Introducing Happy Nostalgia

David T. Humphries and Justin Rogers-Cooper

Origin Element #1: Past and Future Conversations

I listened to even more music than usual during the first two years of the pandemic, when often the only private office space I had was between my headphones. Sometime between spotting my first scarlet tanager and my first great crested flycatcher, I began another new pastime, pausing as I pecked around my music catalogue, trying to trace how I first heard different artists and songs. Isolated like everyone else, I found it soothing to recall past connections to people attached to artists, songs, and albums, but I felt a tinge of anxiety, too, after I started subscribing to a music streaming service: I wanted real memories before the AI overlords and canny algorithms determined my future listening with playlists and the seduction of pure plentitude.

I would stream Luna’s new cover of Television’s “Marquee Moon,” released late in 2020, say, and remember a moment from decades earlier, when our college radio station manager Andy said something like, “Galaxie 500 is the most underrated band of all time,” maybe not even to me, maybe just in my presence at a staff meeting or party.^[1] Andy was older, cooler, and always agreeable despite his black t-shirts, black Doc Marten boots, raven black soul patch, and elegantly ripped jeans -- a role model for a budding first-year college student and prospective DJ in the early 1990s.

Not too long after Andy’s pronouncement, Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500 started a new band, Luna. With my radio training done, my FCC license on file, and my own (co-hosted) weekly radio show, I relished playing “Slash Your Tires,” a song from their first album, just about every week.^[2] Luna became one of the bands that I saw the most, the last time in 2018 at Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. When they played a snippet from “Strange,” it was my first time hearing a Galaxie 500 song live. ^[3] It was a moment to remember.

Around the time I signed up for a music streaming service, I met Sam Bromer in a Liberal Studies class I was teaching on Zoom at the CUNY Graduate Center. Sam is a guitarist and a contributing editor for this volume. We continued to meet online and then in person to talk about music. When Sam mentioned that he was thinking about Television a lot after the death of Tom Verlaine, I noted that I had been listening to them a lot more than usual, too, ever since that Luna cover. It became yet another file to add to my life’s musical soundtrack, past and present.

The point is this: The origin of this project came from remembering how music layers memories with new connections.

Being Analog #1: Moore’s Law

Not long ago the drummer for Galaxie 500, Damon Krukowski, wrote The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World.^[4] Like many authors reflecting on analog culture and technology, Krukowski cites one of the most influential forces that acted on the lives of nearly everyone born after the 1960s: Moore’s law. That would be Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, who in 1965 famously predicted that integrated circuits would double in power and capacity every 18 months. It remains the least understood force acting on our culture and politics, even though we essentially think about it constantly.

In ways that Marx and Engels could scarcely have dreamt when contemplating capitalism’s colonizing power, the rise of commercial and personal computers (and their transformation into mobile technology) revolutionized nearly all aspects of culture, politics, and consciousness into the twenty-first century. The disorientation experienced by those of us that lived through the eclipse of analog technology by digital code might only be exceeded by the generations born directly into algorithmic life.

Ken Steiglitz defines the digital as meaning “a signal of interest is being represented by a sequence or array of numbers,” while analog means “a signal is represented by the value of some continuously variable quantity.”^[5] Digital signals can be counted, analog cannot. An analog clock moves continuously. Digital displays time discontinuously. For him, signal is what carries information to us, and noise is what carries no information or obscures the signal.^[6] Analog signals are continuously corrupted by noise. Digital data can be “copied perfectly” and transferred to new mediums to elude decay.^[7] “All analog signals are fundamentally mortal,” he writes, adding, once an “analog signal of any kind has been corrupted by noise, the damage is generally irreversible.”^[8]

Analog culture is not necessarily superior, but its pleasures are different. Nor can we claim contemporary life is wholly digital, or that analog time is over. Robert Hassan finds any easy equations about analog authenticity and digital unreality to be vague and misleading.^[9] Defining technical differences between analog and digital might be easier than distinguishing the nostalgic culture of retro or steampunk. Krukowski refuses an all-or-nothing reaction: “Analog is not simply old, and digital is not only new.”^[10] He defines analog as a “continuous stream of information” and digital as “discontinuous.”^[11] Our senses, he insists, are analog; feeling the vibration of a guitar string, we sense on an analog scale. For Hassan, analog is “something not there in our digital present.”^[12] Happy Nostalgia might well be an attempt to inquire into the palimpsest of the “there” that is “not there.”

While each day we mediate between analog and digital states, digital hegemony is the rule, the dominant form of extraction, the point of investment, the apex of surveillance. We know the many reasons why the digital became paradigmatic. Its convenience, ease, and intelligence sustain awesome effects of power, for individuals and for corporations and for states. Take just one app on the “cell phone,” a pocket computer whose secondary functions relate to “calling.” The U.S. Defense Department developed GPS during the Cold War, with the first satellite launched in 1960. The agency spent billions making the classified system, but when the last satellites came online in 1995, the Cold War was already over. By 2000, the now unclassified system was available to anyone: “Now we all carry the full power of this massive military project in our pockets.”^[13]

Now combine the photos, videos, social networks, banking, crypto, movies, shows, music, games, messages, news, reviews, notifications, live-streams, sharing, Zooms, Facetimes, posting, locking, passwords, swiping, liking, hearting, hacking, suspensions, terminations, stalking, blocking, bullying, canceling, conspiracies, recruitment, incels, chans, grifters, doxing, phishing, spamming, doomscrolling. As a technology of mass power, the cell phone rivals the automobile and firearm, a liberatory device of control, surveillance, anxiety, manipulation, deception, fantasy, secrets, and influence -- of love, dating, marriage -- and divorce, suicide, and murder.

