Hey, it's Melody. Today's full episode is free for everyone. And if you ask me, it is Culture Study Catnip.
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Okay, this intro has fully made me nostalgic for the olden days of public radio fun drives I used to have to do. So consider this a segue on with the show. I asked you to come up with a commercial from your childhood. The hashtag video. And this is what you brought. Little cinnamon gum fresh and grass longer than big red. So kiss a little longer. Stay close a little longer. Hold tight a little longer. Longer with big red. That big red.
This is so of a convent me like I know exactly why we're come commercials. We should say this is a commercial for big red. I forgot, which I don't think you could even buy anymore. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't been on the lookout for big red. I had to stop chewing big red. When I was a kid, I chewed too much and couldn't taste anything for a little while. I was so enticed by this big red jingle. I was like, well, I got it. I got to do it.
So you burned your mouth basically on big red cinnamon gum? Yeah, yeah. It was on a school trip. I was just, I had a big pack of big red. I just kept chewing it. This is the Culture Study podcast and I'm Anne Hill and Peterson. And I'm Gabe Bullard. I'm a freelance journalist and I write the newsletter number one with a Bullard and together alone about TV criticism. So like commercials, I think, for people of our age and older are a really profound part of like,
Ardena Stelge, a backdrop. And the one that I, did you, Melinda, did you send him the one that I picked? Yes. Okay. Can we watch that one? Yeah. Let me grab it. All these like, terubic white kids, playing hungry, hungry, which is just a game where you like mash on a button and try to get these white marbles that are so light, like they would always get lost so easily.
We had hungry hippos, which is part of the reason I'm maybe because of this commercial, but that particular iteration of the jingle. What's the base? What's the real song? Do you know what it is? I'm trying to remember. I don't know, but I do remember there was a gummy candy, I think called amazing fruit. It's amazing fruit. It's amazing fruit. Yeah, that used the same. Yeah.
Amazing fruit. Yes. I sing it all the time. I sing it to my dogs. And I did it to, so I do it to amazing fruit and also to hungry, hungry hippos. You know, we couldn't watch television without watching commercials. And you know, they were trying to put commercials for kids wedge those commercials into the times when we were most likely to be watching television.
And there weren't that many commercials for kids. So you'd get a lot of repetition. So if you're watching Nickelodeon or Saturday morning cartoons, you would see these commercials again and again and again. All the time. Yeah. And they would play. It seemed like commercials lasted for years and years, like that big red jingle. I was looking into it. I think that started in 1979 and ran through the 90s. There's all these different versions of it.
I remember one where a horse was singing it in the ad or saying part of it. And it is so lodged in my memory at this point versus I can't even think of a new commercial jingle beyond the 00O's, the OZIMPIC one from a few years ago, like the only ads I see now are like pharmaceutical ads on streaming services. I hear some on the radio. Yeah. In part because like it's such, you know, a
audio format that you are in order to like get the name of the place in your head, they use a jingle to like imprint it that way. But I think like we have that so seldom now with television ads or even the idea that like you would have a jingle that would endure for 10 years the way that some of these did.
Yeah. Yeah. One thing I was thinking even I think most of the phone numbers I can still recall now probably came from TV jingles I. Yes. When I moved I got a new phone number I don't know with certainty the phone number that I have now but I can tell you the phone number of the you know windshield repair service that advertised on local TV when I was a kid like I I know that number but my own cell number I have to like pause for a second when I tell people now.
Okay, so we're going to back up a little bit here and from talking about commercials and like our nostalgia like it's one of those things I feel like if you're at a dinner party and someone brings up a particularly a vocative commercial and you have a lot of other people who were also raised in places where they were playing that commercial.
And you can just like spitball and it's like oh you remember this one like all this watch that one on YouTube and it becomes this whole like conversation driver. You're talking about commercials like this is so weird that you're talking about the attempts by large conglomerates to sell us like cheap plastic hippo games. But I do think that it allow it creates a sense of connection and this is our way into talking about nostalgia and particularly generational nostalgia.
