Nostalgia For All? Not Quite...

(Sorry for the awkward title. I swear I have a point, despite how disjointed this post seems.)

Tom Ewing's post for the Guardian about never really listening to Nirvana's Nevermind hit a nerve. I've written here, many times, about various aspects of pop culture that "defined my generation"  that either passed me by completely, or that I've come to piecemeal years later through fan and critical accounts. This is especially true with music, which is odd because I'm a music blogger. I understand -- and appreciate -- certain records' acclaim, but the original context is missing.

There are records you come to late – very late, in this case – but also records you miss out on through no fault of your own: you weren't born, you weren't old enough. There's a mystique to these: you hear about them through storytelling, and you get to use the album to magic up a time you could never have seen. These imagined contexts can be stronger, stranger and richer than anything in the grooves. At 13, I was enthralled by a coffee table book called Top 100 Albums of All Time – not because I cared about the placings, but because the terse descriptions and glossy sleeve photos conjured a world of far-off adult experience. John Fogarty leaning on his guitar as if it really were an axe, dappled by sunlight on the cover of Green River – I love Creedence Clearwater Revival now, but that picture and the words "swamp rock" made me imagine something far deeper, muddier and more elemental than the actual records.

I can agree with this. I think it's completely possible to create your own context, and historical distance often adds to a band's mystique. The Replacements were a band I can to really late: a half-decade after they broke up. I have no memories of the drunken, sloppy shows that are a huge part of the band's image. I don't remember staying up late to see their television debut on Saturday Night Live when lead singer Paul Westerberg dropped the f-bomb (frankly, I don't know why this is considered a benchmark in their career). They were basically a collection of images and second-hand stories, and that made them hugely appealing. I was a fan of the ghost more than the band.

But more importantly, I think there's a danger in labeling things "universal." So much of the 20th anniversary Nirvana talked about Nevermind being the single most record that defined Generation-X, and while it would be silly to deny its influence, its appeal is far from universal. I wish it were mentioned more often, or at all, that 90s nostalgia is incredibly white-washed. Or maybe just nostalgia blogging is. I think people forget that not everyone has access to the same things, or that those things resonated with everyone. When I think of Nirvana in 1991, I remember feeling like it wasn't for me, or someone like me. Everyone I knew still had huge hair and listened to metal. I didn't want that either, but Nirvana was, as my cousin said, "the jocks' band." I'm guessing Kurt wouldn't have appreciated this.

This isn't the first time I've written about the the current deluge of 90s nostalgia being almost exclusively the domain of white, middle-class 30-somethings (at what's getting published is). In fact, I almost feel like I'm taking a cheap shot, conveniently inserting it here, but when I find writing that doesn't necessarily wax poetic about how wonderful the 90s were, or how this big, huge record resonated with the writer, I heave a little sigh of relief that I'm not just being a contrarian when I say, "That's not my nostalgia."