#Constructed Nostalgia for Rock’s Golden Age: “I Believe in Yesterday” La nostalgie construite Volume !, Numéros Volume !, Documents -- La revue des musiques populaires AccueilTous les numéros11 : 1Rock & chansonConstructed Nostalgia for Rock’s ... -- Rock & chanson Constructed Nostalgia for Rock’s Golden Age: “I Believe in Yesterday” Deena Weinstein -- The phenomenon of rock’s past having occluded its present is examined through the intentionality that grounds it culturally. Specifically, neo-nostalgia (Jameson) and similar postmodern terms (simulation, construction) constitute the intentionality and the commercial interests of the music industry and the generational power of the Baby Boomers and Gen X are the structural determinants. Neo-nostalgia for rock’s past is directed toward an aestheticized imaginary of rock’s golden age — a mythical time that never was, rather than a supposed eternal transcendent (religion) or an individualized empirical past (homesickness). Nostalgia for a construction, fabricated for corporate profit and generational/parental power, is a depthless and riskless adventure for a generation that experiences severe constraints on its -- Keywords: memory / nostalgia / retro, music / recording industry, mainstream / commercialism / commodification, marketing / communication / advertising, authenticity, age / generation, archives / reissues / -- Rock Zombies Invade The Living Constructed Nostalgia Commodification of Nostalgia Youth without Youth Conclusion -- Knebworth festival Afficher l’image 1Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be and neither is rock. In a sense, rock today is even more what it used to be while nostalgia, especially nostalgia about rock music, has changed so much that it deserves a new name. It once referred to direct experience; now it is mainly a cultural construction, so it would be more precise to refer to it as cultural nostalgia. Both nostalgia and rock have had their own histories, the first as old as the human past itself, and, the second inaugurated in the middle of the last century. The relationship between nostalgia and rock has flipped – originally nostalgia was often influenced by rock, whereas today rock is impelled by nostalgia’s new incarnation. The following discussion traces the conjunction of rock and nostalgia in terms of a general (post-modern) cultural analysis and its social-structural grounds. -- Thinking””. Constructed Nostalgia 11Rock hasn’t changed to become exactly what it used to be. It carries a severely edited version of its past with many artists and recordings redacted, and others, especially those from the late 1960s and early 1970s, bolded and underlined. On the other hand, nostalgia is something more than it has been with a history far older than the word itself. The oldest form of nostalgia, first documented in those who lived and died in the same community in which they were born, was for some mythic past. It was a past when the gods interacted with humans. In -- Eden. It was the home of human beings, the home of us all, a wonderful place-time to which we could never “return,” providing that dual sweet and bitter feeling that characterizes nostalgia. 12Nostalgia’s second incarnation, adding to but not erasing that originary type, began once there were armies stationed or fighting for years in foreign lands, sailors, traders, or explorers discovering “new worlds,” and whole communities forced from their ancestral lands. This new type was a longing to return to a real, not ideal, site, in which people once lived. By the 17^th century, such nostalgia was understood, at least by the Swiss whose mercenary armies experienced it, as a medical problem. Many soldiers pining for home physically deteriorated -- doctor Johannes Hofer, who coined his neologism in 1688 from two Greek words, nost (return or home) and algia (pain) (Hofer, 1688). This pre-industrial denotation of nostalgia as a desire to return to one’s native land, or the bittersweet memories of it, persisted and is still in use. For example, the Irish escaping famine and populating the -- in shebeens and then saloons and sing Irish songs (Rosenzweig, 1983). Perhaps for some, the object of nostalgia is a place, but, less than a century later, one of Hofer’s countrymen, Jean Jacques Rousseau, would interpret the term in a broader way. In his Dictionary of Music, -- childhood as his youth itself. He is not straining toward something which he can repossess, but toward an age which is forever beyond his reach” (Kant, 1798: 95). Rousseau and Kant comprehend nostalgia as it has mainly been understood in the modern world. Lunching with a friend, a professor of art about 50 years old, I asked him about the music he -- him a strong sense of his self? “Yes, definitely.” 14The third incarnation of nostalgia is the meaning that characterizes the current period and that applies to the domination of rock’s past over its present. Whereas originary nostalgia was directed toward a mythical “golden age” that was deemed to have existed and was lost, and modern nostalgia refers to an individualized experienced past that can no longer be recovered, contemporary nostalgia is a construct of the communications media that is directed to a simulation of a de-individualized empirical past that never existed as such and is not directly part of the lives of the individuals who experience the nostalgia. 15Contemporary nostalgia is neither for everyone’s personal past nor for a concrete individual’s life history, but for a social construction. It is constructed nostalgia that the students who would prefer to have lived in the 1960s or in some later decades of the twentieth century, feel (e.g. “I would have rather been a teenager in -- rock functions here as a “memorative sign” for a representation, a sign for a sign. As Pickering and Keightley (2006: 929) grasp it, contemporary nostalgia is self-referential: the individual who feels it is engaged in a process of “mediated nostalgic remembering.” In his commentary on Frederic Jameson’s discussion of nostalgia in postmodernity, Brown defines Jameson’s notion of “neo-nostalgia” as “the pseudo-historical appeal of a bygone aesthetic.” That appeal “is achieved by stylistic evocations and temporal stereotypes, which convey various forms of past-ness”(Brown, 2001: 310). 