The other day, I saw this tweet by a popular data journalist (who I will not be naming) that suggested musicians in 2021 are nowhere near as good, or as talented, as musicians were 30 years ago, in 1991. For proof, the author cited such records as:
Reba McIntyre’s For My Broken Heart
Nirvana’s Nevermind
Genesis’s We Can’t Dance
I think one of them might not belong, but I digress. Statements like this are the bread and butter of a certain type of twitter user, the kind of person Noah Smith has dubbed “The Shouting Class”: people who game the algorithm with intentionally provocative statements meant to generate outrage and, in turn, drive up their engagement numbers. It doesn’t matter if the original tweet’s author really believes that music in 2021 sucks or not, the only thing that matters is the way it pisses a certain kind of person off and gets them to quote-tweet it, further driving up the amount of people who see the original tweet.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what people on the political right do all the time. It’s a tried and true formula, and the only proper way to deal with it is to block the original user and move on. But it did get me thinking about something: the nostalgia trap and the way we’re constantly redefining the boundaries of so-called “Classic Rock.”
Let’s take a step back for a moment. Classic Rock is a genre that doesn’t have any set definitions or boundaries; rhythms can be hard-driving and frantic or laid back and slow, the music can be melodic or hard-edged and grating. It’s a genre where something as chill as Jackson Browne’s “Running On Empty” sits comfortably next to something as hard-edged as The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” and next to the long, free-flowing jams on Live Dead. Classic Rock doesn’t represent anything specific, just evokes an era of when you’re young and experiencing things for the first time.
Which is the danger of the nostalgia trap. Baby Boomers love to suggest that rock music peaked in the 70s and it was a time when good music was all over the radio and TV. But let’s take a brief glance at the Billboard charts. In 1978, for example, the top-selling record was the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, not something generally considered part of the classic rock canon. The top-selling single was Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing,” with the Bee Gee’s “Night Fever” hot on its tail.
Memory clouds even the best of minds, and nostalgia’s a trick that happens to the best of us.
But the original post is about 1991 - a year where nostalgia tells us that grunge broke through into the mainstream and revitalized a genre. But a quick glance at the charts tells us that:
The best-selling record was Mariah Carey’s self-titled debut
The top single was Bryan Adams’s weepy “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”
Indeed, Vanilla Ice topped the Billboard top 200 for eight weeks that year, as did Garth Brooks. Meanwhile, on the singles chart, names like EMF, Timmy T and Color Me Badd all graced the top ten - while Nirvana, the record the data journalist suggests exemplified the year’s merits, isn’t anywhere on the list (they’d only show up the next year, albeit behind artists like Sir Mix-A-Lot and Kris Kross).
There’s a phenomenon one encounters in youth, where everything seems magical and exciting and brand new, experiences that feel like they’re out of the movies and nobody has ever felt before. This happens because one’s never experienced them before: the first time someone stays up all night at Nuit Blanche, the first time you get to see a band you love up close and personal, the first time you’re really moved by a book or movie. These feelings are so powerful because they’re new to you, not because they’re experiences nobody’s ever had before.
And that’s okay, everyone goes through it. My dad looks back fondly at shows he went to over 40 years ago and says musicians were better then. Maybe they were (but I doubt it), but maybe he’s viewing stuff through that prism: it was exciting to see Jaco Pastorius live and yes, he was a seminal bassist, but also getting to see a musician of that calibre up close in a nightclub, well, that’s going to colour one’s memory a little bit.
There are ways to avoid the nostalgia trap. You can constantly keep exposing yourself to new ideas and art; you can look back at hard sources and see what was really happening at the time. But mostly, I’d suggest that you avoid leading with your gut and making a blanket assumption: to simply write off a entire year’s worth of music isn’t just lazy, it’s stupid. Even if it drives clicks.