Origin Element #2: From a Place of Annoyance

A second prompting also included Dean Wareham. In October 2021, he released a solo album called I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A.^[14] I listened to it all the way through late one night when everyone was sleeping. As soon as it ended, I thought, like a headline in my brain: “Dean Wareham: He’s Still Got It.” Then I pulled up Pitchfork to read the review. There was none. There was an announcement of the album, but there was no review. There never would be.

I hadn’t noticed that Pitchfork changed from comprehensive and snarky, a voice of the college radio I remembered, to something more clickable and probably more profitable (or trying to be more profitable. Now that this drafting has gone on for more months, these last sentences take on an a more ominous turn, as the corporate bean counters at Condé Nast have folded Pitchfork into GQ, gutting further its original mission and culture.)^[15] I hadn’t noticed that I was becoming out of touch just by staying in place. I was annoyed. I was still mostly stuck at home with time on my hands, so I decided I would write something about music, and when I did, I would mention that Dean Wareham album and share my mental headline. As of this writing, that is done and done.

So, the second origin of this project was also very pandemic and very digital DIY: Why not turn some annoyance into something else, something to be shared, a gesture towards what makes music enjoyable beyond the bounds of data and profit?

Being Analog #2: Cell Culture

AT&T proposed cell service in the late 1940s. In 1947, the FCC allowed a few local licenses for about 20 or so conversations. The USSR had mobile service for drivers called Atlay in 1957. Bulgaria had pocket mobiles in 1966, with one phone able to call six others. Amos Joel developed a way for calls to transition though local cell towers in 1970. The FCC reconsidered cell technology the next year. Motorola demonstrated cells in New York City in 1973, and Japan launched commercial cell phones in 1979. The FCC approved AT&T mobile service in 1982, and in 1990 cells start going digital. By 2001, pay phones were abandoned. By 2008, there were about 2.2 billion cell phones for 6.7 billion people. Last year there were around 7.33 billion cells for 8 billion people.^[16]

In 1980, the three network newscasts reached 75% of the viewing audience each night.^[17] In the early 1990s, CompuServe and Prodigy began offering dial-up services. Yahoo! and AOL organized new audiences for email, browsing, messaging, and news. In 1995, data rates were 10 Kb per second. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gifted broadcast licenses to broadcasters for nothing, despite a market value between $12-70 billion.^[18] The Clinton administration, Congress, and the FCC redistributed wealth from the commons (or the public, as you like it) to private corporations in an act not unlike the land grants to the railroads in the nineteenth century. The political economy of digital primitive accumulation set the stage for the collapse of print cultures and businesses who could not survive the disaggregation of narrative news from advertising capital. Not only did print newspapers begin their epic contraction, but an event not captured on video “barely registers as news… [V]ideo-driven stories eventually drove out the old method of narration.”^[19] Writing in 2012, Alex Alben noted a Tik Tok logic: “[T]he distribution of video by user groups on video portals” centers user attention and political power.^[20] The 2001 fake shark attack photo “And You Thought You Had a Bad Day At Work,” manipulated through Adobe Photoshop, gave way to AI deepfakes.

Digital culture accelerates and transforms at the pace of Moore’s law. Nvidia and TSMC have become global corporations essential to meme making, national security, driving cars, uploading family photos to the cloud. The risk of overstating this history occurs because it’s so obvious and transparent that we lack the vocabulary to understand the obvious. But what’s occurring is likely as consequential as Gutenberg or any industrial revolution, on par perhaps only with refining fossil fuels into energy.

Digital culture colonized space-time through the dissemination of cell phones combined with the internet; when the two met in Apple iPhone in 2007, culture, politics, and time began a new phase.^[21] This is not a history of innovation, but a narrative about a transition in knowledge, perception, and memory. Happy Nostalgia speaks to more than decade-isms in music; rather, it chronicles historical practices of mediating social identities during epochal transformation. The contrast between then and now illuminates the past in ways we couldn’t have known then.

Hassan tells us about the “human bond with a particular category of technology.”^[22] That bond partly emanates from media waves; analog forms come from “wavy and fuzzy” signals.^[23] Alben defines the analog era through radio. For him, the period from the 1970s to the 1990s initiated the transition from analog to digital. He narrates the now commonplace observation that digital media does not just distribute information differently, but also transforms our perceptions of reality in the process.^[24] Analog media allowed for the easier management of consensus reality, derived from the monologic concentration of media into television networks and anchors like Walter Cronkite. But it also expresses “the irrational, the imprecise, the ineffable.”^[25] The culture of analog is more than wavy tech.

We have become ‘cellular.’ Cellular culture makes us digital beings; we are alienated and yet networked, alone yet linked. Cellular politics are atomizing and individuating, crowded and viralized, carceral and terrorist. “The problem for modern society,” writes Hassan, “was privatization of knowledge (as information) that was being sequestered within commercial databases to be stored or sold as commodities.”^[26] We watch and are watched. We post and we are shared; we call and are called, message and are messaged, swipe and are swiped, use and are used.

