Music, Old or New?

 

Just take those old records off the shelf
I'll sit and listen to 'em by myself
Today's music ain't got the same soul
I like that old-time rock 'n' roll (1)

 

About fourteen or fifteen years ago I was talking with a young lady when the topic of conversation turned to music.  I don’t recall exactly how we got started on the subject but I’ll never forget her response to something I had said.   After commenting that a band I had mentioned was the sort of thing her father listened to – she was seven years my junior, mind you – she said that she made a point of never listening to any music from before 1995.

 

I didn’t really know what to say to that.  I had, of course, heard young people dismiss the music of their parents before but to declare oneself to have purposely shut oneself off from all the music from prior to what at the time would have been less than the last fifteen years, that was new.   To be fair to the young lady, about a decade later when I found myself seated fairly close to her at a concert it was of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra performing Beethoven.   I refrained from reminding her of her previous words.   Perhaps her tastes had matured or perhaps she had distinguished between popular and classical music, excluding the latter, when making he statement.   There is a third possibility but it would be uncharitable to spell it out.

 

Thinking over the conversation later it struck me that she had expressed the exact opposite sentiment to that in the Bob Seger song quoted above.   It is interesting to observe that while “Old Time Rock and Roll” has demonstrated itself to be a true classic – a song that is timeless and never really gets old in the sense of past its time – the examples provided within the song of the “today’s music” which “ain’t got the same soul” have not weathered the test of time nearly as well.   The next stanza goes:

 

Don't try to take me to a disco
You'll never even get me out on the floor
In ten minutes I'll be late for the door
I like that old-time rock 'n' roll

 

Disco was an early antecedent of electronic dance music named after the type of nightclub in which was played throughout the 1970s.   Think the BeeGees and Studio 54 and John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (1977).   It remains permanently associated with the 1970s, having reached the apex of its popularity at approximately the same time that Seger recorded “Old Time Rock and Roll” after which it sharply tanked, at least in North America.   The Last Days of Disco (1993) the third and final instalment in a trilogy - in the loosest possible meaning of this term - of films by Whit Stillman, is set at the very beginning of the 1980s.    Music so closely associated with a particular decade is dated rather than timeless.

 

Interestingly, however, eleven years after Bob Seger’s song was first released the Australian Princess of Pop, Kylie Minogue, recorded the song “Step Back in Time” on her third album Rhythm of Love.  This song, which was written by the London production firm of Stock Aitken and Waterman with which the soap actress turned diva had begun working after her cover of Little Eva’s “The Locomotion” had become a hit three years previously, is similar in sentiment to “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” except that the negative flip-side, the not-so-subtle rejection of “today’s music” is absent and the sentiment is directed towards the very music rejected in Seger’s song.  Here is the refrain preceded by the bridge that leads into it:

 

Remember the old days?
Remember the O'Jays?
Walkin' in rhythm
Life was for livin'

 

When you can't find the music
To get down and boogie
All you can do is step back in time

Ball of confusion
When nothing is new, and
There's nothing doin'
Step back in time (2)

 

Some have found it amusing for Kylie to sing these lyrics.   She would have been four years old when “Love Train”, the only O’Jays single to reach the number one position in the charts, was released (3) and she was singing for an audience younger than herself.  The song would chart the path for her future career, however.  The following year she covered “Love Train” herself in her world tour and she would continue to pay tribute to disco right up to her last studio album which is entitled Disco (2020).   Bob Seger, incidentally, would have been roughly the same age during the years of “that old time rock ‘n’ roll” that Kylie was during the years of disco.   Don Maclean, who is the same age as Seger, paid tribute to the same music in his “American Pie”, although in his case he noted his having been merely in the early days of adolescence at the time Buddy Holly died in the lyrics which he wrote himself, with his reference to learning it from the pages of the newspapers he delivered on his paper route.

 

If asked to identify the sentiment shared by these two songs most people would probably say it is nostalgia.  This is not quite right, however, because while nostalgia shares with this sentiment the element of looking to the past with fondness, it also includes an element of sadness. (4)   The sadness of nostalgia is the sadness of loss.   It is the sense that what one looks back to with affection in the past is lost in the present and will never come again.   Think of the sentiment expressed by A. E. Housman in the fortieth poem in his A Shropshire Lad:

 

Into my heart an air that kills 

  From yon far country blows: 

What are those blue remembered hills, 

  What spires, what farms are those? 

