A Pocketful of Mumbles: Nostalgia

Showing posts with label Nostalgia. Show all posts

Wednesday, 22 February 2012

Nostalgic Mumblings of a Homesick Time-Traveller

Whilst finishing up the last few pages of ‘John’ by Cynthia Lennon, the latest in a long line of books that I have read in the hope that people’s words and memories can successfully – if temporarily – transport me back to the glorious 1960s, I reached the conclusion that; I am old. While this may not be true if one is measuring the abstract concept of time in the conventional way, as by that dubious yardstick I would be deemed a mere twenty-three years old, I am talking more in the musical sense.

Nostalgia is a weird, wonderful, troubling and powerful thing, and a curse that I struggle with a lot. There are times where I have found myself almost crippled by the desire to exist at a time when people, society, music and attitudes were more similar to my own interests and ideals. Of course, whether such a time ever really existed is uncertain, and I’m not denying that much of my personal torment has been caused by peering through the glorious rose-tinted glasses of hindsight.

I noted the other day, as I was reading through various definitions and tales of nostalgia in attempt to sooth my own raging bout, that the first synonym that appeared for nostalgic was homesick. I like this. This allows me to believe that I am actually from another time and that I should be turning twenty-four not in 2012, but in 1969, having spent the previous five years of my adult life submerged in the colourful, liberating, experimental and optimistic cultural waves that were crashing around everyone like a tsunami of awakening. However, by some misfortune, I have ended up far away from home in the complicated, digitalised world of the 21^st Century, struggling to find the portal which will deliver me safely back to the part of myself which cavorts and frolics there as we speak.

I’m sure I am not the only one who has been lost to the complex voids of time travel, and if my geographical navigational skills are anything to go by, it is hardly surprising that I find myself so far from home, a bit confused and entirely unsure as to what I came here for in the first place.

There is a great deal of evidence to support the strength of my age-related epiphany, not least to be found in the music that I listen to and repeatedly praise and obsess about on a daily basis. While the majority of my musical intake comes courtesy of a record collection, my hope being that somewhere between the needle and the vinyl there will be room for me to slip back to the homeland, even by other more 21^st Century means of listening to music the majority would be pre-1995. This therefore leads me to believe that I have the listening habits of someone between the ages of thirty-five and seventy.

This is why I feel old before my time. I spend my days thinking to myself that all this popular music is rubbish, just insignificant churning shod; noise pumped out to the useless farting masses. Now, obviously music is subjective, and if it brings joy to people/morons then there's not much I can do about it. I'd never wish shit music didn't exist. It can be a useful tool in determining whether someone is a vibrant, interesting person or y'know; a JLS fan.

Now, obviously I am not saying that good, new music doesn’t exist, and indeed it can be found in abundance if one only looks under the right mossy rock. Nor do I not love many things about my life and the wonderful people I have met here in 2012. Where possible, I deal with my homesickness by spending time with other people who may also feel like they too have been born in a time that is not entirely their own, strong in the knowledge that if we all want it badly enough time can be transcended. Besides, it is only through our acceptance of time as a concrete a notion which suggests that we cannot in fact choose to exist in any moment we so desire. Time is irrelevant after all, not linear.

In the meantime, I continue to submerge myself in words written by those lucky people who know for certain that they existed at the time to which I feel such a connection. Cynthia Lennon, Pamela Des Barres, Patti Boyd, Mick Rock, Pauline Butcher, Nick Kent, Elliot Tiber and Cameron Crowe – thank you for providing the mind raft for such a vivid and sensual journey back through time.

Fortunately for me, alongside the realisation that I am old comes the brilliant awareness that I am also incredibly young. While the homesickness for a previous age lingers within me, rearing its head sometimes more powerfully than others, I am confident that at some point I will find myself back at the moment in which I belong. And in the meantime, I might as well enjoy the holiday for all it’s worth.

A song to transport you...

Sunday, 2 October 2011

The Lost Art.

Sometimes it is hard to deny that the old ways are the best. While this may be true of many things, there is a definite romanticism of a time gone by when - while it may or may not have been the case – there was a sense of quality, truth and simplistic beauty in the way people lived and the way that things were produced. This is certainly the way I feel about music, and while it may be a bit of a cliché to declare that the greatest albums were made prior to the turn of the 21^st century, if not long before, what I am mainly talking about here is the evolution of the physical (and digital) musical format and subsequent loss of album artwork.

The cover of a great album has shown itself to have the capacity to become as iconic as the music itself, with images such as The Dark Side of the Moon prism and the Abbey Road zebra crossing being forever etched on public conciseness – perhaps in these cases, even identifiable by those few who have not listened to the albums themselves. This is why I believe one of the most distressing things about the rise of the mp3 to be, aside from the ease at which we evade honouring an album by playing it in its entirety, that there is no longer the appreciation of album artwork.

Long have I fantasised about what it must have been like in the golden-age of vinyl, at which time you would leave your front door with enough money in your pocket to head down to the local music shop to purchase the latest album release by your favourite band. Racing down the aisles to the new release section and gripping that glorious physical 12 inch square piece of art in your hands for the first time, before racing home and devouring it with your eyes and ears as you pour over the sleeve and inserts within. Call me nostalgic, but that’s got to be better than a click of the mouse as £8.99 is removed from your bank account in exchange for an invisible musical concept.

While the ipod is a fantastic thing and fabulous in many ways, it is hard not to overlook the fact that all the wonderful artwork, new and old, is now being forgotten and overlooked thanks to the confides of a thumbnail image. Not only this, but it marks the death of the back cover (the qualities of which were often found in its ability to portray a brilliant photograph or image which never quite made the cut of the front). It is a real shame that album artwork isn’t getting the appreciation that it deserves these days, both in terms of the fantastic pieces that are still being produced, and also for those people who are currently discovering the wonderful music of the past fifty years, but yet not getting the whole sensory experience.

It might be worth arguing that at least with albums of the vinyl, and even CD eras, they have had their time and appreciation in larger formats, and the real crime is that brilliant new pieces are never escaping out of the confides of a 2.5 cm square. I was reminded of this most recently when I purchased Florence and The Machine’s album Lungs on vinyl, and was blown away by the richness and detail of an album cover which I already knew to be beautiful, but had never been able to appreciate it for its true splendour. Formatted in a gatefold, filled with stunning imagery and plentiful sleeve notes, it really takes a generous amount of time to take it all in - the only shame being that it won’t reach a wider audience.

As is the case with Lungs, it is great to see that artists and record companies are still producing vinyl copies of their albums, and this is due in part to the resurgence in popularity of old formats. I’m incredibly pleased that there is still a great passion and interest in these things, and that even those brought up in the digital age are keen to appreciate music as it was intended, and I really hope this trend continues.

Below I have included eight album covers; four pre-digital and four post, yet all equally brilliant and worthy of attention. Feel free to click on each of them to appreciate them in high resolution.