Nostalgia is a Disease
New words, new memories, shitty music, and JAZZ.
Zeebo,
I'm sorry for your lack of inspiration last week -- sometimes the muses deliver, and other times they leave us impotent, I get it. In order to not make you feel bad I'll keep my response short and to the point. I'll also keep it to a 9th grade comprehensibility reading level, on account of the candid feedback I received on the Kill Tony letter from the delightful people on his subreddit.
In fact, rather than dazzling you with my mickle large vocabulary, this week I want to introduce you to some new words that don't really exist. (Don't worry, this will make sense by the end)
There's a nifty little project from the mid-teens called 'The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows' (the Dictionary, from here on out). Over the course of a few years, author John Koenig (an avid Tumbler-er, just to start coloring in some context) made up a bunch of new vocabulary that he felt captured feelings in the zeitgeist modern day that did not yet have their own words. Words like sonder, the feeling you get when you let the solipsism self-centeredness slip for a moment, and opia, the heebies you get when staring at another pair of irises for too long. These words were compiled in John's new dictionary, along with others, all sorts of apt little encapsulations of millennial angst, words for feelings that simply could not exist before Instagram filters were a thing.
This past week I attended the 2023 New Orleans Jazz fest. This is not a non-sequitur, this is the topic you wanted me to write about. How is this related to a little black book of made up words? I'll get to that.
I want to preface with a disclaimer, because the rest of this letter is going to be pretty rant-y: I thoroughly enjoyed Jazz Fest. I like jazz music, and there were some really awesome acts playing there. The closing set by Trombone Shorty was magical, one of the best performances I've ever been to. I believe the whole world would be a lot better off if we all listened to more jazz.
However.
I made the mistake of not going to just jazz performances. While there was a whole tent devoted to jazz (the 'Jazz Tent', in case you were curious. Very easy to understand. Jazz Fest totally the basic reading comprehension thing nailed down), but I did not spend all my time there. The reason I did not spend all my time there was because there were several 'big names' playing at Jazz Fest. Contrary to the reading comprehension level obvious elsewhere at the festival, these 'big names' did not play jazz, but instead played whatever they normally play. Specifically, I listened to the following non-jazz acts: Mumford and Sons, the Lumineers, Dead & Company, and Ludacris (yes, that one).
Let's return to the Dictionary for a moment. There are several words from the Dictionary that concern different flavors of nostalgia. I don't like nostalgia. There's nothing wrong with it in principle, but in today's hyper-capitalized world, nostalgia is a disease. Everything that invokes the warm and fuzzies from a bygone past era is monetized. Movie reboots. Reunion tours. The new 'retro'. Midcentury modern. The list goes on.
Like many diseases, nostalgia-capitalization is slowly killing its host. At a certain point, there won't be remix of old-is-new that will be new anymore. However, we've found lots of clever ways around this constraint. Nostalgia now goes so much farther than just an endless array of cyclical sequels in movies and television and games. The Dictionary provides us with words for all these new types of nostalgia, starting with 'anemoia':
Anemoia
noun. Nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.
Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins—and live in a completely different world.
Imagine stepping through the frame, into a time you've never known. Of course! We can be nostalgic for places we've never been, people we've never known. Of the non-literal nostalgias, this is the least egregious in my opinion, because I suspect humans have always had this capacity even before the modern remix era. Still, anemoia can be capitalized on. How? Reunion bands.
The Grateful Dead was a jam band from back in the day that grew a fanatical cult following. I'm not going to bash them at all, I'm sure they were pretty good, and I like some of their recorded music even though it isn't really my favorite genre (and it's definitely not Jazz). Dead & Company is a Frankenstien's monster, an aberration born from the re-animated corpses of some of the original Grateful Dead band members and John Mayer (former beaux of T-Swift I think? That's another rabbit hole). The only logical conclusion is that Bob Wier and the others are drinking John's blood to stay youthful. The whole thing is nostalgia-bait, both for the few surviving original fans of the Grateful Dead, but also for these weird new creatures that have somehow acquired a taste for music that panders to a specific time and place without themselves having ever inhabited that time or place. Even Mayer himself recounted that, "in 2011 he happened upon a song by the Grateful Dead while listening to Pandora, and that soon the band's music was all he would listen to." There is no original tie, no authenticity, even from the lead guitarist of the outfit.
But fine, sure. People bandwagon onto all sorts of things that are not from their time, and I think they have for a while. Humans tend to romanticize the past, in part because it's such a known quantity. The years have separated the pearls from the muck, and it's in a lot of ways easier to find the real good stuff from days past because all the shitty stuff eventually washed away. Since this seems to be a sort-of common state for humans to be in, it makes sense that it has been capitalized on, with $400 tickets for the privilege to listen to mumbling geriatrics.
How about 'dès vu' and 'morii':
Dès Vu
noun. The awareness that this moment will become a memory.
You were born on a moving train. Even though it feels like you're holding still, time is sweeping past you, right where you sit. But once in a while you look up, and start to feel the inertia, sensing the present moment already turning into a memory, even as it's still happening. Somehow you know in advance that you're going to remember this day for years to come.
Morii
noun. The desire to capture a fleeting experience.
Strange how strong the instinct is: to see something incredible and reach for a camera. As if you're trying to lend it some credibility. To prove that it's real. That I was here.
Contemporary Today's entertainment optimizes for the combination of these two ruthlessly. Look, we're making memories. This might not happen again. Buy experiences not things. Mumford and Sons aren't touring, I might not get another chance to see them ever again. With sepia tones and acoustic guitar picking, our brainstems are hijacked to be nostalgic for things that haven't even finished happening yet, for experiences we're still in the middle of. Halfway through the set, the dad and the boys made an off color joke about scoring some cocaine from the crowd. I could physically feel the heart palpitations of those around me, the feeling of the moment being tarnished by off-brand banter. A sea of smartphones set to record faltered.Oh no, I could almost hear them think, my memories are being ruined.
This is the really pernicious bad one I think. Things will always be capitalized on. They're the material in materialistic. But experience is supposed to be sacred. It's the internal, the personal, the subjective. The thing that sets us apart. Except now there's a lot of money to be made in the manufacture of experience.
Besides the Walking Dead and Powder & Sons we also saw Ludacris perform live. He played clips from The Fast and The Furious 10. I don't feel like any additional commentary is necessary.
Should've stayed in the jazz tent.
— Austin