Uses of Nostalgia

 

 

Music has become very postmodern in the sense that architecture or painting became postmodern. Architectural postmodernism, which started around 1980, was a reaction to minimalism by pulling out the stops on decoration. That same moment happened in music around the same time with MTV, with the "decoration" manifesting as a focus on image.

In art, postmodernism was a return to representation (the works of Basquiat for example). In music, it was an evolution from simply listening to music as a singular experience to one that required visuals, but was ironically the opposite of visual art in the sense that was made more abstract and perhaps surreal by using film techniques from early/mid 20th century (Man Ray, Luis Bunuel, Maya Deren and others). Painting was reviving something and music was looking for a way to extend what pop music could be using other domains.

What are we seeking to restore? Perhaps it's simply a matter of nostalgia and the challenge is choosing the right nostalgia for the occasion. In the West we're disabused of making difficult choices, such as choosing a revival in the arts. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the only choice was whatever would be created in the future, because the extant nostalgias were not an option.

As the late Svetlana Boym said in her book The Future of Nostalgia--way back in 2001 when the advent of the Internet began disrupting culture in a big way:

"With the waning of the role of the art and humanities, there are fewer and fewer venues for exploring nostalgia, which is compensated for with an overabundance of nostalgic readymades. The problem with prefabricated nostalgia is that it does not help us to deal with the future. Creative nostalgia reveals the fantasies of the age, and it is in those fantasies and potentialities that the future is born. One is nostalgic not for the past the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been. It is this past perfect that one strives to realize in the future."

 

(3/2021)