Music and nostalgia

[pmv]

Browsing YouTube, something that occurred to me, is how hearing music from decades ago can really make you feel nostalgic. OK, that's a banal observation. But the funny part is, it seems as if, for me anyway, it only really works for music I didn't like enough at the time to actually go out and buy the record. Music that I really _liked_ I've tended to listen to so much over the intervening years that it's entirely lost any sense of an association with any particular time in my life. The music that really makes me feel wistful is the stuff that I liked a bit, that I heard simply because it was on the radio a lot at the time, but which I never liked enough to buy it or to seek it out again. Turns out that stuff is uniquely powerful at bringing back memories.

Now I find myself trying to think of music that I heard a lot decades ago, but, crucially, that I didn't like enough at the time to actually buy it, just to get another hit of that melancholy feeling of being taken back to the past. Turns out there's not a lot in that category - I've been too keen on buying music in the past, dammit.

Is this just me? Anyone else find that old music they only moderately liked back then, now has a stronger effect, due to the memories associated with it?

 

[stargazr]

Yeah, music is entwined with our past. I definitely get the nostalgic part. Having said that, I either like something or I don't. I do go back and explore my old favorites for albums I never really heard.

 

[lxskllr]

I don't listen to much music I heard in "real time". The 80s can go to hell AFAIC. Listening to big band makes me nostalgic, but that was before my time.

 

[dasherHampton]

Music is absolutely gains nostalgia, especially as you age. For me music attached to something in real life can make me especially melancholy.

When I listen to something like this:

it absolutely tugs at my heartstrings. I've made endlessly clear my disdain for how the series ended, and how the showrunners grasped desperately for mediocrity when they had greatness within their reach.

But I still remember to this day how much fun I had watching the series with my friends, how great the season finale parties were, how much fun it was to guess what was going to happen week to week, the grating impatience between seasons etc.

And that time is gone. Forever. Nothing can ever bring it back.

We've all gone our separate ways the past 10 years and I rarely have any contact with my old LOST group. Those simple notes in that song had hardly any emotional depth back then. Now they encapsulate all of the nostalgia I feel for that time period.

 

[UsandThem]

When listening to most of my music collection, I can usually remember things from when I first heard a song. Parties, out driving around with friends or out on dates, etc. Many of the hit songs also remind me of seeing the music videos on MTV for the first time. Music videos like Tool's 'Prison Sex', Motley Crue's 'Girls, Girls, Girls', and Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' really are still really memorable.

For the last 10 years or so, I've been buying a lot of albums from the 70s, 80s, and 90s that I never had access to when I was young. I grew up pretty poor, so I didn't have much of a music collection. Up until I was 18, I pretty much relied on radio to hear anything, so I was only familiar only with the hits that made it on the air.

Now that I have had the chance to listen to full albums, there is so much great music that I never new existed. It's kind of how I stumbled into Pink Floyd. The local radio stations pretty much only played very few songs like Money, Another Brick In The Wall Part II, Comfortably Numb, or Wish You Were Here. Of course those are good songs, but when you here the same few songs over and over, you kind of begin to tune them out. However, once I came across their expanded catalog, I was hooked. But of course a person never would have heard songs like Echoes, Dogs, or Shine On You Crazy Diamond on most radio stations.

 

[pmv]

Oh, on the topic of feeling melancholy, there are a couple of songs I can hardly bear to listen to, for that reason, due to being associated with bad times. But it's definitely the case that for most music it seems I've managed to 'wear out' that nostalgia effect, by listening to it too frequently over the decades. So I only suddenly found how strong that feeling can be when stumbling on things in that 'quite liked but didn't buy' category. I suppose music can be like a drug - you get immune to it from over-use.

 

[brianmanahan]

does it make you feel freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

free fallin?