Music and nostalgia
For the Bear Blog Carnival James ask us to write about music memories. I recently wrote about how my kids playing music affect me, but this will be on the effect from nostalgia musical memories can have. I think the scientific term is Music-evoked autobiographical memory.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug and for me, specific pieces of music attached to memories decades ago are something that really can pull on my emotional strings. A 90s pop song can be almost devastating - not the song itself as such, but how it subconsciously puts me back to simpler, safer and more carefree times, in contrast to the present world that can seem closer to pre-apocalyptic. If I get misty-eyed to a movie it is almost always in combination with some sort of musical cue, and just listening to the soundtrack alone can be enough. It can be the death of Boromir, the ending of Con Air or La Marseillaise in Casablanca.
Like for many people, my musical taste has been more or less locked into what I got into in my teens and twenties. It is very rare for me to get a strong emotional attachment to music I have found in recent years. Not that I still don’t find new good stuff, but as time goes, the discovery rate and excitement fades as new discoveries is not mindblowlingly new and fresh, but mostly just small variations of what I already like.
Engaging with music was also a lot more intense in my 20s, as I could easily buy several new CDs per week and went to concerts regularly. And being before music streaming services where a thing, the attachment to my collection was greater and as I have written about previously on my years with Last.fm, I listened to the same albums multiple times rather than just browsing new stuff. Listening to favourite songs today becomes more than just good songs I like, but also a nostalgic trip back to a specific happy time and place.
New such musical memories can still be formed though. When my daughter started in school 3 years ago, for the ceremony with all the new classes, the 3rd graders sang the Danish song Sensommervise, and that of course created a special personal association with that song I didn’t have before and couldn’t create on my own.
Hearing music live could be a long chapter in itself, as it becomes more than just a piece of music you like, but a shared experience that is unique and locked to a specific time and place that can’t be recreated to its fullest. If I should highlight a specific concert memory, it would be seeing Slayer in 2008 when they played in Copenhagen. Somewhat past their peak, but Jeff Hanneman was still alive, Tom Araya didn’t yet have back problems and I was 23, so being up front in the mosh pit didn’t punish me so much the day after. Slayer was on fire, being in the crowd was hectic. The band kept true to their edgy image by displaying some of the controversial Muhammad cartoons on the big screen during Jihad, and they played the whole Reign in Blood album from start to finish as an encore. A rare treat from them. Of course phones didn’t record that well back then, but I have found some old recordings that I think capture some of the atmosphere of that particular show.
I am glad James chose the “music memories” for this month’s topic as those concepts are inseparable in my mind. It is not just “I like this piece of music”, but that a specific piece of music moved me at the right place and time in my life that makes it special. No matter if it is Slayer or 3rd graders singing from Højskolesangbogen.