Against the "Nostalgia Concert"

Scraping the bottom of the barrel will never solve the anxieties of the declining rate of profit

Writing for the New York Times, the wonderful Substack writer and novelist Peter C. Baker yesterday lamented the advent and proliferation of the “nostalgia concert,” the practice wherein one established pop musical act after another submits one of its long adored canonical entries into the long play pantheon for live performance on tour.

According to him, the culture industry has now reached peak saturation for this most monetizable practice of cultural regurgitation.

I can’t but of course agree with the foundation of his rebuke: a conspicuous tendency has developed over the past decade and a half, one where bands foist live panegyrics of bygone albums for demoralized fans who are thirst-trapped into parting with paychecks for a trip down memory lane. To me, this is just more evidence of the stalled packaging innovations of the entertainment industry.

But I say “of course” when I agree with Baker not only because the band I cut my teeth with is guilty of this practice—and I have been very critical of the kinds of industry practices which artists like they are often forced into.

It’s also that by now I have been rather clear about where I stand with regard to the culture industry (which is to say that I don’t stand with it). And I find this new trend of performing albums start to finish to be a noteworthy manifestation of the contradictions inlaid in the culture industry’s practices.

This rather curious phenomenon which, using Baker’s nomenclature, we’ll call the “nostalgia concert” (I would prefer something like the “live tableau,” but let’s not fix what ain’t broken), presents a notable inversion of rock music’s historical tension with high brow art.

For decades, rock music has presented the public with a popular art form seamlessly imbricated in the postmodern weave of a media-saturated totality.

Rooted in the counterculture, the hand-and-glove capacity for this cultural product to stream in and out of the spaces of the larger media, the talk show appearances and the music videos and so forth, was, like its close cousin the Hollywood blockbuster, always predicated on the notion of release and reward at the point of consumption of content. To consume a rock album was to participate in the larger market, along with all of the propaganda of market ideology.

Against this visible collaboration with market ideology was rock music’s tendency to strain under the artistic limitations of its industry overlords and seek finer forms, often borrowed from high art.

For example, the excesses and ecstasies of the prog rock of the 1970s can be seen against this backdrop of talented artistry growing up with commodifiable blues and Elvis seeking a more rarified legitimacy, the kind afforded to jazz and classical musicians.

Later on, the advent of punk rock gave rise to the efforts of rock musicians to respond to economic depression and the torpor of consumer life with disruptive agitprop of the kind already seen in galleries and museums in the form of “happenings” and other Situationist art.

But the salience of rock music as an art form necessarily resides in this tension between the high and the low and we can comb its history to assess its successes and failures using precisely this heuristic of detente with so-called higher art forms.

The practice of performing old albums start to finish onstage, the nostalgia concert, can be seen as yet another form of this tension coming out into the open.

The way it does this is through an inversion of the construct of the originally explosive agent of the rock album against an unwitting populace at rest. Now, it is the audience that is agitating for an explosion and it is the rock album that is at rest.

Without knowing it this practice borrows from the tradition in classical music to honor and reproduce canonical work, most often long after the authors of said work have been buried in the ground, for audiences gathering not for the performers per se (though a respectable orchestra and artistic director can often draw audiences in their own right) but for the interpretations of long dead work revivified in a particular rendition.

I have listened to enough classical music in my life that by now I can’t stomach certain interpretations of, say, the Eroica. This evidences a key component of the tradition in classical music, which is here being borrowed by the entertainment industry, that symphonies and quartets, much like plays, are mere splotches of ink without the animating properties of live performers reading the scrawl.

The premise of inviting fans of a particular musical act to attend a live rendition of a familiar work emulates this construct in the classical music world, that the content is a Sleeping Beauty which can only awaken with the princely kiss of the conductor or music ensemble.

The problem with this transference into the entertainment industry of what in the world of concert music is an organic relationship to written material is precisely what Baker wrote about which is the clear monetization effort undergirding the practice by pop musical acts.

The escape into a rarified world of prewritten content in the form of a rock album is yet another instantiation of global capital’s fantasy effects as it continues to scrape the bottom of the barrel of its increasingly finite store from the declining rate of profit.

Repackaging of what was at one time a sui generis explosive event, the chance encounter of young rock musicians with large studio magnetic tape and multitracking, now as some “dead art form” in need of revivification for audiences, restages the spontaneity of the original explosion as some new, albeit fake, spontaneity, the spontaneous explosion of the audience agita increasingly under the strain of a culture industry that can no longer supply them with rewards.

The fantasy that the rock album can now be reproduced as a dead art form interpreted back into life by live musicians—in this case by the very creators of that supposedly dead art form—is only the next sleight of hand which the entertainment industry has foisted on its desperate consumer base.

We may come to find in a half century, after all of us authors of these albums have been dead and buried, an industry that has adopted a strange tradition of reproduction wherein young, aspiring musicians form tribute bands that take these albums out onto the road, the copyright revenue stocking the estates of long gone artists.

As grotesque as such a tradition appears to me I recognize it as a theoretical possibility along the onward march of global capital. Certainly, this practice of the nostalgia concert which we have already gotten used to, and, with Baker, have already grown tired of, would most assuredly appear incomprehensible to the average 45 consumer in the early 60s.

The emotive capacities of rock albums to fuse with the anxieties of teenage and young adult life have long been established, starting with the King himself. That is nothing new.

But there was always something unfinished about this fusion, for what is to become of this youthful ecstasy once it ages out? Capital’s response to this dilemma was the juvenilization of the consumer base. If the industry could create a population of adult teenagers then there the dilemma is solved.

The nostalgia concert is a way to offer a measly bit of chum to an increasingly restless population of adult teenagers, who are looking at middle and old age with worry and concern and need new ways of managing our possessiveness around intellectual property which market ideologues have cultivated in us over our entire lives. As such, the fantasy of the rock album as a dead art form somehow now ennobled by its revivification in real time by that very form’s authors can be seen as merely one more stop on that desultory train.

It is more smoke and mirrors from an industry and a neoliberal model with decades of smoke and mirrors. No amount of high brow posturing can save the demise of an inherently low brow art form, nor should it.

Go to Peter C. Baker’s Substack, “Tracks on Tracks,” here.