The Disposition Audit

April 26, 2012 § Leave a comment

This is the first post to this blog that includes text. It’s an experiment, an attempt to stop using Facebook and Twitter as a place to dump ideas and, isntead, think about what I have to say and record it in a meaningful way. Blogging, if you will.

I have had the Pearl Jam discography on random for the last two days. Not the entire thing, mind you. Just all of the studio albums, plus their rarities and b-sides comp called Lost Dogs.

A few things have struck me during this gluttony. One is that I regret discounting PJ after Vitalogy came out. I did one of my all-or-nothing subculture switches and stopped listening to anything with a guitar in favor of 100% electronic music 100% of the time for about 5 years. Then I moved to NY and got involved in a messy relationship that put me off electronic music for years. Back to Rock.

Fast forward to the last year or two when I rediscovered all these bands who put out really great music while I was ignoring them. This was sparked by rewatching Singles and getting obsessed with Grunge, again.

So now I’m sitting here listening to Pearl Jam’s discography. It’s good. There are tons of amazing tracks that I never knew about. The recent documentary by Singles-director and PJ-fan-boy Cameron Crowe helped. And the funny thing about this music is that I am nostalgic for it, but I have never heard it before. What is this short circuiting in my brain?

I poked around google a little and discovered the word Saudade. It’s not exactly what I meant, but it covers another experience I find myself having pretty regularly. I have a lot of nostalgia, mostly for the ’90s because it was the best decade, but just generally. I have nostalgia for this morning, for yesterday’s lunch, for last month’s weather. I have theorized that this is a biproduct of moving frequently as a child combined with your typical Gen-X malaise.

The term that has started to coalesce around this ideas of having nostalgia for something one has never experienced is False Nostalgia, and apparently it’s screwing with all of us from the tail end of Gen-X. And then there’s always what Chuck Closterman says about Nostalgia in the context of music and entertainment.