You know how it shifts between generations how generations try to claim different memories of something that is specifically theirs all of those things that's what we're talking about today. So I think I'd like to start to see if you can define nostalgia for us. Well I'll try actually up. I know right it's one of those things like I know when I see it but like what is it right.
Yeah because it's really evolved over the years there's the idea of it was originally homesickness and you know identified in Swiss mercenaries hundreds of years ago. But when I think about nostalgia I think of this sort of modern feeling this longing for the past and sort of warm feelings for the past. And through the research that I've read I think nostalgia is in a motion. It's a core emotion of being human.
It's something that studies indicate rises when we're not totally happy with how things are going in the present. We might be feeling a little bit down and we look to the past in a warm way. And it's a little different than a straight ahead memory because we have kind of a different effect. We get some of the good brain chemicals whenever we go on a little bit of an nostalgia trip and it helps give us a bit of grounding, a bit of sense of who we are adds a little bit of meaning to the present.
I think the example that a lot of people use is it's very sad when a loved one passes away but there's that point of thinking well I'm I'm sad that this person is gone but I'm glad to have known them. And I'm glad I had that experience and that experience has shaped me in this way and that person has shaped me in this way. And it sort of gives you that bit of meaning and that bit of a boost afterward of thinking nostalgia gives you that bit of a boost of thinking okay I've made it this far.
Here's how I got here I can keep going that sort of thing. So like I think if you're unhappy with the present it can be a really good way of pointing out that you're you're able to keep going. And that to me falls under the umbrella of like mental coping nostalgia right like the coping mechanism positive nostalgia. And then I think that it can also be wielded in really damaging ways.
I think the most salient example right now is probably make America great again which is a vokin a past that has been that is based on memories that aren't full right like I'm based on a slow way. Based on a sliver of understanding of what the past used to be like and using that as a weapon, a cudgel like using it to justify various policies and various racism and various styles of thinking in order to bring us back to that imagined place.
Yeah and there's a good good bit of writing book and essay and everything from this theorist is felt on a boy and she had distinguished between reflectiveness to which is thinking back on the past a fond memory a TV commercial that you know makes you happy to go on YouTube and watch and restorative nostalgia which is where you try to actually bring the past back or recreate the past.
And that's where I see something like maga and and this idea of firmly deciding the past was better therefore we must bring it back and I think where that really starts to create some trouble to is that it halts progress not just progress from where we are now forward but progress from whatever that imagined point was in the past.
Yeah somebody could say that they really long for you know any year 1955 or whatever but the thing about people in 1955 was it was 1956 and then 1957 until we get to today whereas I think with a lot of restorative nostalgia there's this idea of no we need to recreate the past and we need to not move forward at all and we need to freeze everything in that time and it's impossible but it's also really dangerous.
Because not everyone is going to agree on what that past was not everyone is going to have all the details you're besides just not being able to physically recreate or anything your version of the past of an ideal past is going to be different from someone else's and it's not going to be that that complete picture and so you could have a lot of people who want to bring back a certain era and they're going to agree on certain things they're going to disagree on others and there's going to be a whole lot of people who don't want the past brought back.
And I think we're going to have to back at all like that and and disagree as well so it's this really dangerous type of thinking that you can get into when you get into the restorative nostalgia. Where I do think there could be some some positives the writer Mark Fisher had theorized I think he used the term hauntology for this which is this idea of bring back elements from the past not so much to live in the past but to almost get a do over like take the road not taken.
If you're not happy with with where we are right now think back to a point where maybe things were a little bit better and what were the steps that could be taken differently and I think that's a that's an intriguing idea as well.
That's a lot healthier than restorative nostalgia of saying I have an idea of the past and you and everyone else has to come with me to that idea of the past versus okay here's what we liked about a certain era here was something positive that we've lost how could we take steps to bring it back to something that if things do get worse or if we find that certain elements of modern life aren't what we had hoped for or aren't as good as something in the past how could we bring that back.