 

That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain, 

The happy highways where I went 

  And cannot come again.

 

This sad sentiment is notably absent from the songs we have been discussing.   Both are upbeat, neither assume that the old music they are praising is something lost to time.   Indeed, they assume the contrary.   In Seger’s song he defiantly declares that he will “sit and listen” to those old records “by himself” and Kylie’s song calls on the listener to “step back in time” as a genuine possibility.   If there is a name for this sentiment, like nostalgia but without the sadness, it escapes me.   There should be one because the distinction is important.   Music that is truly timeless cannot be the object of true nostalgia..

 

For an example of a song that expresses a similar rejection of newer music to Bob Seger’s but with actual nostalgia, or at least imputes such to its title character, consider the following from the Bellamy Brothers’ 1985 country and western hit “Old Hippie”:

 

He gets off on country music
'Cause disco left him cold
And he's got young friends into new wave
But he's just too friggin' old
And he dreams at night of Woodstock and the day John Lennon died
How the music made him happy and the silence made him cry
Yeah, he thinks of John sometimes
And he has to wonder why (5)

 

Even more obvious an example is a song we have already mentioned, Don MacLean’s folk rock classic “American Pie” originally recorded and released in 1971.   Like Kylie’s song, MacLean’s is not critical of newer styles of music the way Seger’s is.   It expresses a sense of sadness and discontent and while this has to do with much more than changing styles of music, the lengthy song relating a number of events representing the sweeping societal and cultural changes of the volatile era through which the artist had lived, it does so through the lens of nostalgia for the music of his early childhood,  the same old time rock ‘n’ roll Seger’s song references.   As with the character in the Bellamy Brothers’ song, the nostalgia is focused on a tragic death that symbolizes the closing of an era, in MacLean’s case “the day the music died”, i.e., the day in 1959 when a single plane crash took the lives of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens.  

A third song that expresses nostalgia towards older music is “Video Killed the Radio Star” which was originally released by The Buggles the same year as “Old Time Rock and Roll”.   In this case the nostalgia is not directed towards a style of music but an era of music distinguished from that which succeeded it by stages in the development of media technology.  Also, the loss expressed is not primarily the loss of the singer expressed in the first person, but the loss of the radio star, left behind by technological advancement, which is expressed in the second person in the stanzas and the third person in the chorus:

 

Video killed the radio star
Video killed the radio star
In my mind and in my car
We can't rewind we've gone too far
Pictures came and broke your heart
Put the blame on VCR (6)

 

We have just discussed five songs that have one thing, at least, in common.   Whether nostalgically or not, whether coupled with criticism/rejection of the new or not, they all express an attitude of fondness towards older music.   Other examples could be given.  Country music abounds with songs of this type.    The title single of George Jones’ 45^th album, Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes (1985), is a good example.   How many country singers since 1953 have not paid tribute in one way or another to Hank Williams Sr.?   Not many.

 

How many songs, I wonder, express the opposite sentiment, that of my friend from the conversation mentioned at the beginning of this essay?

 

Not too many come to mind.   The year after “Old Time Rock and Roll” was released, Billy “The Piano Man” Joel, recorded “It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me” which was number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for a couple of weeks.   The timing of the two songs made it seem like the one was an answer to the other.  This may or may not be the case, but even if it is true, Joel’s answer is to assert continuity between the new music and the old rock ‘n’ roll, not to set the two against each other like Seger but picking the opposite side.   The following lines should demonstrate that conclusively:

 

Hot funk, cool punk, even if it's old junk
It's still rock and roll to me (7)

 

In fact the only song that really stands out as expressing anything remotely similar to the contempt for older music shown by my friend – and this is ironic for several reasons as you will see if you go back and re-read the first few paragraphs of this essay – is “Roll Over Beethoven”, originally written and recorded as an R & B single by Chuck Berry in 1956, but covered several times, including by The Beatles in 1963. 

