Nostalgia as the key element in pop music
The latest sell-out tour by pop extroverts The 1975 is so retro that it’s a surprise concertgoers aren’t handed complimentary Rubik’s Cubes on their way into the venue. The state-of-the-art set is bathed in a fuzzy lava lamp glow that by turns recalls the opening credits of Rainbow and U2’s Zoo TV tour.
Equally steeped in nostalgia is singer Matty Healy’s persona—a delighted-with-itself mash-up of George Michael circa “Wake Me Up Before You Go-go”, Peter Gabriel at the end of the “Sledgehammer” video and David Byrne in “Stop Making Sense” (with just a hint of “Back for Good”-era Robbie Williams).
What’s different is that today’s nostalgia is less a natural response to growing older than an act of wilful reminiscing by artists too young to have any meaningful memories of the era to which they are giving tribute. The 1975’s irrepressible Healy has, for instance, cited Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere” and Madonna’s “Into the Groove” as huge cultural signifiers no matter that the 29-year-old was born long after their mideighties heyday.
Far from outliers, The 1975 are merely part of what looks set to become the definitive pop trend as the decade slouches towards its close. Take “1999”, the dewy-eyed banger by Charli XCX and Troye Sivan, which offers unabashed homage to the tail end of the Nineties. Where once Prince immortalised the eponymous year as the ultimate sci-fi party zone, now it is looked back on as a font of cultural bric-a-brac. Given that she was seven when Britney Spears had her break-out hit, it’s difficult to imagine Charli developing anything beyond the most child-like of relationships with the song first time around. And it’s even harder to picture the then primaryschool attending Essex native “listening to Shady” as she brags in the tune.
But it is important to recognise that this isn’t simply a pop phenomenon. Even genres historically wary of sentimentality have caught the bug. Among a new wave of empowered and outspoken young female songwriters, for instance, a surprising recurrence is their devotion to early Noughties emo tomboy Avril Lavigne.
Dismissed at the time as cynical fluff, the Canadian’s scruffy skater anthems live on 18 years later in the music of artists such as Soccer Mommy and Snail Mail.
Another component of this fractured jigsaw is the remarkable resurgence of Queen. By the mid-eighties—their supposed pomp according to revisionists—freddie Mercury and company were widely perceived as a primordial embarrassment. And this was after their performance at Live Aid in 1985, remembered today as the moment they achieved rock immortality. That is certainly the picture painted by Oscartipped box office smash Bohemian Rhapsody, which reaches its crescendo with Mercury’s big Wembley moment. Yet in reality Queen were the popular punching bag of their era. A 1980 NME review of The Game—headline Flogging a Dead Pantomime—upbraided the group as embodying “everything that was depressing about music… emotional emptiness dressed up as spectacle”.
Nostalgia is obviously not confined to music. Netflix has tapped the collective hankering for times both simpler and grittier with Stranger Things. It is a trick HBO’S True Detective appears to have cribbed with its season three winks towards Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the heavy metal panic of the early Eighties.
But even a cursory survey of rock’ n roll’s medium-term history exposes the folly of such a line of thought. What was Britpop but a spiritual longing for the chirpy post-british Invasion music of the late Sixties and early Seventies? Blur were indebted to the Kinks even though Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon were too young to have first hand memories of Ray Davies’s imperial phase. Ditto Oasis’s worship of The Beatles, who released “I Am the Walrus” the year Noel Gallagher was born. In other words, musicians have always had a fascination with the hazily recollected soundtrack to their childhoods. When The 1975 crib from Talk Talk or repurpose old Joy Division riffs (as they do on tour opener “Give Yourself a Try”) they are merely leaning into one of pop’s defining attributes. Nostalgia, it turns out, is as old as the hills.
THE INDEPENDENT