I mean I think about when I get together with my college friends we spend a good amount of time laughing hysterically about stupid shit that we did right like just weird like awkward also you know just memories like and part of the retelling of those memories and the retelling of those stories is is cementing them in memory mythologizing them to some extent. The important thing I think is that we can't let our gatherings exclusively be that otherwise you make no new memories to mythologize.
You know the the reminiscence of the old times can be really helpful in a lot of ways because nostalgia isn't just remembering the past it's it's rewriting the past for yourself rewriting it and and sort of turning even what might have been a negative experience into a positive you know it ended up making me stronger I wasn't happy then but I got through it here's how I did it I'm you know I'm stronger I'm more resilient because of that but I think that recognizing when you're doing it and recognizing that that's happening it's not going to be a positive thing.
It's really the key to breaking out of it because I think it is so easy to just fall into and it's easier now than ever before I think to fall into this sort of nostalgic reverie and completely lose sight of the need to do something new the need to create those new memories
you know I like just as much as the next person going on to YouTube and looking at adult ads or watching an old show or something like that but you could spend all your time doing it and just end up rejecting all modernity basically rejecting anything that exists anymore and live completely in that world and and at that point it just becomes isolating you know what what is and should be a really nice social force of you know bringing people together to talk about a shared experience becomes just
kind of sitting alone in your room watching you know big red commercials on YouTube or something which isn't going to isn't going to help make new memories isn't going to be something that you know in 20 years you'll sit down with somebody and say like oh remember when when I texted you after I watched a bunch of gum commercials.
So you write really wonderfully about nostalgia in your newsletter and I'm curious if there is a topic that you received a lot of reader feedback on that you're like wow I didn't realize people were so nostalgic about this.
Oh gosh I think the one thing that really has touched a nerve has been this idea of particularly what do you do if you recognize that things weren't great in the past but you like something from the past or if you even make you know this this assessment and decide okay maybe things were actually better in this regard and wherever in about it before is been with you.
It's been with movies in particular that you know we're going now from a really digital heavy virtual world and for millennials and older we're looking from a modern world into a more physical tactile world like from from a place where almost
digitally to a place where things were done in this older way and so there's this huge gap in material quality that you see in movies and you know you talk to people about movies that really hold up special effects that look great and Jurassic Park and the matrix come up and these are movies that
just exactly like these old movies where there's a material quality that holds up you know these movies that are decades old hold up now still after all these years more than a superhero movie made last year does when you're when you're looking at it and so I think there is this conflict sometimes of thinking
well I'm not a restorative nostalgia I'm not a person who wants to you know like I reject anything about mag of that sort of thing like I don't want to to bring back the past but at the same time hey things were made better back then like movies looked better you did the episode on clothing quality and you know looking back and going to a thrift store sometimes it's really hard not to just be nostalgic for an era when clothes were made better made to last differently
and I think that that's something that when I've written about that people have really responded to because I think it's a conflict that other generations haven't necessarily had to deal with in quite the same way and it's something that I think feels really pressing because not only are things made differently but when it comes to arts and culture
if they just hold a different place in society now in a streaming era culture just feels different it doesn't quite hit in the same way it doesn't quite look the same way we experience it so differently that being nostalgic is it necessarily just being nostalgic for a particular movie or a particular show or a particular song it's for the place that that held in in the culture that we lived in at the time and the way that everything existed around it that is really hard to hard to recognize
to hard to reckon with sometimes I totally agree with you about like what a massive shift that we've gone through in terms of a static quality and other forms of quality as well but the one thing aesthetically that I might think was also very difficult to grapple with was the transition to color for our grandparents and great grandparents generation watching some movies and then many movies and then all movies transition into color
television transition into color people who still had black and white TV sets because like that was the way that they wanted to watch things or that was the way that they understood like how a TV show should look and I think that that probably like I wish I would love to read a study of how people articulated their feelings about that transition to color at that time because it was celebrated right and like you can read the trade press about like the marvels of Technicolor but I also think that there were people who were like
this looks like shit yeah the same way that I look at digital stuff and I'm like this looks like shit give me you know give me a very traditional traditionally filmed on film. Oh totally yeah and and I think with with sound coming to movies to the whole idea of yeah like it's always I think going to be a level of discomfort with with change and I think where I am really interested in in that conundrum is how do you even know if you're being as objective as as
you might want to be when you're making an assessment like this like if I look at at a movie right now like with a lot of digital effects and everything I might think like gosh this looks terrible I missed the way that you know that a movie had been made before but then at the same time it's like okay but how much of this is just I was used to one thing yeah like I was used to black and white now I'm not used to color like and so I think that's probably is behind what is really setting off a lot of the discussion around it when I write about it is that I'm not going to be able to do that.
