# Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be!



## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

In these uncertain times I find that I’m not interested in listening to much that is new and I find myself listening to stuff that I bought in the sixties when I was in my mid teens. I find it comforting and it brings back memories of people and places that were incredibly important to me at the time. I look around at my contemporaries and panic about who of my family and friends might not make it through this crisis and I need something to calm me down. 

Anyone else think the same?


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

Barbebleu said:


> In these uncertain times I find that I'm not interested in listening to much that is new and I find myself listening to stuff that I bought in the sixties when I was in my mid teens. I find it comforting and it brings back memories of people and places that were incredibly important to me at the time. I look around at my contemporaries and panic about who of my family and friends might not make it through this crisis and I need something to calm me down.
> 
> Anyone else think the same?


Comforting is the key word. And not just music. Comfort food, old movies. I'm in NYC, which, in itself, is a cause for panic not just about others, but myself (age 67 with no underlying health conditions, fortunately).

Right now listening to an album of Ben Webster ballads.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Barbebleu said:


> In these uncertain times I find that I'm not interested in listening to much that is new and I find myself listening to stuff that I bought in the sixties when I was in my mid teens. I find it comforting and it brings back memories of people and places that were incredibly important to me at the time. I look around at my contemporaries and panic about who of my family and friends might not make it through this crisis and I need something to calm me down.
> 
> Anyone else think the same?


We share the feelings of concern for family and friends, especially the ones in the danger groups. The nostalgia part has been with me for a long time already (turning 63 in a few weeks). Our car MP3 USB stick has hundreds of songs from 1974-1984, the years I went to university (including PhD). Good times, good memories. But I do listen to new stuff as well (I have Steven Wilson's upcoming album on order, delivery June).


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## Helgi (Dec 27, 2019)

I find myself listening to a lot of recordings from the 1950s now, from around the time when my parents were born. Certainly more comforting than the music I listened to when I was a teenager in the '90s :lol:


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

Art Rock said:


> We share the feelings of concern for family and friends, especially the ones in the danger groups. The nostalgia part has been with me for a long time already (turning 63 in a few weeks). Our car MP3 USB stick has hundreds of songs from 1974-1984, the years I went to university (including PhD). Good times, good memories. But I do listen to new stuff as well (I have Steven Wilson's upcoming album on order, delivery June).


Oh, I'm still buying and listening to new stuff ( just got the new Nadia Reid album. Brilliant. ) just not as much at the moment.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

jegreenwood said:


> Right now listening to an album of Ben Webster ballads.


That sounds wonderful.


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

FOr non classical right now I am lookin at Johnny Cash and Joe Cocker.


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## senza sordino (Oct 20, 2013)

I'm very vulnerable to nostalgia. I'm always thinking of the past, in a kind of sentimental and yearning way. I am realistic enough to realize that I can't go back, and I am not paralyzed by the future. But I look upon my past with a sense of longing and what ifs. 

I listen to a lot of music from the 1960s, 1970s and some music from the 1980s. I was born in the 1960s. In the 1980s I was listening to music from the 1960s and 1970s. I have never really listened to contemporary music at any point in my life. 

I emigrated just before my tenth birthday. I have left my home, my true home, both temporally and physically. Yet, I often wonder what if I had stayed in the UK? 

And it certainly wasn't all rosy in my past, as a teen I was a pimply bullied introvert. We emigrated and I am convinced I achieved more than I would have had I stayed in the UK. We were lower middle class, council estate renters. 

I have a very chronologically ordered mind, I know what happened when. People ask me when did this or that happen? When did we go there? I always know the month and year something happened. I don't seem to forget anything that happened in my life, I know what and when it happened and it sticks with me forever filling my brain with ever more memories and nostalgia. 

I am moving forward with one foot forward but the other is behind.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Not being particularly prone to nostalgia, I listen to music from the 1940s to today without dwelling much on the notion of times past and Remember When. I've found that if I liked it then, I like it now, just as much. Perhaps the closest I get to something vaguely like nostalgia is when I speculate that others today listening to some piece that I've loved for, say, 60 years, won't or don't or can't love it as I can and do as a piece fresh and fully alive. I believe that, in some important ways, I never grew up. There may be pluses and minuses to that, but it serves to keep one's musical memory bank always fresh and well-stocked, without much of a hint of nostalgia.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

senza sordino said:


> I have a very chronologically ordered mind, I know what happened when. People ask me when did this or that happen? When did we go there? I always know the month and year something happened. I don't seem to forget anything that happened in my life, I know what and when it happened and it sticks with me forever filling my brain with ever more memories and nostalgia.
> 
> I am moving forward with one foot forward but the other is behind.


I am of the same type - I have a very good memory of the past. I do feel regret when I think of the past, but wouldn't particularly want it back again, as I've always suffered from anxiety, and it was if anything more intense when I was younger. The only thing I'd like back is the ability to talk to my mother and grandmother. I still miss them.

But the past always does have power - sometimes evoking a fond chuckle, as today, when we used the word 'gonk' in a word puzzle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonk

I was in my early teens at the time, and remember the craze, though I didn't quite understand why people wanted them. At the same time 'squashed Viking' ornaments appeared in the window of our local upmarket furniture store, Hunter & Smallpage. These I considered witty, but fiendishly unaffordable at 29 shillings and 11 pence each. I can't find an image of them, but you looked down on them from above, saw a horned helmet and some bristly hair underneath, and a spear poked up from the outstretched arm.

AT the same time there was a fashion for us teenage dolly birds to wear wooden hedgehog brooches on our coats, with bristles for spines and little glass jewel eyes. So *sweet*, we thought.










The music of choice was the early Beatles output - I still enjoy it, and particularly the harmonica on *Love Me Do*.





I remember the feeling of excitement at hearing the Top Ten played on the radio or TV, and the adventurousness of feeling cool and fashionable and young in my reversible poplin mack.

This cool stage of my life lasted about eighteen months. By the age of fourteen, I was sensible and middle-aged again.


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## Room2201974 (Jan 23, 2018)

******Spoken in my best Louis Renault voice******

"I'm shocked, shocked that nostalgia is going on in a forum dedicated to music that is hundreds of years old." 


Long ago I realized that I was not fond of the music in the periods of my life that were crappy while loving the music of the periods in my life that were great. Since nostalgia cuts both ways for me, I have a tendency to avoid the music of the crappy times. I just do.

Having observed this many decades ago it also became apparent to me how subjective "liking" something is and it tempered my belief in the concept of the "greatest."


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