Origin Element #3: Analog Energy and Considered Revisions

I don’t have to own every record, know every fact, see every show. I collect a lot of music, remember much about artists I like, learn a bit about music every day, and see a lot of shows, but I am not a completionist. I have a few gems and stories that I share as part of my quirky collection, and I have my own tastes and favorites. I also miss things, have gaps in my knowledge, and am open to suggestions. I’m interested in other people’s musical knowledge and passions. I suppose that’s why my ideas of music are so associated with particular people, places, and times.

When I was an M.A. student at Ohio State University, I had such gobs of time that I signed up for an introductory, undergraduate Italian class. That’s where I met Jason. He was a drummer living in the Neilhouse, a collective of undergraduates inhabiting an old Victorian house near campus who hosted live shows in their oversized living room. When Jason learned I was into music, he invited me over. I saw a handful of shows there and kept a few of their homemade flyers, including one that I shared with their Facebook group back when: The Softies and Elliott Smith (as billed).

That show is one of the gems in my mental collection. When I saw Elliott Smith perform at the Oscars a few years later, I was miles away watching TV, but I pictured myself at his feet while he played an acoustic set on the sofa at the Neilhouse. When he died a few years after that, I felt a greater obligation to remember. The truth, though, is that what I remembered most were The Softies, as they struggled to ground their microphones properly during a short set. It was a charming refuge during a time of transition and tumult.^[27]

So, the third origin element, as exemplified by that homemade flyer, concerns grounding a digital writing project in analog energy, the energy that not only made the music but created the fanzines, posters, handbills, and ephemera, objects that passed an interest in music from hand to hand, making in-person, impromptu communities.

Being Analog #3: Nostalgia for Noise

Krukowski reflects on the history of technological change through music and habits of listening, searches for communion, and cultures of politics. For him, narrating simple shifts in technology, from magnetic tape to ProTools, can obscure both lost and recovered practices of listening and recording, and the relations of performer to audience, of artist to public, of fans to friends. Recording practices suggest relations to time; analog time can be found on the tape, located, distinguished. In the studio, analog time refers to the sound on the tape, but the sound also “signifies where it is not.”^[28] By contrast, digital time is “signal only.”^[29] Digital audio is provisional, discrete, absolute: “We do not feel digital time so much as we receive it.”^[30]

The re-organization of music into codes and apps shifted relations of power from artists to programmers, from record companies to big tech, from collections to streaming. The global and still under-theorized spread of digital economies carried infamous material consequences for musicians. As Krukowski notes, pressing one thousand singles in 1988 equaled the earnings of 13 million streams in 2012. Napster altered music -- but also listening cultures, how we relate to each other through music -- by isolating music into data.

Krukowksi imagines the primary differences between analog and digital through the relation of signal to noise. Analog media includes noise, while digital media eliminates it. The elimination of noise, however, destroys what noise communicates. On social media, algorithms

-- black box codes of artificial intelligence privileging monetized attention -- determine the signals we see and hear. Our own processes of sorting information, searching for signals amidst the noise, risk becoming degraded and compromised: “[T]he act of sorting through that noise is itself a tool for communication.”^[31] Noise sorting is labor. Happy Nostalgia reflects that labor.

The analog tools we used to make ourselves allowed us to find analog social networks, to inhabit analog spaces. They are more than outmoded technologies; they are remnants of past practices that shaped identities and social relations. They were technologies of culture -- they made particular sounds that created specific feelings, which in turn channeled masses and classes, gendering and racing -- they made labors possible, and determined, if not over-determined, the rhizomatic directions of politics. Our nostalgia becomes a meditation on the possibilities of relation, of relation to time, of time to consciousness. Put another way, “noise has value” beyond the history of noise.^[32] Like sound, it can bind us in time, infusing space with an autonomy of sensations that might feel otherwise like agency.

Music is an appendage of memory, an application of remembering time, a folder on the desktop of the mind. Sometime during the Cold War, when musical recording took on mass forms, when radio and vinyl began to circulate through childhoods and schools, rhythms and electrification and embodiment produced mass gyrations, viral blues, friendships formed through attitudes, postures, fashion. Listening cut across Jim Crow. Anticommunist censorship went pale before songwriters. Communist censorship failed the underground of magnitizdat. Sexuality refracted Christianity into the backseat. Girls found girls through boy bands. Boys found boys through divas. Records in living rooms travelled upstairs to cassettes and CDs in bedrooms. Cars discovered bass. Headphones melted into earbuds on wires, one to an ear, knowing smiles.

Exchange value is not just a technique of social relations sustaining capitalist economy. Exchange value defines cultures of pleasure, of survival, of politics. Picture David and his origin elements, wandering around a record store, trying on headphones, chatting with the clerk, selecting an album to define meditation, to digest floating emotions, to initiate a tour of mourning and romance. If searching for the right sound is a kind of labor, what happens to the craft of listening once noise sorting is outsourced?

