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Can You Overdose on Nostalgia?
Probably, but I am going to try anyway. I have started a new project.
I tried to make a list of the albums that I have listened to the most. I am up to about 50 albums so far, and almost all of them are from late adolescence and young adulthood. This means these are old albums I haven’t listened to in a long time. I listen to one of them every day while I am walking for exercise.
For a small monthly fee, I can listen to every album I have ever heard! The internet is an amazing thing. I have only done this three days so far, but it has brought back memories that might have been lost forever if I had not done that.
Of course, I never know if those memories are real.
Published in General
Wonderful idea, SP! I may have to do the same.
The Matrix has you.
Heh-heh…I do something similar, but opposite. I try to listen to all the albums I never got a chance to listen to.
I was in my formative high school years in the early 70’s where there was so much amazing music being released that, even though I had a sizable record collection and a couple wonderful radio stations on tap, I simply couldn’t keep up with even a tiny fraction of the music. And I’ve always been wondering, what does *that* album sound like.
So every dog walk is an opportunity.
And this applies to classical and jazz also.
Recently: Henry Cow, Keith Jarret, Ralph Vaughn Williams, Tony Williams, Godspell, The Grass Roots, John McLaughlin, Telemann, Paul Williams, Jack Bruce, West Bruce & Laing,…
And podcasts, too.
Dog walks are just wonderful in the 21st century.
Thank you, thank you. I had totally forgotten about Paul Williams and his amazingly soulful voice and bitter sweet lyrics.
And gorgeous melodies. His album “Life Goes On” includes:
I think ” A little bit of love” is the album I played over and over and over. Good times and better memories.
I am constantly overdosing on nostalgia. I hope it’s not fatal.
Currently, I’m in a project to reread a bunch of books I remember reading and liking when I was in my teens and early 20s. Revisiting them in middle age makes for a much different experience, of course.
I did that a few years ago and it was surprising how well most of them held up. That has not been true for movies however. I wonder why that is.
I took up fiddle about 35 years ago playing Irish tunes. It takes a while to get good…and then and I kept playing and now studying classical violin, playing jazz, blues and rock as well. As a youngster in the mid sixties I played guitar, was a pretty good blues player, but didn’t really apply myself and those years were chaotic.
Now I’m learning and playing songs I listened to in my youth. I never, ever thought I would be, or could be doing anything like this.
a few songs I’m learning:
Statesboro Blues Duane’s slide guitar part
Spain, Chick Corea
Sax solo from Stones Can’t you hear me knocking
Meletron solo from Genesis Entangled
And many more.
It’s a special kind of nostalgia.
Music is well connected to memory and I still get images from the old days hearing these songs.
If I hear a song from those days, but I haven’t heard it since it can be pretty powerful, calling up lost memories.
The few books in my life that I have read more than once seem to hold their magic over time. I am not sure if the music of my youth will hold up as well but I hope so. There are not many movies that I have watched repeatedly but I can’t think of any that I would watch if there was a ball game on at the same time.
I played sax years ago. About 7 years ago I rented one for a couple of months just to see if I remembered how to play. It all came back.
One thing I didn’t realize when I was younger is just how physical it can be playing an instrument. The breath support, the weight of the instrument, circular breathing, etc. It took a toll at first.
I’m now in my 7th month of re-learning to play the trumpet after a layoff of 55+ years, and I heartily echo the sentiment about the physicality of playing.
It well may be that in my 70s, I can never fully regain the chops I had when recording in the 60s, but I still like to play the horn. When I tire of doing the technical work, I pull out some charts of old favorites and have a bit of fun, even if I do fracture too many notes. If I ever get to be able to play the pieces from back then, it’ll be like time travel. Heh.
My son who teaches at UNC in Chapel Hill lives in a dump but his living room includes a piano, an electric synthesizer, a drum kit, multiple acoustic and electric guitars, ukuleles, a saxophone, flutes and recorders that are played by all of his kids. His high school band teacher offered anyone in his class who could play a tune on his English horn his English horn. That sits in Scott’s house as well.
Heh. I also played recorder in a Baroque ensemble.
What does your son teach if you don’t mind me asking? Both my kids went to Chapel Hill.
Youngest daughter (18) recently invited a whole drum kit into the house.
Together with the three guitars and the piano, we could start a band!
Need a bass player, Drew.
I picked up his Back to Love album a couple of decades ago. It was a compilation of greatest hits that he released or wrote. He wrote Rainbow Connection and sings it on that album. I adore it.
I just cued up Rainbow Connection at my son’s suggestion, the cover done by Kermit the Frog. Good times, good times.
Stand-up. Don’t let an electric bass player anywhere near your daughters, Drew. They range from sketchy to depraved.
This is the one I’ve probably listened to the most in the last 50+ years. Heard it first in 1970 or so at the student union “listening room” (on 5-foot speakers) and still have it on LP, ITunes, CD, etc.
Oh, she’s working on that, too.
EDIT: I should say, she’s working on learning that, not recruiting that.
Good on her!
I don’t know if this qualifies as nostalgia, or cultural inquiry, or dissatisfaction with modern entertainment (I don’t think I’ve gone to the movies since The Hangover II). But I’ve recently watched a lot of TV shows from the 50s and early 60s, and now movies made between the 20s and the 50s. And they’re really quite good (and no CGI, and the willing suspension of disbelief make the primitive special effects inconsequential in relation to the effect of the many other aspects of the story-telling — men in gorilla suits can still make you go, Oh, No!, at least a little — consider the two gorillas in Trading Places).
But they’re eye-opening to see how people lived in days before my birth. If movies represent the culture in ways that contemporaneous audiences didn’t perceive, cultural differences are rather clear from 50 to 100 years later. They’re kind of subtle, but one thing I noticed was that men don’t so much stand aside and let women pass through doors that they open for them, they take them by the arm and physically push them through. And people touch each other more in common conversation (though I don’t know if this is a theatrical convention, it sure is different from movies today). And people don’t lock their doors. And people carry their cigarettes in cigarette cases, and use wooden matches!
That’s nostalgia for you.
There is a movie in which Humphrey Bogart is desperate to find a pay phone despite being in the middle of nowhere that absolutely wouldn’t work in the cell phone era.
That’s a lot worse than Superman not finding a phone booth. Would that joke go over with today’s youth?
In the original Christopher Reeves Superman, he finds a public phone, but booths were already a thing of the past. It got a laugh from the audience; all but the youngest knew when Clark Kent slowed down to look at the phone while pulling off his tie what he was thinking.
It’s funny you mention technical work. I was mainly a trombone player in my early 20s. I had the discipline to sit in a practice room and play long tones for an hour. Really helped with my tone and endurance. Today, I think I’d quit within 5 minutes. I now mainly play guitar and I know I should spend a couple weeks just doing technical drills. I get bored too easily and want to work on stuff that interests me. I think besides physical limitations, I also am becoming limited in my ability to focus and getting less disciplined because of it. I admire you for doing the real work of trying to become a better player.
Nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be.
Nostalgia? You don’t know what nostalgia is. When I was a child we had to build our own nostalgia out of Lincoln Logs. Oh, those were the good old days.
Cross-checked this with the Boatwife/Cultural Curator:
Has affirmatively not been observed
Has not been noticed
I didn’t inquire: neither of us would notice, since we don’t lock our doors. (We are however, always struck when we see the opposite: people locking their doors.)
The cigarette cases yes. Wooden matches? No. Only nice cigarette lighters.
* * *
Conclusion:
Need more studies to eliminate a possible confounding effect due to sampling biases. (It seems Kate may travel in a better class of movies than you. Have you heard of a Cary Grant?)