infobong.com

One of the issues we're exploring in my "Media/History/Collective Memory" class is nostalgia. We're looking at how it can be invoked for political purposes (generally on the right) or as a marketing tool. The New York Times has a story today about how many eighties bands are retooling, but having a hard time marketing themselves. Apparently, my generation doesn't idealize the 1980s the way that Baby Boomers romanticized the 1960s.

Certainly the cultural conditions of the 1980s were different from those of the 1960s, making it more difficult for folks my age to feel nostalgic about the Reagan era, but I also wonder if there were institutional conditions within the music industry that also generated products with a short shelf-life. For example, in the 1960s FM radio was still a frontier for commercial broadcasting - for much of the decade FM transmitters were largely used to simulcast AM programming. In the late 60s, FM radio was accessible to low-paid DJs who could introduce the public to favorite records and enjoyed a great deal of latitude over their broadcast. In contrast, FM listeners overtook AM listeners in the early 80s, and by then had become an important outlet for record labels to promote bands. It had become another arm of an increasingly corporatized music industry.

I'm on the tail of Generation X, and I enjoyed a lot of eighties music in high school: bands like Talking Heads and New Order were old bands from a different era. Still, I'd have a hard time enjoying more commericial bands from the early eighties. I sometimes listen to a retro hour on a local radio station, and I'm dismayed when they'll play a song that was released when I was in high school or - even worse - in college. I'll think, "Pavement isn't retro... yet." But I suppose, for the purposes of radio programming, anything that is off the rotation and the listeners want to hear is "retro.