Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Ministry Nostalgia Tuesday

Just So You KnowMusic Wonkery

Since last week I’ve been getting a little nostalgic.

When I get this way- typically an annual event- I would post something maudlin about my soldiering days, and the good times and the high adventure (or what passed for it in Cold War Bavaria) and the lost opportunities that can put me in a days-long funk if I dwell on them.  A recent article in Stars and Stripes about the few remaining US casernes in Germany, casernes that I once knew well, might have been enough to do the job.  I mean, imagine your college, for example, which you were anxious to leave yet to which you grow more attached over time; where you learned hard lessons about, well, everything- chicks, drugs, booze, probably some art, literature, cars, debt, dealing with pricks- lessons that could only be learned in that place.  And then imagine that your cherished alma mater is being sold and will never again be yours.  It can be tough.

And you know, I did get nostalgic.  A little.

But instead of the cloying post about lost innocence, leavened with the cynical asshole-ishness characteristic of much of my writing, I got to thinking instead about other things that are gone, in a sense, yet still remain.  I got to thinking of music in that way, probably because of recent Ministry musical postings, and that brought me in turn to what Johno once deemed “chronological vertigo”.

Chronological vertigo is the appreciation of timespan between a chosen point in spacetime and the present.  But it’s much more than understanding what a decade is, or a century, or a lifespan, or any other stretch of consecutive elapsed time between two points.  It is understanding, even feeling, the relationship between that elapsed time and today; between then and now.

Consider some musics that are 30 this year: Kill City; Decade; Animals; Never Mind the Bollocks... The distance between those records’ release and now is nearly the same as between them and the end of WW2.  Next time someone mentions the Sex Pistols, consider that they are the halfway point between now and VJ Day.

Or what about Star Wars?  The original is 30 years old now.  If you were thinking about movies that were 30 years old while you happened to be waiting to see Star Wars, you might be thinking about The Secret life of Walter Mitty, or any of a dozen crummy westerns.  But look- the difference between the release of Star Wars and today is probably longer than it was between the establishment of the Empire and the umasking of the Sith Lord, until the destruction of the second Death Star and the establishment of Endor as a martial power.

Think about *that*.


Posted by GeekLethal on 04/03/07 at 01:38 PM
Just So You Know • Music Wonkery • Permalink