A Musical Time Capsule in Nostalgia Age
There’s a new and extensive personal collection, made by you and for you on Spotify.
Ah, nostalgia — the luxury and trap of the digital age. Already-dominant streaming service Spotify has introduced yet another feature for its users, this one designed to send them on a rewind through past musical tastes based on listening history and imported iTunes library information.
It’s a profitable gimmick, to be sure; I did, however, find my Time Capsule playlist to be eerily accurate in its reflection of my past tastes and present throwback favorites. High on the list are preteen anthems like “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance, the punk icon from Newark, New Jersey; “Ocean Avenue” by pop-punk band Yellowcard of Los Angeles; and “1985” by three-hit wonder Bowling For Soup. Also included are classics like The Killers’ breakout hit “Mr. Brightside” and a personal favorite “A Lack of Color” by my eternal love, Death Cab for Cutie — which can both, to this day, be considered staples of my musical education. Whatever the precise algorithm may be, it works.
We all seek time-honored throwbacks on road trips, trains and planes as roots to our core selves amid the transience of modern life. In recent years, high-budget filmmakers have relentlessly tapped into this nostalgia market for box office glory, paving the way for other art forms to do the same. One of my recent favorite ventures was director Matt Reeves’ revival of Planet of the Apes by way of a trilogy packed with mind-blowing visual effects and touchingly humanized CGI primates. I also enjoyed the controversial all-female reboot of Ghostbusters, a blockbuster mixed hit from summer 2016. And, of course, to condemn or too-harshly criticize the newly Disneyfied Star Wars trilogy is dangerous online territory.
As this trend has expanded into the music industry, it’s aired less on the side of revamped franchises as we know them in movie theaters. Listeners instead return to repertoire as it was originally canonized. The music festival industry has boomed across the country as it’s graduated from a meet-up of relatively lesser-known artists to a high-budget hub for young and old alike to gorge themselves on both younger, newer acts and older classics.
For the older crowd, this nostalgia is rooted in actual lived experience; for the younguns — namely millennials — it’s in a sense they missed something “before their time.” Sometimes this sense is imparted by parents, other times by born-in-the-wrong-time peers. Over the past several years, acts like Jack White, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have regularly made the festival circuit, attracting crowds of all generations swaying and belting classics in would-be harmony.
But by now, millennials have their own experience-based nostalgia tracks lined up. Though often these only date back to the 90s or as recently as the early- to mid-2000s, they’ve been tied long enough to awkward and intimate points in our lives (especially within an expedited digital-age timeline) when access to Tiger Electronics HitClips, CDs and early streaming services served to ease our adolescent growing pains.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing. Spotify isn’t the first to capitalize on it, and certainly won’t be the last.
Kid Cudi’s “Up Up & Away” only dates back to my junior year of high school, but certainly feels emblematic of that seemingly distant time in my life. Blink-182 anthems like “All The Small Things,” “First Date,” and “I Miss You” predated but informed my preteen and teenage years as early as sixth grade, when I trafficked handwritten notes between “dating” couples and thought sincerely that no boy would ever like me. I burned my mom her first Death Cab CD — a copy of Plans (2005), still one of my all-time favorite albums — at the start of junior high, and a decade after its release, I tearfully sang along at the band’s concert in Berkeley, California.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing. Spotify isn’t the first to capitalize on it, and certainly won’t be the last. I often scorn the now-mainstream nature of reminiscence, but I’ll be damned if Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors (1977) doesn’t remain one of the best albums — not to mention best road trip soundtracks — to date.
To find your own Time Capsule playlist, simply type those words into your Spotify search bar. “Your Time Capsule” should be the first result. Happy time travel!
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