Set adrift on memory bliss full#

“It was the first music I ever heard.” (It will not surprise you to learn that I recentlyĪsked one of my former students why she loved ‘80s music so much and she said, Something deeply wrong about the fact that IĮffect what I was fighting against was their parents’ record collections. There were “just no good bands these days.” Even back then I knew there was My tertiary lecturing years (in the early noughties) I was frequentlyĪstonished by the ferocity of my young charges passionate declarations that My eyebrows rise when I hear young people, (who should know better), spouting the same tired cant.

Set adrift on memory bliss full#

May well just be the inevitable and pardonable corollary of age, (you’ve seenĮverything go full circle and it’s just not as interesting this time round) yet Life was simpler, the drugs were better and theīands were simply brilliant compared to today’s pale imitations. Just as every teenage generation thinks it is in the process of inventing sexĪnd naughtiness, so every wave of middle agers comes to believe that things Write songs like they used to is enshrined in our shared cultural experience. The idea that somehow civilisation has passed its zenith and that they don’t Wonder the marketing bods ruthlessly target it, selling us our own memories. At its core is the commodification of wistful regret, of our slow tiring, of our forlorn wish to be young again. The rock & roll nursing home is built on the myth of former glory. No disrespect to the Spandaus but back in ‘83 could anyone have reasonably foreseen that thirty years down the track roomfuls of misty eyed forty somethings would pay good money to croon along to True and Muscle Bound? Such is the gravitational power of nostalgia. Okay stop! Tony Hadley singing the hits of Spandau Ballet? Is that what passes for gold these days? Clearly, memory has a transfigurative effect. The once bohemian heartland of St Kilda scream out knee blanket names like GoldFM, or that the bill posters that line the walls of the Palais Theatre in Perhaps it is not surprising that this year’s summer festival line-up reeks of The mellifluous, reassuring voice on the radio said it all: “Music from the time of your life.” That the next song was Nirvana Come As You Are was truly horrific not simply because Kurt & Co had been co-opted by the queasy listening classic hits community or even that I was showing my age, but that what was being sold was the idea that the best years of my life had been and gone, and that by gluing the dial to the past I could revel forever in some halcyon fantasy land, where life was sooo much simpler and I could still get laid. Though some of the particular examples are dated … oh no, wait a minute, that’s the point. Note: This piece was originally composed in October 2013 and was an op ed for an independent music magazine here in Australia. The making and marketing of legislated nostalgia