Origin Element #4: Not a Solo Show

This was never a solo show: I’ve always associated the CUNY Graduate Center with music more as a listener and contributor. My favorite album as a college DJ was One Last Kiss… a compilation on spinART records. It’s where I heard “100,000 Fireflies,” my introduction to The Magnetic Fields.^[33] When I came to the Grad Center and met my classmate Claudia Gonson, their manager, vocalist, and keyboardists, I was a little star struck, and after all this time, I still am.

More recently, I was the adviser for two exceptional theses by students in the Liberal Studies program: Kwame Ocran’s “Aloof: Black Divas of Refusal” and Max W. Kaplan’s “Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack of Liberal Nostalgia.”^[34] Both got me talking, thinking, and reading about music again in ways that were both personal and academic. In another of my classes, I met a student who shared the pleasure of being in a band that opened for Le Tigre, and who created a capstone project on archives related to riot grrl bands from the 1990s, creating other sparks of associations. And throughout most of this project, there was talking with Sam and listening to his band, Golf Lexapro, on the Best of Spotify playlist I made for myself, featuring my favorite song of theirs, “Craigslist.”^[35]

So, origin element #4 was simply to keep the project local, to make a digital record of people who had -- or could -- see each other in or around the Liberal Studies program at the Grad Center, and create more conversations.

Being Analog #4: Analog economy

What’s lost to digital media is more than a quixotic relation to prior tools, to familiar sounds, or to nostalgic fantasies. It’s more than the seemingly preordained expulsion of analog technology in the name of market efficiencies, consumer demand, and machine learning. What’s lost are cultures of memory, practices of space, sensitivity to localization, capacities of hearing, relations of spontaneity, times of privacy, pleasures of device, artifacts of consciousness, faces of markets, histories of liveness, tones of home.

Music is not just a soundtrack, but a sonic force that engenders promiscuous solidarities. It’s a technology of memory, an aural archive. Between Napster and the iPhone, the hegemony of analog tech collapsed. Music went digital, and the politics of listening shifted. But soon after the emergence of mobile apps as the dominant form of capitalist communication, analog tech and industries recovered. In The Revenge of Analog, David Sax explains why analog technologies remain profitable at smaller scales.^[36] He writes that he lost the “carnal pleasure of physically browsing and buying music.”^[37]

The audience for vinyl is not the usual suspects, but younger customers, including many young girls and women. For one, what was mass culture became class culture. Jenna Miles confirms that the internet “sparked the revival.”^[38] The internet helps sell records, facilitating analog adoption. Record factories around the world run at full capacity. There is still a profitable market for film, Polaroids, board games, books in print. Moleskine notebooks open for the creative class: “Like a Patagonia jacket or a Toyota Prius, it projected someone’s values, interests, and dreams.”^[39] Jehnie I. Burns traces mixtape nostalgia to a combination of “auditory memory and kitsch retro appeal.”^[40] The mixtape is both material culture, the cassette you can record yourself, and metaphor, a way of re-assembling culture to express yourself. Through the mixtape, you relate to others, find others, love others -- subcultures of sound lived political practices; music makes solidarity.

For Sax, analog returned because the digital is so successful, pervasive, and obvious. Its ever-growing power is nonetheless somehow simultaneously limited. It seizes attention and alters social behavior, conscripts beliefs and programs desires, yet still we “want to interact with goods and services with all our senses.”^[41] The analog economy is not just postdigital, but parallel and even dependent on the digital. Analog culture is an inheritance, a sensory fantasy, and an historical indicator, a dashboard artifact. Yet across generations and genders, analog becomes class culture, middle-class markers, an elaboration of education, a signifier of party, an expression of identity, a claim to the erotic. Authenticity is a cultural construction, a shared fantasy, a projection of necessity, but when wearing that mask, analog signals the wound of the real. We want to acquire objects, collect times, own the gods.

In part, the business model for digital media simply does not work (yet): most streaming companies are not profitable, and many digital publications “still spend more than they make.”^[42] Subscription revenues do not necessarily replace ad revenue, but with ads now predominantly on search and social media, the ‘content’ of legacy media online often struggles. Retail shopping did not die when e-commerce became normal: Some over-indebted box stores and department stores went bankrupt, and some malls in specific regions closed.

Sax links the creative destruction of digital capitalism to two historical trends: the internet and neoliberal globalization.^[43] We live now in the new mobile intelligence of the former and the breakdown of the latter. The U.S. has export controls on semiconductors to China, and the ‘China plus one’ strategy of corporate supply chains reflects anxiety over ‘just in time’ production located in the authoritarian state, hungover from pandemic lockdowns, flatlining infrastructure lending, deepening property debts, and militarized oceans. State capitalism has picked up where open markets faltered, racing to subsidize electric cars, wind farms, lithium production, and yet more computing power, an endless future of shrinking chips, quantum computing, and server farms for cloud applications powering hallucinating chatbots.