 

While it hardly surprising when young people have a preference for newer music and see it as their own,  the contrast is almost always with their parents’ music rather than older music in general much less all music prior to a certain recent date.  Usually, the only people you will hear painting older music with a broad brush so as to condemn it wholesale, are left-wing activists or academics, with a political axe to grind against anything they associate with dead, white, males.   The reverse, where someone says that newer music has all gone to pot after such-and-such a date is much more frequent and there is a reason for this.   The position that older music is better and newer music is corrupt, while it can easily be articulated in such a way as to show the person speaking up to be a fool, is intellectually defensible.   The opinion that all older music must be rejected as bad – or, and this is worse from the perspective of those holing this kind of opinion, irrelevant – and that only the music of today is worth listening to instantly and always demonstrates the stupidity of the person who expresses it.   Most people, of course, would reject both of these viewpoints usually on the basis of a general consensus that likes and dislikes in music – and art and culture in general for that matter - are entirely matters of taste, that taste is 100% subjective, and that most or all attempts to evaluate types of music objectively, merely disguise the subjective tastes of those doing the evaluating.   I disagree with this consensus, but even if it were accurate, I would say that there are still a couple of differences between the two viewpoints that make the one more obviously stupid than the other.   First, the person who rejects all older music in favour of today’s music, is deliberately shutting himself off from the vast majority of music ever made for reasons that are either superficial (it is no longer fashionable), solipsistic (it is not relevant to me), or political (it was made by dead, white, males) with the only one of these reasons that bears any resemblance to an objective complaint against the rejected music being the worst of them all.   The person who dismisses today’s music in favour of the old shuts himself off from a much smaller percentage of the music out there even if his reasons are no better than those of the other person. The second difference between the two viewpoints is that the person who rejects today’s music rejects that which has yet to prove itself whereas the person who rejects the music of the past rejects that which has already proven itself.   Music, like all other art, is not automatically entitled to our acceptance.   For these reasons, even if there were no objective “better” or “worse” when it comes to music, the person who writes off today’s music wholesale is objectively less stupid than the person who writes off the music of the past wholesale.

 

The person who writes off today’s music may do so for reasons that are no better than those of the person who writes off the music of the past.   There are, however, better reasons available to the person looking to objectively justify rejecting at least some of today’s music.   This is because the idea that there is no “good” or “bad”, “better” or “worse” when it comes to music, or any other kind of art, that all is subjective, simply does not bear up under scrutiny.  Consider the history of the types of music that have come up in this discussion so far.   With the exception of Beethoven, all are types of popular music, and with the exception of country and western, all the rest came about after World War II.   The “old time rock ‘n’ roll” itself, the first stage of what is now just known as rock music, was subjected when it first came out, not merely to aesthetic criticism of the professional sort that all art and culture receives, but to moral condemnation as well, coming primarily from parents and clergymen, especially fundamentalist preachers.   These have been mocked in popular culture ever since, but were they wrong?

 

Although many people, probably most, assume that they were, it would be very difficult to make an intelligent case for this.   The fundamentalists warned that rock ‘n’ roll was contributing to the overthrow of sexual morality and respect for parental authority and religion.   To this day such preachers are mocked for their warnings of seventy years ago and the basis of much of the mockery is the tameness of the objects of their homiletic wrath at the time compared to what is normal now.   This, however, is the textbook example of a self-defeating argument.   Look around at society today.   The traditional sexual morality of keep it within marriage by the traditional heterosexual definition of the word and if you can’t do that at least have the decency not to flaunt your indiscretions in public has indeed been overthrown and replaced with an identity-politics based one in which “slut shaming” is condemned rather than sluttiness and every conceivable alternative to heterosexuality and to even being male and female comes with high status points.   Parental authority is at all-time low and here in the Dominion of Canada progressive nincompoops are promoting Bill S-251, currently before Parliament, which would abolish parental authority altogether.   In North America and throughout Western Civilization we are far more secular today than we were at the end of the Second World War and secularism itself has evolved from a tolerant, classical liberal, secularism towards one more resembling the intolerant secularism we used to associate with Communism.   We have arrived, basically, at exactly where the fundamentalists of the 1940s and 1950s said we were headed, and the fact that the music and movies and culture in general of today is far worse by the standards of said fundamentalists than the kind they actually preached against, hardly demonstrates them to have been wrong.   The point, to be clear, is not that rock ‘n’ roll caused the moral collapse of civilization.   It is that the forces which were moving us towards this collapse were already in motion in the 1940s and 1950s, that the fundamentalists of that era correctly perceived rock ‘n’ roll to be in alignment with those forces, and so the objective moral grounds of their preaching against it has been borne out by history.  

