Ted Gioia discusses the oddly nostalgic turn modern music writing has taken:
The first thing you notice is the sheer abundance of music magazines on display. We must truly be living in a golden age of music writing if it can support so many periodicals.
I was very happy to see this — at least at first glance.
But at second glance, I started to notice the cover stories.
Lavish attention is devoted here to artists who built their audience in the last century — Miles Davis, David Bowie, Buddy Holly, Blondie, Led Zeppelin, Björk, Motorhead, The Cure, etc. That’s an impressive roster of artists (well, most of them), but they don’t really need the publicity nowadays — they were legends before many of us were born.
Even the magazine names reveal a tilt toward nostalgia. I can’t make out the titles in their entirety, but I see the words Retro, Vintage, and Classic. Publishers are shrewd people, and they don’t put these words in large font unless the audience responds to them.
Maybe print media is nostalgic by definition — if, as we’re repeatedly told, young people don’t read things on paper. (I’m skeptical of that claim, but I hear it all the time.) Yet when I visit the websites, I see the same backward glance. You can’t click on Rolling Stone‘s homepage or Twitter feed without finding some massive list article — touting the “100 Best Songs of 1982” or “The 100 Greatest Country Albums of All Time“. You will find similar retro celebrations at almost every other music media website with a large crossover readership.
Editors love lists nowadays, especially of all-time greats. If I pitch an article like that, the whole editorial team starts salivating — you can even feel the moisture over Zoom — in sharp contrast to any proposed article on a young, unproven musician. Those pitches get pitched right back in your face. You might conclude that we have now arrived at the end of history, with all greatness residing in the past. The editors, at least, must think so.
Things weren’t always like this. Go back and look at old issues of Rolling Stone or Downbeat or some other music magazine — there were years in which every cover story was about a living person and usually someone young with something new to say.
Those days are gone. But here’s the most ironic fact of all — the actual cover stories haven’t changed.
On the cover of the Rolling Stone — 1971, 1984 and 2012
By the way, I’d like to know when Rolling Stone published its first “all-time greats” list — that was the moment when nostalgia first entered the rock bloodstream, a vital force previously resistant to sentimental yearnings for the past.
