As our media and culture cycles speed up, so do our nostalgia rates. This hyperwarp eventually eats itself and now we just spend each day, week, and year looking back at the great things that already happened “on this date” 10, 20, and 25 years ago.
Usually we are nudged along by anniversary edition remasters of classic albums we already know and love. It’s easy to have a hit with a hit.
Anniversary culture reminds us to tell the world which albums changed our lives. The Beatles foretold it all by starting Sgt. Pepper with “It was 20 years ago today,” but sometimes we can’t wait for the 20th or 25th anniversary, so now just “It was 10 years ago today” is good enough.
Deciding which albums are worthy of re-buying again brings us from nostalgia to our other favorite rock pastime: Top 10 Lists. From the dawn of the first day spent on that hypothetical desert island, we’ve been making Top 10 lists. Rock fans everywhere rage against the taste makers, righting all the wrongs unjustly handed down by the gatekeepers who get it wrong when trying to tell us what’s good.
WHY DO WE DO THIS?
The cliche answer here is “it’s only rock’n’roll but we like it,” but it feels like something deeper. For some of us, rock music and everything that phrase “rock music” implies is so important to us, if you couldn’t be IN a band, or if the band you’re in starts singing different tunes, or if we “learned more from a 3-minute record than we ever learned in school,” then crafting these lists and defending them and amending them is how we not only tell the world who we are, and why, but also what’s “now playing” on the soundtrack of our lives.
About the presenterTodd Levinson Frank
Todd Levinson Frank is a musician, writer, husband and father of 2 boys. He writes about football for NFLspinzone.com and writes about music and popular culture for BumsLogic.com.