Origin Element #5: The 1990s

As the kernel of the project took shape, I began to read more about music, paying particular attention to Simon Reynolds’ Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.^[44] It began to make even more sense to see the 1990s as a good break, the other side of the bridge from where we stand today. Speaking broadly, for Reynolds the 1990s was the last decade (so far) in which new genres really mattered as a force in culture with their own new subcultures: Hip hop came into its own, rock had its last heyday as a headliner, and electronic and dance music did new things, with raves and scenes beyond the clubs. That made sense, and as a completionist, Reynolds offered a good bit of information to back it up. Seek and you shall find, I suppose, but since then it seems that every week there is more published, posted, and otherwise shared about the 1990s. Hearing of the project, others have directed me to the examples I might have missed: To give just one example, the CUNY Graduate Center’s Jenny Furlong pointed me to the 60 Songs that Explain the 90s, another podcast that helps the commute during the hybrid work week.^[45]

Beyond Reynolds, there is much more that could be said about the changes in technology and business models at the beginning of the 2000s, but it mostly comes down to the emergence of the digital: Music no longer has to be attached to physical things and places in the same ways. Along with the breakdown of the record label-radio industrial complex, the idea of ‘selling out’ faded away and the commitment to certain kinds of social ideas and social movements shifted. With so many categories and structures challenged and dissolved, and the emergence of a new economy of attention, getting that attention became its own scramble, its own story, for all but the largest and most established acts.

And so the fifth origin element was just a loose central concept, but one that seemed far from arbitrary: The 1990s is an interesting frame to reconsider how music became digital, and how, in turn, new technologies of streaming changed the cultures of art and consumption.

Being Analog #5: Signal Cultures

The Dead Media Archive tracks the differences between analog and digital to the Greek roots of “ana,” which means equivalent, and “logos,” defined as the “structure of reality.”^[46] Analog was a way of experiencing life, and perhaps still can be. However much revenge analog has taken, the transition to digital remains the fundamental revolution of contemporary capitalism: History did not end, it became digitized.

The transformation of technology extends into all domains of economy and culture, but the volumes talking about big tech and big data and monopoly still too infrequently rhapsodize on the terrifying and spellbinding transition period in question. As AI attracts the new investments that ten years ago would have gone to co-working start-ups and apps for selling rooms, the story of analog’s revenge intensifies with the histories that track the 1990s, with the advent of Netscape and AOL, and maybe concludes at the point Meta (then Facebook) purchased Instagram. We hope that Happy Nostalgia is one of those histories.

If neoliberalism made the conditions for digital economies, then digital economies enabled new neoliberalisms, of Californication, of self-branding, self-marketing, influencing and following, monetization of experience, friendship, and sex. Following Bernard Steigler, the Dead Media Archive observes that the digital representation bears a different correspondence to reality. The digital aesthetic touches differently, its affects ping elsewhere, its algorithms capture open and secret desires with an unprecedented precision.

Like many philosophers of the analog, the Dead Media Archive turns to Carol Wilder. In 1997, she delivered a conference paper entitled “Being Analog.”^[47] Here analog came into focus as a concept, a way to think about technological change. Turning to the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics held between 1946-1953, she follows debates to surmise that “digital and analogic metaphors are complementary forms of representation, which acquire meaning only in relation to each other.”^[48] Citing the definitions of language philosophers, Wilder notes how we have always communicated both in digital and analog. She also asks, what makes analog so real and seductive? Why did the digital feel so disembodied?^[49]

Disembodied may have felt accurate then, when using a desktop computer on dial-up to download webpages. But any easy opposition of analog and digital ‘realities’ long ago disappeared: Is the digital anything if it’s not shockingly intimate? Digital realities -- even fake ones -- not only compete with ‘truth’ but can remake the real. Moore’s law means that with every new app, and every new algorithm, the depth and shape and sense of the digital dials into the mind anew. Who can deny the hyper-flex allure of the dopamine flood delivering its random intermittent reward? We are an analog species becoming digital, losing control over autonomous intelligence, already organic machines, reproducing digital animals. Maël Renouard writes that the “machine is not external to us. We are machines more often than we are non-machines… we are automatons insomuch as we are minds.”^[50]

Origin Element #6: Genres and Generations

The 1990s was never just a place for happy returns, a vessel for the indulgent nostalgia of a simpler time of MTV, Rolling Stone and Vibe, and Billboard charts based on sales, but a template for reading and re-reading our current moment. When Jamie Zabinsky (former Liberal Studies student, current English Ph.D. candidate at the Grad Center, planning editor) joined the conversations, they became less about closing circuits and more about the future. Considering the 1990s as more of an open-ended starting point offered new kinds of personal reflections and broader understandings of how politics and identity have changed. We had always hoped to include writing on different genres of music, and writing in different genres, but this shift in inflection also made the 1990s more inclusive, depending on how one had experienced it. Some of us were there in real time, but it also became a template for exploring comparisons that feel like a starting point for a myriad of subsequent evolutions. From the conversations across interests and generations, the 1990s inevitably and wonderfully could also be a combination of the two, an ending only now understood and a beginning to monitor and trace.

This sixth origin element gave us our newfound title, Happy Nostalgia, which might have otherwise scored somewhere between Led Zeppelin and Quiet Riot on the oxymoron spectrum. Nostalgia for the music of the 1990s can be a happy nostalgia because it can produce an evolving nostalgia, a strategic return rather than a refuge or retreat, a source of renewal and sustenance, a kind of imaginary origin for journeys not yet fully mapped out.