16Nostalgia for rock’s past is a form of “mediated nostalgic remembering.” There was, indeed, an empirical past of rock, but it has been taken up in the present as mediated and then re-mediated to create, for example, the 1960s as a set of selective representations in which some artists, music, and events are highlighted and others eliminated. In that process of selection and simplification, nostalgia is aestheticized – it becomes a pose that can be felt intensely, but that does not connect the individual to an “eternal tradition” or to a personal history, but to an image lacking insistency. 17Aestheticized nostalgia for past rock lacks seriousness in the sense that it does not instigate any attempt by those who feel it to try to recreate the past, except sporadically and episodically. To dwell in the constructed golden age is to experience its culture as an imaginary (similar to originary nostalgia), but also as the survival of an empirical past in which there is interest but no commitment. That aestheticized nostalgia should have come to be the dominant intentionality towards rock might be an irony, since rock’s ideology privileges authenticity and novelty as the requisites for having one’s -- reversal have happened? Commodification of Nostalgia 18Why has rock’s past swamped its present? Why is rock today mired in neo-nostalgia? There are two major structural determinants of this constructed nostalgia. The major one is economic, essentially, commercial capitalism doing what it is supposed to do. Each of the companies that comprise the complex of the rock industry is focused on -- audiences. To make audiences desire the “back catalog,” they have also had to promote rock’s past and construct a simulation of the past that would instigate neo-nostalgia. That is exactly what the big players have done, aided and abetted by a -- 33Writers and documentarians, accompanying the major record labels, concert promoters and classic rock djs, create an auratic imaginary of rock’s past that breeds neo-nostalgia. These hypesters of the canon create some Golden Age that never was, but can be heard in this $100 box set, or seen for a few hours and $355 in person. These writers and -- Mass media reports on the death further reinforce that nostalgia-inducing imaginary. The innumerable TV, radio, magazine, and newspaper accounts of Lennon’s death referenced not the man and the four decades in which he lived, or even the nearly two decades in which -- The imaginary is also alive and well in video games like the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises. These simulations foster neo-nostalgia for an aestheticized golden age, a simulation itself. Hodson’s analysis of the Beatles Rock Band Game is illustrative. “The game produces a -- relationship to commodity over community” he writes (Hodson, 2012: 72). “Rather than just a commodification of play, Beatles Rock Band is a game that also commodifies nostalgia” (Hodson, 2012: 81). 37For Jameson, neo-nostalgia is a matter of substituting an imaginary/construction/simulation/myth for what actually presumably happened at some time in the past. Neo-nostalgia takes that construction as its object and then judges the present to be inferior to the construction — it would have been better to live then, but at -- factor — the power of the Boomer generation especially in the US — insured that hegemony. The cultural power of the baby-boomers is a second structural foundation for constructed nostalgia. 39The most obvious factor in boomer-power is the fact that Boomers -- their rock, listening to it, or to the newer music made by the bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their music was, in Rousseau’s (1768: 267) term, a “memorative sign”, creating a sense of nostalgia, in Kant’s sense, “toward an age which is forever beyond his reach” (Kant, 1798). As these bands began to be seen as “great” aesthetically, they -- Alternative rock, R.E.M., Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins were among the commercially most successful. It has turned out that Gen-X was the last generation before neo-nostalgia buried new musical initiatives by young people. -- generation, which has substituted the effect of “youthfulness” for actual youth itself — another aestheticization and simulation that accompanies and is bound up with neo-nostalgia. Conclusion -- sense, youth. 51 Neo-nostalgia — Frederic Jameson’s precise contribution to postmodern discourse — is the framing intentionality of the event of rock’s past occluding its present. (New rock has not disappeared: it -- an overhanging past in Baudrillard’s Simulations (1983), the critique of the modern culminates with its subjective component in (neo)nostalgia. 52 The myth of rock’s “golden age” is an aetheticization of rock’s -- artifact. 53Neo-nostalgia for rock’s past is a riskless adventure. Haut de page -- Hodson, J. (2012), “When I'm Sixty-Four: Beatles Rock Band and the Commodification of Nostalgia”, Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, vol. 6, n° 10, 72-89. Hofer, J. (1688), Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, Bâle, J. Bertsch [cited in Starobinski]. -- October 2014] Pickering, M. & Keightley, E. (2006), “The Modalities of Nostalgia”, Current Sociology, vol. 54, n° 6, November, 919–941. -- [1768, cited in Starobinski]. Starobinski, J. (1966), “The Idea of Nostalgia”, trans. W.S. Kemp, Diogenes vol. 54, 81-103. -- Référence papier Deena Weinstein, « Constructed Nostalgia for Rock’s Golden Age: “I Believe in Yesterday” », Volume !, 11 : 1 | 2014, 20-36. Référence électronique Deena Weinstein, « Constructed Nostalgia for Rock’s Golden Age: “I Believe in Yesterday” », Volume ! [En ligne], 11 : 1 | 2014, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2016, consulté le 17 décembre 2022. URL :