 

The fundamentalist complaint that rock ‘n’ roll was undermining parental authority has particular bearing on the “it is all subjective” argument.   The moral position of the fundamentalists was based upon the Fifth Commandment – “Honour thy father and thy mother”.   The fundamentalists maintained that rock ‘n’ roll was influencing young people to break this commandment.   Rock’s identification with rebellion against authority, especially parental, would become much more explicit in the 1960s, but the earlier rock ‘n’ roll marked the beginning of the generational conflict that has so persisted ever since that it is often assumed to be part of the unavoidable “the way things are”.   A good case can be made that the “It is all subjective” argument has more to do with fatigue brought upon by this conflict and the desire to escape it than with the nature of music and musical taste.

 

In the 1995 comedy film Clueless, which borrows the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma and loosely translates it into the world of rich, 1990s, Beverly Hills teenagers, the matter of the generation conflict is raised by one of the minor characters in one scene.   The main character had just given a presentation in class on Haitian refugees, the teacher played by Wallace Shawn had asked the class for “further insights”, and the character of Travis, who corresponds to Austen’s character of Mr. Martin and is played by Breckin Meyer as a Jeff Spicoli type (referencing an earlier movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, from the same director) offers the following, off-topic remark:

 

OK, like, the way I feel about the Rolling Stones is the way my kids are going to feel about Nine Inch Nails, so I really shouldn't torment my Mom anymore, huh?

 

The assumption behind this is that kids always hate the music their parents listened to when they were their age.   It has been my experience that this assumption does not have much  validity except for kids whose musical preferences fall within pop, rock, and other genres derived from or closely associated with these.   It certainly wasn’t valid for me when I was a kid.   My first musical preference was for country and western and while I listened to artists like Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs, George Strait and Dwight Yoakam who were the new face of country at the time, with the exception of Steve Earle my favourites were mostly those of my father’s era – Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Charlie Daniels and especially Johnny Cash and Ray Stevens.     Even with pop and rock, to the extent I had any use for them at all at the time, it was certainly not ‘80s music, which I did not appreciate until I could look back on it from a distance, but my mother’s music, especially Elvis, that I liked.  Of course I recognize that my experience was atypical.  I was born with a thoroughly reactionary disposition and even before I reached my tenth birthday took, or at least affected, a curmudgeonly attitude towards the pop/rock favourites of my peers as “the devil’s music” that would have put the best fundamentalist preacher of the ‘50s to shame.   That having been said, I can think of people I have known over the years who are musically inclined from the creating and performing end of things, and these almost always have had a very broad appreciation for music of all types and eras and shown no evidence of the sort of attitude the Clueless character was talking about it, exemplified to the nth degree by the friend mentioned at the beginning of this essay.   While classical music was for me an acquired taste, one that I developed in college – except, of course, for that which I acquired from Bugs Bunny and other cartoons as a meme my sister recently sent me reminded me  – I did know a couple of people who were classical music aficionados from childhood.   There is considerable overlap between these and the creative types just mentioned but my point is that it is difficult to conceive of someone whose musical taste has been classical from childhood experiencing the kind of generational gap in taste that seems to go with pop and rock.   Indeed, it is comical to imagine it.   Try and picture someone attending the first performance of Beethoven’s Fifth in Vienna in 1808 and then going home and mocking his father for having attended the premiere of that stuffy old “Jupiter” (Mozart’s 41^st) back in 1788.   It would be “inconceivable”, to borrow from another Wallace Shawn character (Vizzini the Sicilian in The Princess Bride) but use the word correctly.   The loose equivalent to what “pop”, “rock”, “disco”, “hip hop” and the like are to popular music in classical music are Baroque (Bach, Vivaldi, et al.), Classical Proper (Haydn, Mozart), and Romantic ((Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, et al.) with Handel as a transitional bridge between the first two, and Beethoven as the same between the last two.   This is an oversimplification, but the point is that the principle classifications within classical music speak of eras each of which could contain within itself the whole of the period that saw all of these styles of popular music rise and replace each other.      

 

Newer classical music, whatever one might think of it – as a rule I am not too fond of classical music composed after the nineteenth century – is not written and performed to set kids against their parents and produce generational strife.   Nor is newer country and western music.  As different as classical and country and western are both are living traditions in which respecting the past is expected of present artists. 