I think that's what I'm going to be talking about it is that question of people sort of saying I don't know for the life of me I really can't find that this is as solid as well made as the things that I remember the movies that I watched you know 20 30 years ago I think where the other element is is to not necessarily make that a judgment of overall taste and quality like movies may look bad music I don't think sounds worse now but it does hold a different place in culture.
In the streaming era and everything it's not that it's worse made like people didn't get worse at writing movies necessarily or worse at making music it's just that so I think it's important to not take that sort of you know the construction idea or the presentation idea or the sort of cultural place idea and use that as a well people just don't know how to you know be creative anymore something like that and I think that's the other yeah no the other element that they can't do that.
The other element that gets so tricky is kind of thinking you know like oh I could say that movies don't look as good now but I'm not trying to say that I want to live in you know the year 1995 or anything like that because there was also a lot of really bad stuff then too and I think that's the other issue that we grapple with so much is for a large part or at least in our own minds our view of the past is kind of a highlight real like we're seeing the best of it when I was a kid at least I love late night television and you can watch some great clips of late night television.
But at the same time there were multiple late night shows every single day like the clips that we remember they're really like amazing interviews and excellent moments and everything are such a tiny fraction of what we see of the hours and hours and hours of just kind of somebody juggling or a comedian who's just terrible like there was a lot that wasn't great and what we retain is the best of it and I think it's always important to kind of keep that in context of like well the things that last are the things that last because they're really good or they're really good.
They're really good or they're really meaningful to us and as much as I might like a certain era of filmmaking there's a lot that I could look back on that was made in those times of the thing like oh this is terrible I would never want to watch this I wouldn't want to.
Oh my god I mean like the 1930s like the peak 1930s peak of like the classic Hollywood period like so many amazing films coming out of it like 1939 arguably the apex also so much shit like unbelievable amounts of shit like derivative B movie unwelcome. The movie unwatchable direct most of which is also not even available to watch now because it never made the like our Jewish transition into being available on DVD so that's a great point.
Melody's yelling at me I can feel it she's not actually yelling at me but she's like vibing me just like you've been talking about nostalgia as a concept for half an hour and you have not gotten to a single listener question.
So let's start and just continue this conversation so this first one is from Megan does each generation experience a wave of generational nostalgia perhaps when they stop being the dominant generation and much of pop culture or is there something unique to this moment in time or unique to the millennial generation.
So I know from reading you and also from reading others that this is not a contemporary phenomenon where have you seen and read about and where have historians situated moments of deep nostalgia for other areas. Yeah so the the writer inventions that Lana Boim she's done some writing about in in countries before a revolution sometimes there might be an uptick in nostalgia all of that.
So I'm really interested in is some of the earliest writing I was able to find that went really deep on popular culture nostalgia came out in the 1970s there's this paper by Fred Davis in 1977 where he's looking at the culture of the 70s and essentially saying what's going on because the past is everywhere right now.
