(Crutcher, 2022)
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Nostalgia and Memory
And somewhere on the hill
Inside the past we hear the bells
Catching only parts of thoughts
And fragments of ourselves
Till we begin again
—Regina Spektor, “The Visit”
There were bells on the hill,
but I never heard them ringing.
—Meredith Willson, “Till There Was You”
Nostalgia has something of a bad name, and I don’t propose to improve its reputation here [i]. Rather, you might call what follows a rumination on precision in language: how do we talk about one kind of everyday experience, and why does that matter? Bear with me, as we briefly descend into the noisy public forum of mass-culture discourse. Lately I’ve noticed DJs and music podcasters referring to “Gen Z nostalgia” as one descriptor for a substantial number of the pop songs coming out these days. I don’t know how long this has been going on, but according to a recent Guardian article (Savage, 2025), it’s also a huge phenomenon on TikTok—UK and Irish TikTok in that case, but I assume that this is also happening in the U.S. version. The source material for such nostalgia is not only music but fashion, TV shows, movies, and even defunct snack foods and toy stores (alas, Toys R Us—we knew you well!) dating from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, when current musicians and listeners were first tuning in to mass culture. This surge in sentiment also seems to explain the weirdly recurrent cultural references we’re seeing to Y2K, sometimes even framed as a feature of music: so a song might be described as having “a real Y2K vibe.” What would that mean? Lots of references to duct tape, batteries, widespread anxiety and—in some quarters—firearms? Those were the days.
Whatever this turn to the past may mean to the Gen Z cohort (whom I understand to be those born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s), I’m always leery of the word “nostalgia” when it’s used to describe affection for past music, movies, or other cultural forms. To me, nostalgia is a form of sentimentalism, a forced summoning-up of what are sometimes not-quite-real emotions about one’s personal history or about its artifacts, often reliant on a gauzy, dreamily-lit version of the past. American musical culture has always included a broad streak of sentimentalism: see such venerable hit songs of the 1820s-30s as “The Old Oaken Bucket,” “The Old Farm Gate” and “Home, Sweet Home.” Such tear-jerking evocations of an idealized, stable, and typically all-white rural or small-town past were hugely popular as America charged headlong into the dizzying age of industry. Sheet-music sales, concert receipts, and pleasant hours spent singing around the piano in middle-class parlors relied heavily upon this potent set of images.
Nostalgia and sentimentality, and the mythical pasts on which they usually depend, may have their uses—they seem to sell reliably—but ladling such syrup over valued cultural artifacts radically obscures and diminishes those artifacts’ actual aesthetic characteristics. How do they work, and why do they appeal to us? Or why do some of them appeal to us, I should say; we’re under no obligation to love everything about our personal past. There are plenty of pop songs from my youth that I devoutly hope never to hear again. I will forbear mentioning titles, as one or more of those tunes might return, like the repressed, to afflict your brain with endless repetitions. But when it comes to those songs that we do still willingly connect with—aesthetically, emotionally, physically—what’s going on there? I think it’s a mistake to reduce such experiences to something called “nostalgia.” I don’t like listening to the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” or to Aretha Franklin’s “Think” because they envelope me in rosy recollections of my idyllic childhood. I like listening to those songs because they are great songs. Did my parents, both born in 1920, still enjoy listening to Benny Goodman records in their later years because those tunes brought back the good old days of the Great Depression and World War II? Of course we all have our Proustian madeleines: a song, a movie, a line of poetry or a vivid scene from a novel may well bring to mind the period in your life when you first encountered that particular piece, including the feelings—good or bad—that you were experiencing at the time (who you loved; what you hoped for; how it turned out). To me, that’s not nostalgia. That’s memory: a set of imperfectly-recalled yet still authentic resources from which we construct a personal understanding of what our lives have been and of how those lives have acquired meaning. It’s how we find whatever we can of the “lost time” that Proust’s title has us searching for. Some of those times were good, some were not. Reducing memory to “nostalgia” seems to me unhelpful and sometimes self-deceiving as we navigate our later lives. It’s also a disservice to the art that we cared about, which gets frozen into an imagined version of our personal past, a mere decoration on a stage set, its distinctive aesthetic elements—whether good or bad, whether innovative or doggedly generic—now subsumed by an imposed pseudohistorical identity. If you first saw the Mona Lisa when you were in high school, would you later dismiss it as “fine, but such a high-school painting?” Imagine having poured your soul into writing a song in 1999 and now hearing it referred to as “a real Y2K classic.”
