Issue 12: Nostalgia is Bullshit

As I get older, I often find it harder and harder to avoid slipping into the comfortable mindset of a curmudgeon, remembering how great pop culture was when I was a kid and how things today pale in comparison. Luckily, I am routinely saved by realizations like that there are routinely great Spider-Man cartoons being made – Brian Michael Bendis is a writer on the next one! – and that with the exception of Batman: The Animated Series, most of what I liked as a kid really doesn’t seem that good when viewed now. Nostalgia, it seems, is frequently bullshit.

I’m not saying new is better. I’m not saying old is bad. I love discovering anything good, regardless of when it was made. There were some fine movies made way back when! Heck, Nosferatu is my favourite horror movie of all time namely because it was the first one that freaked the shit out of me when I was a kid. I was at a sleepover and I got so scared I had to run upstairs to get away from it. Later than night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would end up begging my friend’s parents to call my parents so that I could go home.

Ah, memories.

But that doesn’t mean that all the horror movies that came after it were awful, you know? For all I know, there are great horror movies being made all the time, they’re just not the ones that live inside my memories as living shadows that have privately terrified me for years, and that is perfectly okay.

This is why I often find it so frustrating when people bitch about the present as if everything good is gone from popular media. Nobody reads. The only movies are remakes that suck. Pop music is awful. Everything used to be great and now it’s ruined. Weren’t things great way back when? Maybe it’s the eighties. Maybe it’s earlier. The point is, to these people, it’s better because they’re not now and now sucks.

All this is on my mind right now because, as occasionally happens, someone has decided to make a list where they complain about how awful today is, by virtue of facts that they claim prove that this is a cultural apocalypse. The list is nothing spectacular. Creed has outsold Jimi Hendrix. Barbra Streisand has sold more records than Pearl Jam, Johnny Cash and Tom Petty combined. “Tik Tok” has sold more than any Beatles single. Blah blah blah snob talk blah blah blah, frankly.

First of all, what the hell is wrong with Barbra Streisand? “Tik Tok” is great. And while Creed isn’t exactly my “thing,” who am I to say that the people who love watching Scott Stapp’s hair majestically blow in the wind are wrong? Nobody, that’s who. I’m just some jackhole on the internet who things Batman is keen. Chances are, so are you. Welcome to the club! Isn’t Batman great?

The fact that I won’t deride someone else’s choices should be no surprise, I have an entire series on this site devoted to loving things like Spider-Man 3. It’s pretty much the motto of the whole site. No, what might surprise you is that most of those figures and the comparisons are absolute bunk because as it turns out, sales metrics from completely different times can’t be compared that easily. Why has “Tik Tok” outsold the Beatles singles in direct comparisons? Maybe it’s because nowadays my phone can be used to buy a song that is perpetually available in unlimited quantities in an indefinite period of time on the iTunes store, whereas there’s been no way to buy a Beatles single that wasn’t second-hand in a few decades. Or because “single” back then in sales data meant an individual vinyl release featuring b-sides whereas today’s sales numbers are based around the number of times someone clicks “Buy” next to one song on an album’s iTunes page. Or because there are more people around today to buy music, which dovetails nicely with the fact that a giant portion of these people can buy them via beams that shoot through the air, using money that doesn’t actually exist in the physical world. In the 1960s, people couldn’t buy “Hey Jude” while they pooped unless they had some really weird boundary issues.

Does this mean people think Ke$ha is better and more historically significant than the Beatles, which the doomsayers are generally shouting? No. It means the system is better designed now to facilitate individual song purchases over a sustained period of time than it was back during the 1960s, when people didn’t own magic space phones they could carry anywhere that were smaller than their wallet.

And sure, I bet you can find someone who says that Bruce Springsteen and Jimi Hendrix are shit while the Black Eyed Peas are the best thing in existence, ever. That is the magic of opinions: everybody has them and they are frequently different! If I tweet that I picked up a Tim Hortons coffee one morning and someone tweets back that my decision was stupid, that doesn’t have to mean anything. Life is easier once you realize that the feelings you have about the things you love don’t have to be influenced in any way by someone else’s. Remember: nothing makes the cruelty of saying that Justin Bieber’s existence as a person is wrong because you don’t like his music okay. He’s a human fucking being whose only crime is making some songs you don’t like. The only thing his existence proves is that at one point his parents probably had sex. What of it?

But here’s a secret though, just for fun [Ed. Note: Spoiler alert, it was in the first paragraph!]: nostalgia is bullshit. When we look back at 1969, it’s easy to imagine that Led Zeppelin was universally beloved like they are now, my less than praiseful opinion of “Stairway to Heaven, which once almost got me in a fistfight at a bar, notwithstanding. And yet, Billboard’s top single of the year was “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies, which is fantastic, by the way, but certainly not “cool.” Sometimes the music we think was the best now was a chart-topper at the time. Sometimes, it wasn’t. It doesn’t mean I love R.E.M. any less.

The benefit of the passage of time is nostalgia, which by definition involves remembering things in a positive light. We remember the best things about music and TV and movies from ages past, forgetting that the year that brought us film classics like Seven Samurai and A Streetcar Named Desire also saw the release of Teenage Cave Men and The Giant Gila Monster, or that while Gunsmoke and Bonanza were great, there was a glut of TV westerns that we’ve forgotten because they weren’t very memorable. Even film noir, which I love and which has since been rediscovered for its considerable artistic merits, was at the time considered to be inartistic low budget shit for the masses, fronted by men who didn’t look like they could carry a major studio picture and women with “bedroom eyes,” which was studio executives’ nice way of saying that they looked like sluts. Yes, Marilyn Monroe was beautiful and talented. She was also grossly unprofessional and deeply troubled. Yes, Sean Connery is and was a fine piece of ass. He also has some less than wonderful opinions about how sometimes a man should just hit his woman. The 1960s were full of social injustice and turmoil, not the cultural utopia we often try to remember it as. The Beatles making great records doesn’t mean that things were any better for black people, women or LGBTQ. We remember the best and forget the rest, which is fine sometimes but results in a lot of naïve jackassery today.

Every generation thinks the new one is going to ruin everything. And yet we’re still here. Our grandparents hated the Beatles. My great aunt broke one of my dad’s albums over her knee because she thought Bill Cosby was evil. Bill Cosby.

We’re still here, making records and producing TV shows and movies like it’s going out of style. The era that articles like the one earlier complains about also produced Radiohead, Wilco, the National and an uncountable number of other wonderful musicians. Sure, it made The Jersey Shore, which people complain about but I haven’t really seen, so who knows? It also made Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The West Wing and Community. I don’t know what the top grossing movie was last weekend, but I saw Drive and it was a beautifully shot and acted masterpiece. Art finds a way, like Jeff Goldblum once said. Or maybe he was talking about dinosaurs. Whatever.

So calm down and buck up. Yeah, Sturgeon’s Law says that 90% of every artistic medium is shit. Sure, there’s more media than ever being made and consumed these days, which means there’s more shit than ever. It also means there are more things being made than ever for you to love, and before long that’s what you’re going to remember anyway. We remember the good cartoons from our childhood and before we know it, we’ll remember the good stuff from today. That’s the wonderful insanity that is nostalgia.