Being Analog #6

Renouard compares the transition from analog to digital to the single generation when “horse civilization” disappeared.^[51] He intuits the revenge of analog, too, the “new dialectical phase” in which we wish for our memories in material form again.^[52] We search for music on YouTube seeking our lives from decades before, trying to reunite with others to feel what has “been utterly lost.”^[53] The melancholy of nostalgia brings sorrowful joy.

The internet offers the illusion we can know everything, including ourselves, our past. He argues we have yet to realize the “ontological significance” of the online world.^[54] And yet the AI cannot train on our most personal data, lacks access to our messages, cannot record our waking life, nor our dreams. It devours public content, but the infinite acts of our daily lives yet produce so much data undigitized, unassembled, unquantified. We can ask any question about the world, but might learn so little about ourselves: “The last questions that remain unanswerable are those related to the events of our lives.”^[55]

If the internet has become “coextensive with all our mental acts,” however, was not that also true for analog technologies?^[56] Hassan argues that the Greek and Latin antecedents of “analog” reveal a meaning of “parallel” and “analogous” -- “the human and the tool,” the person as analog.^[57] Drawing from Silvia Estévez and Charles Petzold, Hassan describes us as “analog human beings” now living in digital worlds.^[58] Following Marshal McLuhan and Arnold Gehlen, he reminds us how technology extends and intensifies and amplifies human needs, imitating the powers of animal bodies, offering evolution through replacement technique: technologies that “act in place of organs or capacities not naturally possessed by humans.”^[59]

On the one hand, we recognize in analog machines how things work: We see the gears turn, see the parts act in ways hidden by the microprocessor. On the other hand, Marx already identified alienation through analog automation, through capitalism’s privatization of tools and time. Some may feel intimacy and nostalgia for analog time, work, and culture, but the nineteenth century electric telegraph already possessed a mystification associated with the disorientations of Moore’s law: “[T]o act remotely was to diminish the analog continuity and resonance that had constituted the individual and social relationship with technology and nature that had endured for thousands of years.”^[60] The manipulation of electric currents began to resemble more and more digital culture and capitalism; analog electronics initiated new forms of detachment and abstraction precisely at the moments the world market began to scale in wired networks.^[61] Electricity resettled analog essence into forms amendable to digital colonization.

Like Hassan, however, the thinking within Happy Nostalgia approaches the “analog holistically” and tries to understand its context through a variety of scales and sounds.^[62] In turning to a period of music, we turn also to material histories, to technologies of memory and recording, and to practices of sociality specific to spaces created in the chaos of Moore’s law, of economic revolutions re-writing and re-wiring the cultures of sound. In these chapters are narratives and analyses that seek to complicate legacies of commercial and independent music beyond categories of personal and cultural history. The startling assumption behind our assertion remains that the generation in question, perhaps most definitively marked by the transition from analog to digital technology around the 1990s, resonates as a singular epoch in global time, without real precedent. This isn’t because all periods might claim such singularities. It is because the acute acceleration of integrated circuits can only destroy the species-time of analog once. How stunning were the sounds.

The Realized Elements

Our contributors, who all have some direct or loose affiliation with the Masters in Liberal Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, followed some of the original impulses here while not surprisingly mapping out experiences and ideas all their own. We have clustered the following chapters into three sections: “Sonic Auto-ethnographies,” with chapters that recast the decade through variations of musical memoir; “Reconstructing Hip Hops,” with chapters revisiting the meaning of ‘90s Hip hop music and culture; and “Radical Genres, “ with chapters examining the cultural politics of artists and bands pressuring the limits of commercial music forms.

Sonic Auto-ethnographies

In Lacy Telles “Garbage and One Queer Darkling,” Telles writes, “Every year, it feels as if Garbage has become more and more queer, just as I have become more and more queer.” Telles describes how her appreciation for the band Garbage, their lead singer Shirley Manson, and their live shows, provide important touchstones for understanding her own life journey.

In Max Kaplan’s “Transport Is Arranged: A Travelogue,” Kaplan describes being immersed in music through three live performances -- Pavement in Brooklyn, Stereolab in Philadelphia, and Panda Bear and Sonic Boom in Lisbon, Portugal -- as well as through a soundsystem set by Iration Steppas in Bristol, United Kingdom. Kaplan reflects on how different conceptions of nostalgia operate in his own experiences across time, while deftly capturing the immediacy and thrill of sharing music with others in the present.

In Joel Rogers’ “Suspended at the End of Time: Bob Dylan and Me, a Quarter Century after Time Out of Mind,” Rogers exemplifies the title of Dylan’s album, describing a tumultuous and transitional time in his life when Dylan’s album was first released in 1997, his abiding appreciation of Dylan’s music, and how Dylan’s late career mirrors a new and moving phase of his own story.

In Tomo Imamichi’s “Here in My Garage with a Laptop,” Imamichi reflects on his early life listening to music in Japan and Germany. He contrasts the technology of the 1990s with that of today, and he exemplifies this project’s origins in the pandemic by reflecting on how that time opened new spaces for thinking, new appreciations for the power of music, and new understandings of how technology offers different ways of connecting to others and being alone.

In David T. Humphries’ “A Couple Centuries of Sundays,” Humphries traces his appreciation for two different artists, The Sundays and Jenny Mae, against the backdrop of his educational journey and the shift from an economy of analog presence and scarcity to endless digital networks and plenitude.