So it kind of depends it on the end of the 60s all this up people watergate everything that was going on and and been looking at the 1970s it is an extremely nostalgic time there were he writes a bit about the revival movie houses that were playing you know Bogart movies and WC fields and Laurel and Hardy but happy days was on TV in the 70s there was a Greece there was American graffiti all these movies even that go back into the 30s
and the town and paper moon and bound for glory and Dillinger and day of the locust great Gatsby the sting one of the most popular movies made a movie that helped bring ragtime back Scott Joplin had a number three I know the regular as ragtime and and even even looking at at music in the 70s beyond the ragtime revival which is wild you know one of the few egotts is is Marvin Hamlish who
did the score for the sting and he did a lot of work he wasn't solely working in old forms but he had the hit with with the entertainer a song that had been on you know wax cylinder before maybe on wax cylinder I think sheet music surely you know becomes is number three on the charts
but also you know mainstream rock music at the time really picked up this nostalgic wave of incorporating a lot of kind of old time country into rock music at the time where rock kind of split off in the 60s and soul went in one direction and fun quit in one direction but a whole lot of artists went into more country influenced music I mean the biggest band maybe the biggest American band ever the Eagles who you know lifted a lot of those sort of like country sounds
punk rock you know the clash with their pompadores and they toured with bow diddly and London callings full of references to the 50s and the Ramones have their kind of bubble gum pop air and everything so I think the 70s were a time when people thinking about nostalgia and culture were thinking okay something's going on here and something is driving this huge wave of nostalgia for the 50s for the 30s for the early 1900s I suppose in the case of of ragtime music
and what I think is interesting about that though compared to now is that it was sort of an in exact copy that that anybody was going off of that there wasn't you know you couldn't go to the record store and buy a Scott Joplin record you couldn't you know the idea of the of the 50s the idea of the 30s was what people had just sort of
gleaned from seeing culture from that era versus now you know I have a little pencil box on my desk here that I brought back for my childhood room and it's got the multiplication tables on it and a pencil sharpener and everything this was my brothers when he was a kid I used to when I was a kid I just liked it and brought it with me one time after I was visiting my folks
and I wanted to put a new blade on the pencil sharpeners like I would be cool with this you know worked again and I go online I could buy these there like 20 bucks on eBay and within like a minute I could have one shipped to me any other era if you wanted something like that that you had had as a child you would have to scour junk stores for you would have to call around and say oh does anybody have this versus now we have such a precise replica we have such a high fidelity version of the past
available to us that we can buy the old items instantly online we can look at very very precise pictures media reports everything like that version of the past is there we can pull up any album any movie any show that's streaming it's so easy to get this high fidelity version of the past that I think makes modern nostalgia really different from the wave in the 70s or you
know even thinking of the 50s nostalgia of something like back to the future in that kind of interrogation of it and everything that it's just so much it's higher fidelity and it's frictionless almost to a degree now and I think that really kind of changes how how it affects us I think it actually cheapens it I'm sure that others would maybe disagree with me but I think like there's something lovely about the moment again like a dinner party where you're trying
to remember the jingle of the of the big red commercial and everyone has to be like oh when something like this I think it went like this like and you kind of sing it together whereas now you just look it up on YouTube and you're like oh yeah that was it that was precisely it the immediacy of the referent actually shuts down some of that really interesting like attempts to excavate memory
that are very generative and community building as well yeah I and I think you see that in popular culture as well that when you have to do that extra work of trying to remember it and when it's a little bit in exact you kind of end up with making something that's going to be newer I am thinking of in movies you know movies from the 90s that maybe
reference movies of the 70s and it's like oh this shot calls to mine this other movie this shot calls to mine this other movie they're not as accurately framed because you know if you're directing a film in 1995 it's not going to be easy to go you know pull up a movie from 1972 and exactly frame your shot the same way it's like going from that memory and I think that's one thing that that kind of helps helps keep nostalgia as a positive force is thinking through
