I’ve just read about a concert category sweeping America at the moment. It is another example of just how uninspiring, insipid, money hungry and fucking useless the corporate recording industry has become.
The mystery category is - drum roll (© WEA/DrumRollsRUs 1997) please – ‘Nostalgia’. Yes, you heard right. ‘Nostalgia’. What exactly is ‘Nostalgia’? According to one source, it is any band that had three or more hits in the 80’s, but not after 1986 (how can they say ‘the 80’s’ and then cull four years off the decade? I don’t geddit…) The hits are generally defined as ballads and the band members should have faded into big-haired obscurity around the time Kurt Cobain picked up his first guitar (maybe this is the significance of 1986). And it is different to ‘Retro’ but only the record companies know why.
The significance of this particular ‘movement’, for the want of a more derisive word, is the bands it features have all had their 15 minutes. They made shit loads of money which they probably invested in nose candy and crap clothes, and have been looking for ways to get back into the spotlight ever since. These bands include such luminaries as REO Speedwagon, Toto, Styx, and…gulp…Journey. Fucking hell didn’t we get more than enough of that sanitised, over-produced, saccharin rubbish back then? (Pompous voice-over © 1999 Warners/VoiceOversRUs) Obviously not!
So, here’s me thinking “oh well, if there are plenty of sad individuals who want to pay no less than US$150 a ticket to see these bands, maybe there’s a target terrorists would be urged to hit.” Then I kept reading…and the ‘phenomena’ – don’t you love the way these things are explained as ‘phenomena’, as if the writer hasn’t got the balls to say ‘another example of crass, hyped up stupidity – is coming to Australia by a big Australian promoter, who has taken to making ads for telephone companies recently. This man is quoted as saying he thinks it would work here. Who does he think he’s kidding? He wouldn’t even be looking at it if it wasn’t going to work and he wasn’t going to get a healthy profit margin. I mean, how much money can you make sucking the life out of a healthy, industrious music scene and presenting some glossed over, plastic surgeons wet dream come true, faded, jaded and overweight has-been singing songs about girls he only ever wished he had and having the gall to charge punters exorbitant ticket prices to sit in an ‘entertainment’ centre, freezing one’s butt off and then having to pay through your freezing arse for weak beer, heart killing food and over-priced, garish merchandise.
This ‘movement’ is providing is a one-off trip down memory lane for a lot of folk who have no concept of thinking for the future and want to relive their heydays. And fuck it, if I even hear whisper of a world Nostalgia tour, I’m planning to blow the bloody thing up myself.