Sorry about the delay! Back to the regular schedule next week.
You didn’t miss anything; check out 649 memorized and 650 believer.
I’ve been exploring nostalgia a lot recently in this newsletter. I wrote in this issue that culture is dealing largely in the currency of the nineties (adjusted for inflation, of course), that anything new and trending is just recycled and repackaged. After sitting on this statement for a few weeks, I’d like to amend it slightly; I think we’re living generally in the past.
This revised theory has been made possible by my good friend the Internet. We’ve become closer over the past two weeks as I’ve been making TikToks to promote my band’s new singles. I swore up and down I would never download the app because I’m a curmudgeon and also because I have no self control, but here we are, with a rollout strategy and a time limit that I ignore everyday. As much as I want to hate TikTok, I’ve learned a lot in the past few days about the state of culture on a granular level: niche humor, beauty standards, and Rodrigo-gate, to name a few. TikTok is known for having corners or communities—book-tok, garden-tok, knitting-tok, etc—that thrive in isolation, largely due to the powerful algorithm that serves up exactly what you’re looking for at any given moment. Of course, music-tok found me pretty easily and now I spent altogether too much time watching poorly lit twenty second covers of Taylor Swift songs.
I provide all this exposition to give context for the strange phenomenon I’m bearing witness to, in real time: music is simultaneously calling back to the eighties, the nineties, the aughts—nostalgia is rooted in the past, but not in a particular era. I’ve been loving the Magdelena Bay album Mercurial World (2021), especially the song “Secrets (Your Fire)” which pulls elements from eighties disco. I wrote recently about the new Momma record, which sounds like the younger sibling of Celebrity Skin (1998). This week, I’m writing about a playlist I made of rock songs mostly from the early aughts.
The Arctic Monkeys record AM (2013) was forcibly branded on the inside of the eyelids of every teenage girl on Tumblr in its heyday. I’ve never since seen a record that has the cultural pull of AM; it came to be synonymous with the alt aesthetic, symbolic of monochrome-chic-cigarette-skinny-soft-grunge. There was nothing more popular at the time than this concept of the Tumblr girl.
I arrived on the scene just in time to be totally indoctrinated into this strange moment in history. When I close my eyes, I see the iconic AM album cover; I still worship at the alter of “Knee Socks.” Despite culture (thankfully) moving on from the soft grunge obsession and many of the affiliated trends losing influence—Brandy Melville t-shirt dresses, tights, filtering all your pictures to be in black and white—this album still slaps top to bottom. This song is especially sexy and slinky. Alex Turner croons:
When the zeros line up on the 24-hour clock
When you know who’s calling even though the number is blocked
When you walked around your house wearing my sky blue Lacoste
And your knee socks
The Strokes also figured into this cultural moment, but more with their first album, Is This It (2001). The controversial alternate cover fits more with the rest of the Tumblr girl aesthetic than the censored U.S. version which appears to this day on streaming services. Their most recent album, The New Abnormal (2020) features art that is similar in color and tone to that of the U.S. Is This It cover. The songs, too, sound like they’re pulled from 2001, as does everything by The Strokes, variations on their tried and true signature sound.
This album dabbles in more current political and social themes, but has the overall effect of a time capsule; Julian Casablanca’s voice never fails to transport me to the early 2000s. The record itself is an exercise in sonic nostalgia, a longing for the time when The Strokes were first experimenting on the traditional rock ‘n’ roll methodology.
I wrote recently about The Killers’ Hot Fuss (2004) in an issue of Currently, titled as such:
Hot Fuss is one of those records that I’m savoring, only using songs on playlists that really need them. The Killers are stadium touring Pressure Machine (2021) right now, but they haven’t released anything classic since Battle Born (2012). I may be projecting here, but I think that people are going to these shows to hear “Somebody Told Me” and “Human,” as opposed to anything from the new record. After a nearly twenty-year long career, I can imagine wanting to break free of the songs that made you famous, but I also want to believe that bands recognize their unique ability to fulfill a nostalgic desire, to create an experience that exists outside of time. I want to believe that they’re nostalgic too.