Nostalgia and Nihilism (A Music Essay)

 

An essay on music... so this is a cool closeup shot of my record player from a photo class in college

       The other day, someone asked me what my “guilty pleasure” song is. I replied very seriously that I don’t have any because I don’t listen to any type of music to be cool. “Guilty pleasure” insinuates that I like a song that is “uncool” and listen when no one is around so no one will think me “uncool.” I listen to whatever I want to, whenever I want to. At least that is what I tell myself. 

In many ways, I am a contrarian. I listen to whatever music genre I deem to be underappreciated by the shallow trends of pop culture. I pride myself on knowing the obscure artists and lyrics to unpopular music of all genres. As soon as a style of music goes mainstream, I drop it like a hot potato. My general rule of thumb is if I hear a particular song over the speakers in a box store or fast food restaurant, I don’t like it anymore, even if I did like it a year or so ago.

It is this unwritten rule that led me to Pop Punk music last year. During the pop-punk heyday of the early 2000’s, I was completely obsessed with Classic Rock music. As my friends dyed their hair and wore all black cargo pants with chains on their wallets, I was putting up posters of the Rolling Stones and listening to Pink Floyd and the Cars. I have a vivid memory as a sophomore on the varsity football team of riding the bus to the game and sharing my Walkman with the star senior running back. He had forgotten his iPod and needed pumpup music.  I had the Talking Heads, Foreigner and Led Zeppelin 2. He flipped through my CD’s in disgust and tossed it back to me and went looking for another underclassman who might have some screamo music.

In the early years of college, as everyone I knew was getting into the hip hop titans like Jay-Z and Drake, I was in a jam band phase, filling my iPod with Phish and Leftover Salmon. Two years later in Alaska, surrounded by Deadheads and Widespread Panic gurus, I would walk through the wilderness to the tune of Eminem and Dr Dre. In Grad School, when the Black Keys and similar rock music became the go-to at parties, I dove down the alt-country rabbit hole. Alternative country scenes to Nashville, like Turnpike Troubadours out of Oklahoma or Tyler Childers from Kentucky were refreshingly different from the sameness of popular music. And then suddenly, everyone wanted alt-country. It is obvious after the fact, but that is when I realized how trends work in popular culture. The music genre was re-dubbed Americana and commercialized across the nation. Now it is ubiquitous in every dive bar and western-themed restaurant thanks to shows like Yellowstone. It is still mostly very good music, but it sometimes sucks to have been a fan of a band or style for a decade and then see all the “trend followers” championing that music as if they aren’t bandwagon fans. If that sounds juvenile, it is. I admitted to being a contrarian in the second paragraph. But since I was feeling angsty about losing “my favorite genre of music” to the mainstream, I went out and found Pop Punk. 

Yes, the same Pop Punk that I hated in high school now is my go-to soundtrack at work twenty years later, much to the chagrin of my neighbors. Too old to connect to the current mainstream scene but not old enough to be considered classic, Pop Punk had disappeared from the radio over the past decade. Yet somehow, this time around, the screaming and wailing sounded good to me. Pounding nails and hanging roofing on my funky hippie compound in Montana, I turned up Paramore and Jimmy Eat World to max volume and thrashed my way through a couple summers and winters. There certainly was an element of nostalgia to the relistening of My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy; remembering a simpler time without so much pressure on my shoulders. There was also the realization that I wasn’t very angsty in my teens, so I didn’t identify so much with the feelings of isolation, social disruption and being misunderstood. And yet, here in my early thirties, all the classic moods of those songs fit my current outlook on the polarized, sarcastic atmosphere in my America these days. Pop Punk makes me feel a bit nostalgic and a bit nihilist. And voila, a new playlist was born on my Spotify. 

There are numerous studies that show how people tend to latch onto a certain musical genre in their early twenties and remain with it for the remainder of their lives. Particularly in men, surveys show how the likelihood of listening to an unfamiliar music style plummets as we age from our late twenties into our early thirties. This explains the phenomenon of why parents always hate the music that their kids listen to and vice versa. Ever one to go against the data, I am determined to keep seeking out new styles of music, as my insatiable appetite for instrumentation grows with each year. Yes, I go through phases with predominant styles, like my current pop-punk phase, but on any given day, a stranger can hear one of a thousand different bands blasting out of my old waterproof speaker on the deck. Since I often wear ear plugs because of the power tools, the music has to be loud enough to hear over the muffs and the skil saws. Last week, I had a 90’s country marathon, followed by George Benson’s Breezin’ album. Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” and Phish’s “Hoist” shared an afternoon. The Mavericks “En Espanol” and Gaslight Anthem’s “American Slang” dueled in the evening hours of Friday and Saturday, before I retreated to William Prince and Muscadine Bloodline for my Sunday morning. God forbid, I think I even put on an Americana playlist when friends stopped by the other day… But today is going to be a front to back scream-o-thon with Avenged Sevenfold and Against Me!