The Nostalgic Turn in Music Writing

Ted Gioia on the Nostalgic Turn in Music Writing

It starts with a photo, borrowed from the British writer Simon Warner, of the music magazine shelves in what looks like a typical W.H. Smith (my acquaintance with these generally occurs these days when passing through Heathrow). And indeed when passing through and stopping for a desultory pick-and-flick, I have noticed the profusion of titles to do with the musical past - sometimes precise slivers of the past (the '80s, more or less, with Classic Pop magazine; the '70s, more or less, with Prog) or a through-line across music, as with Electronic Sound, that seems to largely focus on pioneers of the past rather than anyone doing any pioneering today. Then there are all those special editions put out by Uncut and Mojo, one-offs that are midway between a magazine and a slim large-format book, and which are dedicated to a particular Canonical Artist and Their Discography - the contents mixing recycled interviews from the IPC or EMAP archives with new essays that go in depth on particular albums. (The only one I ever bought: Uncut's one on Joni Mitchell).

 This "Nostalgic Turn" does seem to be particularly intense in the UK - I haven't really noticed equivalents in US music publications, when I go and glance at the magazine stands at Vromans in Pasadena. 

Gioia on Warner's Brit newsagents photo: "Even the magazine names reveal a tilt toward nostalgia. I can’t make out the titles in their entirety, but I see the words Retro, Vintage, and Classic. Publishers are shrewd people, and they don’t put these words in large font unless the audience responds to them."

I don't think it's necessarily a Nostalgic Turn in Music Writing (although there are accumulated generations of writers still tapping away at the keyboards, and the older cohorts, like my own, will naturally tend to write about stuff that relates to their formative era more often than the current output). It's more like a  Nostalgic Turn within Music Magazine Publishing - a strategic adjustment to the fact that if there are niche markets still to service, they'll involve those who only really care about the past and who are happy to read and reread endlessly about their cherished icons. 

After all, even the impulse to pick up a solid-form print-and-paper magazines is a middle-aged and elderly proclivity. (I recently quizzed my students about their music-media diet - only one out of 20 ever looked at print mags, most didn't even read online magazines - news and views reach them through social media, YouTube reviewers, and, for a few, podcasts). 

Then you get the ostensibly "current affairs" music magazines, whose primary orientation is to the present output - but there's still a lot of Lists sorting through History and ranking classics - greatest ever dance songs, best songs of a particular year, or a particular decade, or All Time in a particular genre. And always loads of legacy artists being profiled and career-surveyed. Big box sets spurring a fresh spurt of reassessment. And then the tributes, the elegies, the obituary paeans. 

Gioia: "Things weren’t always like this. Go back and look at old issues of Rolling Stone or Downbeat or some other music magazine—there were years in which every cover story was about a living person and usually someone young with something new to say. "

As he acerbically points out, the cover stars of today are often the same cover stars of yesteryear - those old familiar faces, sometimes battered and worse for wear, but sometimes it'll be a back in the day photo of the artist in their youthful prime that gets used. 

 Gioa has some more general comments on an aversion to the new in the current music scene, based on the persistence of older records in the charts and other hard-stats kind of info. Then he offers this striking image: 

"It's almost as if the entire music distribution system is rejecting new songs the way a human body rejects an organ transplant. And we know where that inevitably leads—the host body’s death."