A couple of years ago, a study by a music analytics company determined that the new music market was shrinking. All of the industry growth, they said, stemmed from the desire to hear old songs. In part this was thanks to the burst of popularity that often follows when a piece of music is played in a major film or television series — Kate Bush’s Running Up that Hill on Stranger Things, for instance, Donny Hathaway’s Jealous Guy on Euphoria, or rarer numbers such as a disco remix of Stand on the Word by the gospel group the Joubert Sisters, played during the season finale of Industry.
In 2024, this nostalgia fixation seems even more pronounced. We see it not only on the TV soundtrack circuit, but in Beyoncé covering Dolly Parton’s Jolene, Taylor covering herself, the relentless appeal of the ABBA immersive show Voyage, and the fact that each week TikTok reignites the career of another band once half-lost to time – I Monster, Black Box Recorder, Mother Mother among them.
Of course this is not popular music’s first foray into nostalgia – ABBA enjoyed a previous rebirth in the 90s thanks to tribute act Björn Again and the release of the top-selling ABBA Gold compilation. In the 60s, Bob Dylan channelled Woody Guthrie, whose own career began some 30 years earlier. In the 1980s we saw a yearning for the 1950s, in the resurgence of rockabilly, the Stray Cats and the Meteors, the fashion for full skirts and teddy boys, and the retro settings for blockbusters such as Grease, Dirty Dancing, and Back to the Future.
This particular romanticisation grew in part because of the rise in neoconservatism, in which the 1960s and 70s were regarded as a left-wing aberration. At the start of the 80s, with Reagan in the White House and Thatcher in Downing Street, it was time to steer society back to the days before the great countercultural hiccough, to an era of stable family structures and international dominance.
Perhaps this sounds familiar. It’s hard not to notice that the recent resurgence in cultural nostalgia has coincided with the past decade’s ungainly lurch to the right. The populist momentum spurring Trump, Brexit, Meloni, Modi and electoral shifts across the globe, from Sweden to Argentina, has largely traded on the idea that life used to be better.
Each week TikTok reignites the career of another band once half-lost to time
Simultaneously, we have seen a revival in vinyl sales – in 2023 increasing for the sixteenth consecutive year, a steady supply of classic rock T-shirts for sale in high street fashion stores, and a seemingly endless band reunion circuit, from Built to Spill to Blink-182, via Girls Aloud and Madonna. It is as if in the act of making America great again, of taking back control, we redirected our gaze to some imagined golden yesteryear and dreamed of how it might sound.
It’s logical to assume that our penchant for older music might be about the reassurance it brings in an age of great uncertainty. That in a time of war, plague, climate change, the rising cost of living and the threat of robots taking all our jobs, listening to songs from the good old days might provide some comfort.
So much of what fuels conflict and disharmony is about the dread of the new and the fear of the other – whether that’s the strangers making their way across the Channel, our advancing AI overlords, or shiny new pop music we don’t understand. The familiar feels safe. Give us the old tunes and the singalong choruses.
The peculiar element in all of this is that it is precisely the new that has spawned and sustained our retro music tastes – namely TikTok and Spotify and streamed TV. As the world has tumbled into chaos, we have settled into the warm bosom of the algorithm.
But before we all drift into the balmy horizontalism of a perpetual Hotel California, there is a flicker of revivification. History tells us that dark times can spark exciting new musical movements – bursts of youthful hedonism in the face of recession and doom will spawn the sounds that in time will ripple out to all of us. We saw it in the Great Depression of the 30s when jazz and swing provided a kind of escapism, and the big hits of the day included Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries (it really wasn’t) and We’re in the Money (most people were not).
We saw it, too, in the World War II era, when amid the horror came the Lindy Hop and the jitterbug dance crazes. In the 70s came disco, then the acid house movement of the 80s, and the electronic dance-pop that followed the collapse of the housing market in the late Noughties. Tempos quickened, lyrics seized optimism, the dancefloors swelled again.
Just what musical revolution this particular age of uncertainty will bring remains to be seen. But it’s best to hope for something divisive and discombobulating, a high-speed racket only half-understood by older generations, with a lingo and dance moves that belong to the young. We should see it as the pulse of a new generation carrying us forward; something radical to rouse us from the stupor of our great musical nostalgia.
Laura Barton is a writer and broadcaster. Her book “Sad Songs” is out now