 

So why did rock ‘n’ roll music and its progeny do this?  

 

To understand this it is helpful to recognize that the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll coincides in time with the development of the LP record.  While ways of recording sound had been discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century, and commercialized following Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, it was the LP – what we just called a “record” when I was a kid and now, since its recent revival, usually call vinyl – that really introduced the factory, mass production, mindset into the music industry, because their far superior storage capacity and playback quality made them far more suited to this than their predecessors.   This turned popular music itself into a mass consumption commodity.   The production companies saw young people as the largest market for record sales and began making music to be marketed to young people as their music, a marketing strategy that ended up pitting young people against the parents, a result that become more extreme over time.   Shortly after Columbia introduced the first LP in 1948, record companies began to release music oriented towards adolescents under a number of new style names of which rock ‘n’ roll caught on the most, sometime around the mid-1950s.   Histories of rock music tend to focus on the race politics of the era of its origin, some from a liberal perspective (rock ‘n’ roll bringing black rhythm and blues and white country together in the last days of Jim Crow) others from a hard left racial grievance perspective (rock really beginning with black R & B but not taking off the way it deserved until “stolen” by white artists like Bill Halley, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly), neither of which is entirely wrong although both contain a lot of codswallop.   The real story is that more than any other older types of popular music, rock music, beginning with R & B rock ‘n’ roll, was far more the product of the marketing strategy of the firms that distributed it than of the artists themselves, despite the “No True Scotsman” fallacy employed by the many who claim that “real rock” is distinguished from pop by the independence of its artistic creators.   While the fundamentalist preachers of the ‘50s blamed the Communists, the real villain was capitalism.   Capitalism is far more effective at accomplishing the evil ends of Communism than Communism itself.

 

Now, there are those who would insist that the arguments I just laid out are not really better than those of the person who rejects the music of the past and accepts only today’s music because they are not about the music itself but the way it is made, the intentions of the producers, and social and civilizational ills with which the music was associated but which it did not cause. To fully and consistently maintain that the arguments raised over the last seventy years or so against each new wave of rock music are invalid, however, requires the separation of lyrics from music because it would be insane to claim that today’s music is not much worse than that of decades ago in terms of lyric content.   This separation is indeed at the heart of the case made for Christian rock.   I remember having a heated debate in the dormitory at Providence College on the subject of Christian rock in the very year my previously mentioned friend thought of as the cut-off point before which no music was worth listening to.   I took the con position, my opponent took the pro position.  In the interest of full disclosure, while I was not arguing a side simply for the sake of arguing, i.e., as devil’s advocate, my music collection at the time did include cassettes by Petra, the Newsboys, and One Bad Pig (Christian punk band – the album in question was the one in which they did a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black” with Johnny himself joining in the vocals).   My position on Christian rock is that it belongs to two categories, Christian music and rock music, within both of which it is generally inferior with a few exceptions – the examples just given not being among them – that prove the rule.   My opponent’s argument, or the portion of it that did not consist of accusations of legalism and similar rhetoric, reduced to the idea that music is neutral with goodness or badness found solely in the lyrics.   It is an argument that is well suited to the music of ApologetiX – basically the Christian version of Weird Al Yankovic.    It is deeply flawed when examined on its own merits, however.   In music, all the component parts are put together to make a whole.   Someone can make music without including words just as he can make music without include a piano or without including a guitar or stings in general or percussion.   Once it has been made, however, the words are as much a part of the music as the notes played on whatever instrument is used.

 

Furthermore, instrumental music speaks in the same way lyrics do.   Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is entirely instrumental but it tells the story of the event it was written to commemorate – Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow in 1812 and Tsarist Russia’s successful repulsion of the invasion.   Johnny Mandel’s “Suicide Is Painless”, better known as the theme song for M*A*S*H is just as horribly morbid and depressing when Michael Altman’s lyrics are omitted – as they were in the television series – as when they are included, as they were in the original 1970 film. I defy anybody to listen to the karaoke track of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” without it inspiring the urge to go out and punch someone in the face.  The message spoken by the instruments may complement and support the message of the lyrics.   This is the norm.   Sometime it can contradict the message of the lyrics.   This is usually inadvisable, but it worked for John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival with “Bad Moon Rising” (1969) and for pretty much the entire oeuvre of Sheryl Crow.   Whether in harmony or discord with the lyrics, the instruments speak, and this makes the claim that sans lyrics music is neutral, utter nonsense.  