I like to think of American music not as a sequence of decade- or epoch-defined segments—as a range of possible radio or marketing formats—but as a living, growing, ever-changing repertoire of interacting traditions which are simply astonishing in their richness and breadth. Sampling this bounty is an everyday joy. Louis Armstrong’s and King Oliver’s dueling cornet solos on “Dippermouth Blues,” recorded in 1923, sound absolutely great to me today—not because the music sounds “old” or like some sort of novelty, but because it’s so virtuosic, so multivocal, so beautifully and sinuously constructed. The constant interplay among the instruments—two cornets, trombone, clarinet, piano, banjo, drums—threatens to transcend human capacity. How did this song, like so many in the New Orleans tradition, not just fly apart into spinning fragments and shards? You could trace “Dippermouth’s” influence through plenty of subsequent jazz, blues and rock ‘n’roll recordings, and that would be an interesting-enough enterprise. But you can also just listen to it for its own sake—and for yours, because great music will make you and your life better. This is one of the few things in this world that I absolutely know to be true.
Two unrelated incidents in recent weeks deepened my conviction that our music constitutes a living tradition in which older works should not be reduced to emblems of nostalgia. First, I was listening to the NPR podcast Alt.Latino, which I hugely enjoy despite knowing next to nothing about Latin American music, along with not speaking Spanish or Portuguese. I like the show in part for the evident pleasures of the music itself, and also for the always-entertaining interplay between the deeply knowledgeable hosts, Felix Contreras and Anamaria Sayre. By listening, I pick up a bit of knowledge about this vast, enormously complex body of music, and I have a good time doing it. But this recent experience got me thinking about how we understand and talk about the lives of songs. The hosts had played and discussed new releases ranging from salsa to Latin rap to the avant-garde quirky greatness of The Mars Volta, before they lit upon two songs by the Argentinian guitarist Diego Mema. The second of these was “Till There Was You.” Both hosts were delighted by Mema’s beautiful solo rendition of the familiar song, and there was much banter about how surprising it was to find—are you ready?—a Beatles tune being covered by this excellent young guitarist.
It was fun to hear them riffing on the Beatles, which included Felix suggesting that maybe his Beatles cover band should pick up the song. But it was just slightly disappointing when they didn’t go on to lay out the background to this most recent step in the tune’s travels. Where had that song actually come from? As plenty of people my age (and probably younger) will know, it didn’t start with the Beatles. Paul McCartney apparently got it from a 1960 Peggy Lee recording, but “Till There Was You” was written by Meredith Willson for his musical comedy The Music Man, which Willson had been working on since the late 1940s and which opened on Broadway in 1957. The soundtrack album won a Grammy that year, so the song was widely known and was covered by multiple artists working in various genres. Hollywood’s adaptation of The Music Man came out in 1962, further popularizing the tune. The Beatles’ version appeared in England on With the Beatles (1963), and in the U.S. on Meet the Beatles (1964). Fans like me enjoyed their cover version but were mildly surprised that the Beatles would cop a song from such a square source.
As a kid, I had no idea how song ideas and musical influences actually traveled through the world of music makers before they reached the ears of fans. I had no notion that hip, edgy, long-haired songwriters might admire and learn from older, square songwriters who wore suits. I would have been opposed, on principle, to the very idea. So I wouldn’t have guessed—however obvious it seems now—that Brian Wilson had learned a lot from Burt Bacharach and the Four Freshmen, let alone that three decades earlier Robert Johnson had liked and played the songs of Gene Autry and of Jimmie Rodgers. To begin learning about how such seemingly disparate traditions have interacted is to take a step toward feeling our musical heritage’s breadth and complexity—a task that I didn’t undertake until much later in life. Contreras and Sayre may well have known this particular song’s history but were constrained from elaborating it by time or by other factors, but I couldn’t help thinking that they had missed an opportunity. This story is just one example of how big pop music can be and how widely it can range.
Songs like “Till There Was You” endure because they travel, carrying distinctive musical elements that are ripe for adaptation across space, across genres and across time. Great songs often illuminate those contexts as they move, which makes them ripe for historical study. Like “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” “All the Things You Are,” and so many older standards, “Till There Was You” started on Broadway and then traveled: by 1962 it had migrated to the pop mainstream (Peggy Lee, Nana Mouskouri), to jazz (Sonny Rollins, Sue Raney), to country (Chet Atkins), and then to the Beatles’ second U.S. LP where it lodged between the upbeat rockers “Little Child” and “Hold Me Tight.” But the Revolution was on, and as the 1960s advanced, even the Beatles couldn’t prevent standards from being largely demoted to the status of “your parents’ music.” There were exceptions: the occasional album track, such as “Since I Fell for You,” finely rendered by both the Young Rascals (1967) and Bonnie Raitt (1971); and a few LPs, including Linda Ronstadt’s three-record team-up with arranger-conductor Nelson Riddle, which began with What’s New in 1983. But the principle mainly held true until the new century dawned, when this older body of work was unexpectedly “remembered” by the likes of Rod Stewart. A onetime tribune of the boomer revolution which had overthrown the standards regime, Stewart now turned to popularizing the “Great American Songbook” in a five-volume series of standards albums which began appearing in 2002. The second volume of that series included Stewart’s version of “Till There Was You.” My advice, if anybody’s asking: stick with Shirley Jones’s epic rendition in the Music Man movie soundtrack, and let’s otherwise continue to enjoy the persistent delights of the younger Stewart’s Gasoline Alley/Every Picture Tells a Story period.