Reconstructing Hip Hops

The Collective from the Fall 2022 section of ENGL 89010, which includes Professor Todd Craig along with students Jaïra Placide, DeVaughn Harris, Anjelica Enaje, Katherine Marin, and Nicole Walker, enacts what they describe in “INSERT 1990s HIP HOP BOP HERE: Sonic Happenings and Ethical Listening for 1990s Hip Hop Projects.” Their concept of an ‘ethics of listening’ respects the creators of music, their communities of origin, and the on-going communities of listeners who make the music continue to matter and mean. The collective poses a set of foundational questions and use them to guide extended readings of the music of A Tribe Called Quest, The Roots, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, and Wu Tang Clan, among others.

Anna Akasoy’s chapter “Marginal Soundscapes. Immigration, Racism, and German-language Rap in the ‘90s” situates emergent German Hip Hop in the tumultuous ethnopolitics of the ‘90s. Drawing on personal experiences and readings of more contemporary German Hip Hop, Akasoy shows how this music remains relevant to understanding the period and related issues and conflicts today.

In Pune Dracker’s “That’s word, because you know / A lyrical & critical investigation into MC Hammer’s / U Can’t Touch This,” Dracker notes, “The study of the dressed body is relatively new in fashion analysis.” Dracker offers a multifaceted take on MC Hammer’s immensely popular song that highlights the dressed body, the famous pants, the dance moves, and the sense of release that makes the song still seem new and engaging to those hearing it for the first time or hearing it with a new appreciation.

In Janelle Poe’s “Don’t Front, The ‘90s Got You Open: AKA Hip Hop Will Always Be All That and Then Some,” Poe shows how the geography and circumstances of her childhood impacted the ways in which she was first exposed to Hip Hop culture and came to understand its important place in the world. Noting the ways in which sampling and other elements of Hip Hop culture made it, from the beginning, “a remix of nostalgia itself,” Poe shows how the Hip Hop of the ‘90s honored its origins, while incorporating and often challenging, many of its underlying assumptions, particularly with regards to gender, in ways that remain relevant today.

Radical Genres

In Addy Malinowski’s “Arthur Russell’s ‘Love Comes Back,’” Malinowski’s close examination of Russell’s last song serves as a concise introduction to Russell’s varied catalog; as a meditation on the ways in which the song commemorates a time long gone; and as a suggestion that the song (and Russell’s work more broadly) can offer up new pleasures, consolations, and possibilities for reimagining different creative and queer utopias.

In Sam Bromer’s “‘Kill All Hippies’: Paranoia and Pastiche in Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR,” Bromer considers how Primal Scream’s album self-consciously draws on and assembles past influences in order to call attention to the terms of its own production and reception. Released at the beginning of 2000, Bromer argues that the album marks the end of a certain period of indie music, yet also offers “a lost future” to imagine creative possibilities that might have been -- and might still be -- realized through music.

In Justin Rogers-Cooper’s “Shannon Forever: Blind Melon’s Bee Girl and Countercultural Afterlives,” Rogers-Cooper explores how Blind Melon and the Bee Girl were much more than a single song, “No Rain,” or a single “analog meme.” Rogers-Cooper provides important and moving insights into the career and tragically short life of the band’s lead singer, Shannon Hoon, and demonstrates that the band made important contributions to how the business of music and gender politics were reconfigured in the mid-1990s.

A Note on the Text:

            When Justin Rogers-Cooper joined this project to help with editorial tasks, he suggested that the quality and seriousness of the contributions warranted a more consistent citation style. While trying to avoid intrusiveness with the more personal essays, we employed a modified Chicago style to highlight musical recordings and performances as important documents and artifacts and to honor musical creators as coequal with other thinkers and artists. Retrofitting the citations was no small task, and we want to thank MALS student Jodie Kahan for her help, and to thank all of the contributors for their patience. We also want to thank Robin Miller, for helping from start to finish, and especially Krystyna Michael for helping to prepare the final manuscript in Manifold.

Bibliography

1. Alben, Alex. Analog Days: How Technology Rewrote Our Future. Zeppo Press, 2012.
3. “Analog/Digital Transition.” Dead Media Archive. New York University: Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. http://www.cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php/Analog/Digital_Transition
4. Accessed January 9, 2024.
5. Burns, Jehnie I. Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation. New York: Lexington Books, 2021.
6. Chery, Samantha. “Pitchfork Undergoes Layoffs, Merges under GQ.” Washington Post, January 18, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/17/pitchfork-gq-conde-nast/.
7. Dean Wareham. I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A. Double Feature Records, 2021.
8. Golf Lexapro. Washed – EP, 2020.
9. Harvila, Rob. 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s. Podcast. The Ringer. Accessed October 11, 2024. https://www.theringer.com/60-songs-that-explain-the-90s.
10. Hassan, Robert. Analog. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022.
11. “How Many Smartphones are in the World?” bankmycell. Accessed January 11, 2023.https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world#:~:text=In%202024%2C%20the%20number%20of%20smartphone%20users%20in,85.68%25%20of%20the%20world%E2%80%99s%20population%20owning%20a%20smartphone
12. Kaplan, Max. W. “Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack of Liberal Nostalgia.” Master’s Thesis. The Graduate Center, City University of New York. CUNY Academic Works, 2022, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5046/.
13. Krukowski, Damon. The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World. New York: The New Press, 2017.
14. Luna. “Marquee Moon.” Double Feature Records, 2020.
15. Luna. Lunapark. Elektra Entertainment, 1992.
16. Miles, Jenna. The Beginner’s Guide to Vinyl: How to Build, Maintain, and Experience a Music Collection in Analog. Avon, Massachusetts: Adams Media, 2017.
17. Ocran, Kwame K. “Aloof: Black Divas of Refusal.” Master’s Thesis. The Graduate Center, City University of New York CUNY Academic Works, 2021, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4450/.
18. …One Last Kiss. (Various Artists). spinART, 1992.
19. Renouard, Maël. Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet. New York: New York Review of Books, 2016.
20. Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: Farrar,
21. Straus and Giroux, 2011.
22. The Softies. The Bed I Made. Father/Daughter Records, 2024.
23. Steiglitz, Ken. The Discrete Charm of the Machine: Why the World Became Digital. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
24. Sax, David. The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016.
25. Wilder, Carol. “Being Analog” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Montreal, Canada in May 1997). In The Postmodern Presence, 239-252. Edited by Arthur Berger. London: Sage, 1998.

