The Limits of Nostalgia

By Gordon Hopkins Nostalgia is an odd thing. It's a subject I've mused upon many times before, as do a lot of men of a certain age (aka: old guys). To hear old guys tell it, today we live in an awful world, filled with awful people, doing awful things and listening to awful, awful music.To a substantial degree, this assessment is correct. One only needs to point to the existence of the internet, reality TV and Nicki Minaj to make the case. Of course, my father felt the same way. He made his case with cable TV and Billy Idol.The problem is not just that the world keeps changing, because it always has. It is that the pace of that change keeps accelerating. The world has changed more in the last five years that it had in the previous 15 years, and the 50 years before that. And it all keeps happening while I keep getting older.In other words, change gets faster while I get slower. That is the formula for nostalgia. It only makes sense that folks my age look around the world and think, “It didn't use to be like this.” What I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the nostalgia that some people feel for a time they never lived through. This eighties nostalgia is huge right now and the biggest fans aren't folks like me, who lived through that neon-lit decade, but kids who weren't even born yet. Heck, some of their parents weren't even born yet. Eighties nostalgia has spread among our children, like a fuchsia-and-indigo-colored infection.It is certainly not unheard of for a younger generation to “rediscover” the music of their parents. The eighties was a significant time in music history because it saw the advent of MTV, which transmogrified music from something you listened to on the radio to something you watched on television. While it was a significant era for music, from an evolutionary standpoint, there was no really significant songs produced in the eighties. Sure, the sixties and the seventies gave the world silliness like Herman's Hermits and disco, but it also produced some of the most genuinely important songs ever. You can't say that about any song doing the rotation on MTV. (Anybody who brings up U2's “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or Public Enemy's “Fight The Power” is gonna get smacked in the head.) It isn't just the music, though, but the whole aesthetic that kids are adopting, some even getting obsessed with. Obsessed is not hyperbole, by the way. Some kids today couldn't get more eighties if they were hanging out with Ronald Reagan and Max Headroom, wearing leg warmers and listening to the J. Geils Band while hanging out in a video arcade in a Jay McInerney novel. The haze of nostalgia, even for someone who lived through those times, can be misleading. The eighties wasn't all Ferris Bueller and New Coke and Rubik's Cubes. Bizarrely, the world now finds itself living through an eighties flashback. We are getting to experience a part of the whole eighties, uh, experience that, like most, I was happy to put behind me. Two weeks ago, shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began and, more significantly, shortly after it began going badly for the Russians, Vladimir Putin put his country's nuclear weapons on high alert.Suddenly, the fear of nuclear Armageddon has become a real thing, once again. (Spellcheck insisted “Armageddon” be capitalized, even though I'm not talking about that terrible Bruce Willis movie, so I doubled checked and, sure enough, the word is capitalized. Go figure.) Radioactive annihilation was a cottage industry in the eighties. One of the most famous movies, perhaps most representative of the era, was not “Sixteen Candles” but “The Day After,” a star-studded angst-fest about American life after the bombs fall. It was so depressing it made Kafka look like Pee-Wee Herman.It is hard for some to understand that an era that seemed so goofy, a candy-colored, retro-futuristic haze that gave the world Mr. T and Clara Peller (“Where's the beef?”) could also give children night sweats as they imagined someone “pressing the button” and ending the world. Well, now they don't have to imagine.

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