“Till There Was You” continues to travel, so there will probably always be newer versions to explore. As the Alt.Latino hosts alerted us, the song has made its way to the ears and fingers of a twenty-first-century Latin American guitarist. In his hands, it takes on a new expressiveness and poignancy. There may well be further fine recordings waiting to be unearthed, but I will leave that search to others more industrious than I. On a somewhat less elevated note, I can’t resist recounting an incident that fell much earlier in the song’s travels—in the fall of 1973, as legend has it—when it floated briefly through Granville, Ohio. On a bracing autumn afternoon in that lovely transplanted New England college town, four Denison University hippie housemates, ardent partisans of the counterculture, strode through the lower campus and up the hill to the college bellowing the song at the top of their lungs in four-part cacophony, possibly in response to the Denison chapel’s actual “bells on the hill.” The neighbors’ reactions were not recorded. But the tale of this song’s travels reminds us that the story of pop music just gets bigger, more diverse, and sometimes more weird if you’re willing to do the footwork.
The other incident that got me thinking about the place of music in our culture was seeing the movie Sinners, and then hearing the reflections on it by musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding on their excellent podcast Switched On Pop (along with Alt.Latino, one of my favorite music podcasts). Conceived and brought to fruition by director Ryan Coogler, Sinners evokes a particular past—Alabama in the early 1930s, where violent white supremacists were a constant, ominous presence—but is, if anything, the opposite of nostalgic. Here we are shown how Southern blues music of that era, which would later be reified by would-be purists (mainly white ones) into a fixed, almost sanctified form fit for a museum, was originally ragged, joyful pop music. This was music for dancing, for release, for self-expression, for fun, mainly to be experienced on the Black side of the Jim Crow line. And sometimes, as the movie points out, blues music could also mean a living: “We’re gonna make some money!” shouts the aspiring young juke joint owner, delighted when he hears how astonishingly well the preacher’s kid with the resonator guitar plays and sings. But this movie is no happy hootenanny. While Sinners is about race, music and survival, it is also about vampires. The latter are led by an undead Irishman given to singing the folk songs of his homeland, sometimes joined by his vampire recruits of both races in musical set-pieces of extraordinary power and beauty. He reminds us that Irish immigrants and African Americans both came from histories of oppression, so that both might be persuaded to look forward to the undead utopia he promises his recruits. He argues persuasively that stepping beyond their Jim Crow lives by becoming vampires is Southern Blacks’ only hope for some kind of transcendence in racist America. Meanwhile, the music that pours forth in the juke joint both evokes and becomes part of a living tradition, as the movie demonstrates: first in a surreal, time-bending scene that evokes the entire history of Black music from African origins to the American present; and then through the appearance of Buddy Guy, an actual modern blues master who portrays the grown-up preacher’s son, still playing and reinventing the blues in a twenty-first-century Chicago club.
Sinners reminded me about how I started thinking of earlier generations’ music first of all as music, to be experienced and evaluated as such. Yes, it was historically specific and in need of contextualization. But songs from the past, I came to feel, should not be reduced to fodder for nostalgia: first to “golden classics” interspersed among the current hits, as they were played on WIFE radio during my Indianapolis childhood; and later to hollow artifacts inviting disparagement, now that we had supposedly outgrown them. In adulthood, I didn’t immediately understand why I so quickly tired of the “oldies” and “classic rock” formats, which have become ubiquitous on the radio and in public spaces from grocery stores to airports. At first I thought it was just over-exposure: how many times did I need to hear “Stairway to Heaven?” But it was more than that. A string of familiar oldies might temporarily fire the imagination—it can be great to re-encounter a gem from your past—but the format assumes and is grounded in nostalgia, not in memory. The songs are presented as closed-off artifacts of a distant past, not as living works of art which emerged from distinct musical traditions and might now be heard as being in conversation with contemporary forms and songs. As I groped for new ways of experiencing music, it was academia that opened my mind (an assertion that I suppose some today might find startling). I was in my mid-twenties, just starting graduate school in American Studies at the University of Michigan, when the music historian Richard Crawford exposed me to something close to the full range of American music history: to colonial-era hymnody and shape-note singing; to nineteenth-century dance tunes and marches; to the ironic complexities of Blackface minstrelsy; to the genius of Stephen Foster, Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Nadia Boulanger, Aaron Copland, George and Ira Gershwin, Milton Babbitt, and so many others. Through his deep scholarly engagement and his ebullient enthusiasm in the classroom, Crawford helped me to see and feel the continuing vitality of these works and of the larger traditions from which they stemmed. For me, that was the beginning.