Notes

1. Luna, “Marquee Moon,” Double Feature Records, 2020.

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2. Luna, “Slash Your Tires,” Track 3 on Lunapark, Elektra Entertainment, 1992.

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3. Galaxie 500, “Strange,” Track 4 on On Fire, Rough Trade, 1989.

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4. Damon Krukowski, The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World (New York: The New Press, 2017).

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5. Ken Steiglitz, The Discrete Charm of the Machine: Why the World Became Digital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 6.

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6. Steiglitz, 10.

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7. Steiglitz, 17.

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8. Steiglitz, 20.

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9. Robert Hassan, Analog (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022), 5.

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10. Krukowski, 9.

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11. Krukowski, 9.

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12. Hassan, 8.

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13. Krukowski, 38.

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14. Dean Wareham, I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A., Double Feature Records, 2021.

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15. Samantha Chery, “Pitchfork Undergoes Layoffs, Merges under GQ.” Washington Post, January 18, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/17/pitchfork-gq-conde-nast/.

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16. Alex Alben, Analog Days: How Technology Rewrote Our Future (Zeppo Press, 2012), 118-119; “How Many Smartphones are in the World?” bankmycell. Accessed January 11, 2024. https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world#:~:text=In%202024%2C%20the%20number%20of%20smartphone%20users%20in,85.68%25%20of%20the%20world%E2%80%99s%20population%20owning%20a%20smartphone

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17. Alben, 24.

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18. Alben, 62.

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19. Alben, 55.

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20. Alben, 56.

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21. Alben, 2.

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22. Hassan, 19.

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23. Hassan, 17.

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24. Alben, 7.

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25. Hassan, 21.

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26. Hassan, 174.

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27. Everything keeps coming up ‘90s: As this project came to completion, The Softies released their first album in 24 years, The Bed I Made. The Softies, The Bed I Made, Father/Daughter Records, 2024.

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28. Krukowski, 186.

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29. Krukowski, 188. Italics in original.

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30. Krukowski, 188.

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31. Krukowski, 204. Italics in original.

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32. Krukowski, 207. Italics in original.

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33. Magnetic Fields, “100,000 Fireflies,” Track 5 on …One Last Kiss, spinART, 1992.

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34. Kwame K. Ocran, “Aloof: Black Divas of Refusal,” CUNY Academic Works, 2021, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4450/; Max. W. Kaplan, “Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack of Liberal Nostalgia,” CUNY Academic Works, 2022, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5046/

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35. Golf Lexapro, “Craigslist,” Track 2 on Washed – EP, 2020. ↑

36. David Sax, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).

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37. Sax, x.

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38. Jenna Miles, The Beginner’s Guide to Vinyl: How to Build, Maintain, and Experience a Music Collection in Analog (Avon, Massachusetts: Adams Media, 2017), 214.

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39. Sax, 35.

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40. Jehnie I. Burns, Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation (New York: Lexington Books, 2021), 4.

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41. Sax, xvii.

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42. Sax, 107.

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43. Sax, 153.

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44. Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

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45. Rob Harvila. “60 Songs That Explain the ’90s” Podcast. The Ringer. Accessed October 11, 2024. https://www.theringer.com/60-songs-that-explain-the-90s

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46. “Analog/Digital Transition.” Dead Media Archive. New York University: Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. Accessed January 9, 2024. https://www.cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php/Analog/Digital_Transition

    ↑

47. Carol Wilder, “Being Analog,” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Montreal, Canada in May 1997), in The Postmodern Presence, ed. Arthur Berger (London: Sage, 1998), 239-252.

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48. Wilder, 244.

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49. Wilder, 250-252.

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50. Maël Renouard, Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016), 210-211. Italics in original.

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51. Renouard, 113.

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52. Renouard, 41.

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53. Renouard, 20.

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54. Renouard, 128.

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55. Renouard, 220.

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56. Renouard, 74.

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57. Hassan, 23.

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58. Hassan, 30.

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59. Hassan, 33.

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60. Hassan, 143.

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61. Hassan, 149.

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62. Hassan, 172.

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