I wrote last week about the anticipated Oasis reunion in 2025. In an article in the Times David Hepworth, whose book Hope I get Old before I Die is published this week, writes about the place of nostalgia in popular music:
“It seems that that there is no more powerful force than the desire to get back,”
adding that “the impulse appears to act every bit as powerfully on the people who weren’t there as the ones who were.”
There is something attractive about all things vintage, from furniture to clothing to vinyl records, and the people who first made them famous.
I still buy new vinyl records by current artists and bands. I think there is a freshness and energy about young men and woman cutting their teeth in the music industry. Yet it is often difficult to find a truly original voice or sound. Sometimes I will listen to a new act and begin to imagine what music was in their parents’ record collections!
I tend to listen to a lot of music that was recorded between 1964 and 1975. It just so happens that my early teenage years coincided with an astonishing golden era in popular music.
I have tickets to see the Octogenarian Bob Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall on his latest tour of the United Kingdom this autumn. My son who is 31 will be with me even thought his entry point into the world of Dylan came four decades after mine.
Dylan is a living legend who has received all the honours including the Nobel Prize for Literature! The Royal Albert Hall was one of the venues on Dylan’s infamous 1966 tour, when his band went electric and someone from the crowd at the Manchester concert called Dylan “Judas” for abandoning the purity of unvarnished folk.
I guess that is one of the problems with our heroes, musical or otherwise. They refuse to fit into our pre-conceived ideas of what they should be.
The fact is that, 15 years on, the angry young men of Oasis are now grumpy middle-aged men, married, and divorced, and fathers of children. Their stance on life has shifted, which means they can’t sing the old songs in quite the same way.
Preachers can sometimes be tempted to give the people what they want to hear, producing a version of the greatest hits of the Bible every time they preach.
There is of course nothing wrong with telling the old old story that is forever new, as long as it has the freshness of being forever new. In our attempt to be reassuring by keeping to the old paths, preachers can lull their congregations into the sleep that comes from too much attention to the “Good old days!”
A good sense of biblical memory roots our confidence in a timeless God. It does not freeze our faith in the deep freezer of nostalgia.
Sometimes our nostalgia is a symptom of our anxiety about stepping into the future.
“Everybody, it seems, feels comfortable looking back, possibly because nobody dares look forward.” (David Hepworth)
Photo by Jace & Afsoon on Unsplash
Comments