 

Ultimately, however, the most important standard by which music and art in general must be evaluated is the aesthetic.   This is not a cession to the subjectivists, not if one accepts the view of the Ancients, that Beauty, like Goodness and Truth, is what it is and is not what we decide it is.   This is why the distinction stressed earlier in this essay between the timeless and the dated is so important.   Remember the difference between the two.   Both are old in the sense of having been around for some time.   A song or genre that is dated, however, is also old in the sense that it belongs to the time that produced it.  A song or genre that is timeless, belongs to all ages, being appreciated today in the same way it was yesterday, a quality that can only be discerned with the passing of time.   This is directly related to the aesthetics of the ancients because if Beauty is what it is and is not what we decide it is then it is the same to everyone, everywhere, in all times.    Saying, therefore, that a song – or a poem or a painting or a statue – is beautiful, is not the same thing as saying that I like the song – or poem, painting or statute.   Not necessarily at any rate.  When I say “I like X song” I could be saying that X song appeals to the part of me that recognizes in X song that eternal, fixed, transcendental quality that is Beauty and which is the same for everybody, whether they recognize it or not.   I could, however, be saying that it appeals to something else in me, an emotion or passion or such, in which case I am not making an aesthetic statement.

 

It is not always easy to recognize this difference, especially in an age like ours which has gone to war with the Ancient universals.   Similarly, it is not always easy to tell whether a song is timeless or dated.   There is middle territory, or at least a number of ways in which something that is dated can partially escape its datedness.   A song or book or movie may, for example, develop a cult following that remains attached to it long after the wider culture has set it on the shelf belonging to yesterday.   Or it may undergo a temporary revival like a retro look in fashion.   Or it might attain a lasting value that is not the same as timelessness but is derived in a meta sort of way from its own datedness, in a manner similar to how camp (stuff in bad taste that is appreciated for its own, often exaggerated, bad taste) works, in this case the music having to first become dated in order to be valued in a nostalgic way.   Remember the other distinction that I made a point of stressing earlier in this essay.   That which is truly timeless can never be the object of true nostalgia because it is never lost to us, never out of date.   That having been said, a little common sense goes a long way towards distinguishing between the universal appeal of true Beauty and that which appeals to what is base in us.   If the reason you like music is because of the adrenaline rush produced by negative emotion of some sort that it stirs up in you, or because its lyrics are profane, obscene, rebellious or violent, then you can mark that down on the non-Beauty side of the ledger.

 

I think that what I have said is sufficient to demonstrate that preferring older music and taking a wait and see approach to that which is new, looking for timelessness and Beauty,  while treated as a sign of crankiness by the masses, is a far more sensible approach to the opposite, so amusingly expressed by my friend of years ago.  So I will conclude with the words of Bob Seger:

 

Call me a relic, call me what you will
Say I'm old-fashioned, say I'm over the hill
Today's music ain't got the same soul
I like that old-time rock 'n' roll

 

 

 

 (1)   George Jackson, Thomas E. Jones III, “Old Time Rock and Roll”, recorded by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band on the album Stranger in Town, 1979.

(2)   Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, Peter Waterman, “Step Back in Time”, recorded by Kylie Minogue on the album Rhythm of Love (1990).

(3)   Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco closes with a memorable scene of Chloe Sevigny and Matt Keeslar dancing to this song on a literal train, a subway, after the disco era has ended, but so infecting the rest of the passengers with their enthusiasm that they all join in. 

(4)   The “alg” in nostalgia comes from an ancient Greek word, the one Homer uses in the second line of the Iliad for the suffering and woe which Achilles’ dreadful wrath caused to the Achaeans assembled at Troy.

(5)   David Bellamy, “Old Hippie”, recorded by the Bellamy Brothers on the album Howard & David, 1985.   The Bellamys would later record several sequels to this song providing the characters entire life story.

(6)   Bruce Woolley, Geoffrey Downes, Trevor Charles Horne, “Video Killed the Radio Star”, recorded by The Buggles on the album The Age of Plastic, 1979.

(7)   Billy Joel, “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”, recorded by Billy Joel on the album Glass Houses, 1980.