"Why listen to the new bands that sound like the old bands when the old bands will be back before you know it?"

"It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday. No, honestly — it’s practically impossible, especially in an age of cyclical nostalgia and Internet-assisted memories. Old musical acts have always gone on comeback tours, but these days the disappearances are getting shorter and nostalgia is fully taking its place alongside discovery as a valid aesthetic-appreciation strategy. Why listen to the new bands that sound like the old bands when the old bands will be back before you know it?" - Jon Caramanica, in the New York Times, on the return to stages this year of Fleetwood Mac and New Kids On the Block.

Elsewhere  in today's Times, Jon Pareles on the reactivation of side project bands -- the Postal Service and The Breeders - which is to say more nostalgia / reunion / generationally-oriented marketing.

And Ben Ratliff on the resurgence of hardcore, with  a freakily large number of hardcore oriented festivals, the partial reunion of Black Flag as Flag, "the influential early-’80s band Negative Approach" playing at Damaged City Fest in Washington DC in April, etc etc.

I bought the Negative Approach LP (Tied Down) at the time (1983). I could never have imagined that hardcore punk would even exist in 2013  -- thirty years later - let alone be newsworthy.