, it's about the hype, and older music, the music we're nostalgic about, accrues more hype than current stuff does. How many times have we seen pop quizzes and Top 100s on Saturday night TV in the past few years? If I keep hearing that I should not only like, but love Elvis (I don't, messily disproving my theory re: nostalgia for eras you never lived through), then I might believe it eventually, maybe after the millionth soundbite. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be; it's now an industry, fed by the demand for cheap clip compilations on telly, by the Internet, by MP3, and by samples of Ye Olde Pop on modern hits. The really depressing thing is that despite having a greater diversity of music available to us than ever before, we seem happy to let the media dictate a categorisation of music into universally-perceived pantheons of 'good' and 'bad': should Rob Williams be voted into the UK Hall of Fame, or are The Blur more worthy of this honour? Does anyone with an IQ above 2 really care? Like that leopard-skinned arse swelling up to resemble a planet where Bet Lynch rules by fear, not everything is so easily classifiable. The lovely thing about true musical nostalgia is that it allows us to make our own minds up about what's in our Top Tens and what isn't, and to the youthful pop-pickers of today, I say this: In the kingdom of the Impressionable, the Hall of Fame is King.
Funny how music becomes much more than the sum of its parts - even the music you love to hate. Recently, during my many idle moments in the workplace, I've found myself whistling horrors like 'Suicide Is Painless,' (apt under the circumstances), 'Nine To Five' (The Easton and The Parton), 'Chanson L'Amour,' and 'Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?' (none of my colleagues responded to that last one, ironically or otherwise). Yes, gentle, expectant reader, I know; you're telling me that my brain has been raddled by all those long office hours spent eavesdropping on endless conversations about diets and Wife Swap, and you're right. But then, the pain of hearing any of R Stewart's oeuvre is equalled only by the pain of making cuts on my fingers and putting them in a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, and I've never felt a sudden compulsion to do that during work time. No, the root of this odd behaviour lies in nostalgia, and those of us old enough to remember editions of TOTP featuring Jonathan King as a harmless joker suffer from the involuntary donning of rose-tinted spectacles more than most. For nostalgia, you see, is a virus. Caught from false memories, it attacks the brain from within, leaving it as weak and defenceless as a newborn; and just as the innocent and trusting tot has no natural resistance to measles, so the brain is vulnerable to spectacularly bad ideas - the idea that Boney M were a Good Thing, for example. If only a vaccine could be developed to protect the modern 30-something from the lasting damage inflicted by childhood bouts of Razzmatazz.
The one consolation when faced with this debilitating illness is knowing that today's smug juveniles will become tomorrow's fellow sufferers. Arguably, some of them already display alarming signs of the onset of Chronic Nostalgia - how else do you explain someone declaring that 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' is the greatest pop song ever? (I made a mistake there, confusing nostalgia with plain bad taste - it's so easy to do.) Whatever The Greatest Pop Song Ever is, it certainly ain't that, but neither is it any of the Woganesque fodder I've listed before. My point is, these vapid tunes from yesteryear have a habit of entering my head unbidden during moments of extreme stress or boredom or both, purely because they remind me of childhood, when life seemed simple yet wondrous, when you didn't have to worry about urban violence and the rising house prices, and Pleasant and Exciting Things were always around the corner. (He's just being nostalgic again; his childhood was actually filled with pain and fear. - Al's Stepdad) You could hardly accuse 'Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?' of being pleasant or exciting, (although I'm sure it was exciting for Roddy to have a wet dream about himself in public), but it's what you associate the music with that matters, not the music itself; whenever I hear that song, it reminds me of my 10 year old self giggling at a very silly Kenny Everett TV sketch, in which Sir Ken paraded around as Rod in his tight leopardskin kecks, his arse expanding to balloon-like proportions as he mimed the number. So the song has an effect on me - it doesn't mean I have to own or like the record, but the keyboardy-intro bit seems so much more whistleable these days than when I was 10, and I lay the blame for that fairly and squarely at the door of Ol' Mother Nostalgia.
Similar principles apply to the music we actually like, to the point where it's impossible to tell how good something really was. Were the Fabs that great? (Sgt Pepper certainly isn't.) Are they rated so highly for their melodic and lyrical craftsmanship, or because theirs was the first serious pop music in many listeners' lives, thereby gaining bonus nostalgia brownie points? Were they just the 1960s equivalent of Busted (at least in the beginning), and we're all too blinded by nostalgia to realise it? If I was the age I am now in 1969, would I dislike The Velvets as much as I dislike Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in 2004? Do I like them because they fit my image of 1960s coolness, and it's much easier to be nostalgic about an era you never actually lived through? I knew I was infected by the virus after watching Pop Idols with some friends; I went off on a rant about how contrived pop music has become, and how no-one rails versus the corporations anymore like the Sex Pistols did. They laughed at my naivety, arguing that the Pistols were as much a product of the industry as Will Gates is, and I could see their point, yet I still get hairs on the back of my neck from the opening riff to 'Pretty Vacant,' while I genuinely can't remember anything performed by S Cowell's brainchildren. As Burt Reynolds says in Boogie Nights, 'If it looks like shit and it tastes like shit, it is shit.'
Nostalgia isn't just about the personal, it's about the hype, and older music, the music we're nostalgic about, accrues more hype than current stuff does. How many times have we seen pop quizzes and Top 100s on Saturday night TV in the past few years? If I keep hearing that I should not only like, but love Elvis (I don't, messily disproving my theory re: nostalgia for eras you never lived through), then I might believe it eventually, maybe after the millionth soundbite. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be; it's now an industry, fed by the demand for cheap clip compilations on telly, by the Internet, by MP3, and by samples of Ye Olde Pop on modern hits. The really depressing thing is that despite having a greater diversity of music available to us than ever before, we seem happy to let the media dictate a categorisation of music into universally-perceived pantheons of 'good' and 'bad': should Rob Williams be voted into the UK Hall of Fame, or are The Blur more worthy of this honour? Does anyone with an IQ above 2 really care? Like that leopard-skinned arse swelling up to resemble a planet where Bet Lynch rules by fear, not everything is so easily classifiable. The lovely thing about true musical nostalgia is that it allows us to make our own minds up about what's in our Top Tens and what isn't, and to the youthful pop-pickers of today, I say this: In the kingdom of the Impressionable, the Hall of Fame is King.
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