“ I am really, aggressively and reactionarily anti-nostalgia. Like, when people talk about the music that they liked in high school growing up, I just can’t stand it. I hate it … I acknowledge it’s a reactionary position, because obviously if I didn’t think people who’d been making music for 20 years couldn’t make good music, then I wouldn’t be making music. But I really consider nostalgia toxic.

John Darnielle in Zach Baron’s piece, “Return to Tallahassee”

I love this because I always have the same teeth-gnashing reaction when people wax nostalgic about the music they loved in high school or college, as if music died the day they graduated. I think it was Nick Hornby who pointed out that this is the difference between music lovers and everyone else. For music lovers, music is something that’s happening now—and in the future. It’s the bread and butter of daily life. For everyone else, music is something associated with the past, an incidental soundtrack to their bygone salad days. By implication, the pleasure associated with music is immature, ok to revisit occasionally as nostalgia, but basically inessential.

Quote tagged as: music nostalgia john_darnielle nick_hornby
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