Beyond that class, it was through teaching that I really came to experience music from the past as music to be appreciated and enjoyed in the present for its own distinctive qualities. When I started including songs in my classes—sentimental ballads, labor anthems, political campaign songs, pop standards of the 1930s and ‘40s, jazz of all sorts, blues, soul, rock ‘n’ roll—I found myself researching and then experiencing them as real works of art, not solely as artifacts characteristic of whatever time period we were examining in the classroom. This made songs not only more important and meaningful to me, but also more useful and evocative as teaching tools. In designing and teaching a course on American culture in the 1930s while I was still a graduate student—my first truly independent course—I learned to hear “Stormy Weather” and “Over the Rainbow” as songs with undimmed aesthetic power as well as deep cultural-historical resonances. When I hosted a nighttime session in a darkened dorm lounge, lugging in our home stereo system and an armload of records and then walking the students through some of the milestones of 1930s pop and jazz, it was a remarkable experience for all of us. This was how I started to recognize the breadth and depth of American music, and to love what it has bequeathed to us. What a legacy! And it never stops growing.
That fact—the endless proliferation of new ideas and forms in American music—points to a final reason for why I’m reluctant to view the past through a lens of nostalgia. It not only freezes that past in place and reduces or eliminates our engagement with its aesthetic qualities. It can also encourage the attitude that I’ve heard expressed all too often by members of my own baby-boom generation: “All of the good music has been made. This stuff they make today—is it even music?” And so on. In his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson chided his fellow Americans for excessively revering the fabled European monarchs of centuries past: “Suppose they were virtuous? Did they wear out virtue?” Right. And did John and Paul wear out rock ‘n’ roll? By all means, let’s continue to listen to, enjoy, and learn from our musical forebears, without denigrating their work with the label of “nostalgia.” But what about Wet Leg, Abraham Alexander, Waxahatchee, Chappell Roan, Lake Street Dive, Bad Bunny, Lucy Dacus, Rhiannon Giddens, Jason Isbell, Jon Batiste, Regina Spektor, Janelle Monáe, Olivia Rodrigo, Mickey Guyton, First Aid Kit, Orville Peck, Superchunk, Allison Russell, Rosalia, Cary Morin, Haim, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Jesse Welles, SZA—to name a few? We continue to live in an extraordinarily rich, always-changing musical environment. Why not take a taste? And if you continue to love a song you first heard decades ago, keep right on loving it—but think twice before you label that feeling “nostalgia.” Art, like us, is alive. The best of it grows and changes, right along with us.
I was thinking about all of this the other morning while pulling on my socks, when a familiar song on the radio caught my attention. It was Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising.” That song was about 9/11, but like all good songs, it can be about other things, too. The verses are full of terrible and terribly familiar images, but the chorus is an invitation: “Come on up for the rising.” And I thought, that’s the idea—we should accept that invitation. Life is hard and painful and sometimes tragic in all kinds of ways, so we should come on up when we can. When you watch one of the countless videos of Springsteen and the E Street Band performing the song live, you get the feeling that that’s what the audience are doing as they dance and sing along with Bruce. They’re laying their hands in his, and also in one another’s. They’re rising. There’s room up there for everybody, and the landscape spreads out in all directions. Drink it in, all of it, from the distant past to this moment, here, now. Don’t sugar-coat the past, and don’t forget or minimize its great gifts. Honor it. Build on it. There really are bells on the hill. Come on up.
NOTE
[i] This is not an academic paper so I don’t see a need to engage with the scholarly literature on nostalgia. But for the record, I’ll note that the topic seems to have been ably covered by the historian Tobias Becker in his Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia (Becker, 2023). I haven’t actually read this book, but based on the scholar’s time-honored method of scanning the blurbs, I’d guess that Becker and I agree on some things and not on others. So be it.
REFERENCES
(Becker, 2023). Becker, T. Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia. Boston MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
(Crutcher, 2022). Collage by Angus Crutcher in Janelle L. Wilson, “Party Like It’s 1999, Again.” Zocalo Public Square. 10 February. Available online at URL = <https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/nostalgia-1990s/>.
(Savage, 2025). Savage, M. “Noughties nostalgia trends on TikTok as fans revisit music and TV favourites.” Guardian 4 June. Available online at URL = <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/04/noughties-tv-music-nostalgia-trends-tiktok?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other>.
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