you know I like the way that this looked I like the way that this sounded so if I want to make something or if I want to hear something new I'm going to go for something that reminds me of it and you don't have that ability to do that exact comparison one thing I was thinking of is I remember when I was a kid and the white stripes were making a new album and it was all over the news about how they decided just to use analog recording equipment because they wanted to get a certain old sound
and that was written about in every review whereas now there's a lot of albums that call to mine the sounds of the past that use newer technology to recreate these sounds and it's really cool and it's really interesting but nobody really remarks on it as you know the the links that someone went to to recreate a sound of a few decades ago that it's just sort of there
and it's kind of taken for granted that that we have access to all that now versus the idea of you know even within our lifetimes it was really hard to try to recreate that sound in a way that could be believable or could be you know accepted so
it just kind of changes the effect it has on us because I think we can just take for granted that it used to be much harder to access the past so we had to look to the future we had to enjoy the present a little bit more that we couldn't just sort of you know live with live with what we used to have
so the second part of the question we didn't really get to which is is there something to do with what happens when a generation is no longer the quote-unquote dominant generation but I think we'll be able to address this a little bit in the answer to the second question so this is from Carrie our millennials the most nostalgic why have I felt so drawn to letter press note cards with the Pyrex pattern of my childhood the American Girl Dolls and magazines boxed up at my parents house
and favorite books from childhood that I want to read with my own kid how our millennials in particular dealing with favorites that didn't age well looking at you Richard Scary's busy busy world book that holds such a dear place in our memories so I think millennials are very nostalgic I think that we are nostalgic right now because of what the previous listener noted which is that we are no longer at the vanguard of culture making
we are we are we are moving out of that of that position and so some of the way that you deal with that I don't know if it's exactly grief that reality which is just getting older is I think sometimes returning to the things that made you feel young definitely and I think there's some pretty good science that helps explain some of this so if we think of nostalgia as something that kind of rises when we're not totally happy with the present or when when the present is a little bit uncertain
well there's internal external factors to that external could be the state of the world politics just not you know not being happy with with what you see on the news and and worrying you know that the world's just kind of all all falling apart but the other is that personal feeling of your place in the world and yeah when you're not necessarily at the vanguard of culture but also when you are just getting older and going through some major life changes
you're buying a house for the first time you're having kids or you know even later in life your kids are going off to college like all these changes that are happening cause this bit of kind of reflection and a reminder of you're not young anymore or your place in the world is changing or your personal responsibilities are changing and you start looking back at the past and your memories are strongest they call the reminiscent bump of that era sort of coming out of childhood into
tamed him 20s young adulthood like we have such strong memories that are formed then and so when you get a little bit older you're naturally going to become nostalgic because your place in the world is changing and you're going to look back to the era where you have the strongest memories and that also happens to be an era when maybe you're feeling pretty good because you were young you were you know you can just life was totally different
you had different possibilities ahead of you it's not that everybody had you know a perfect childhood or youth or anything like that but I think that we just start looking back to where our memories are strongest at these times when we go through these major changes and millennials are definitely in it right now I would also say that older millennials and younger gen X are also at the age where their kids are
are that age of like memory making bump and also those kids those teens are excavating a lot of the material culture from that period which I think like brings it back right so you can be nostalgic about or anti nostalgic about a certain
article of clothing that sort of thing and then the other thing I would say about millennials and I this is just I think about this constantly is that we and younger gen X have memories like our lives are very divided between this time when things when like the way that the world worked was significantly different than the way that the world works now and I mean that in terms of communication I mean it in terms of how we like documented things and how people went to work did their work
digitalization has changed so much and I like the fact that I did not have a cell phone in college is wild I developed so many different habits I understood the way that you make friends like the way that you are waiting in line with the grocery store like all of those things were firmly imprinted while like until I was a young adult and then I went through this massive change and so there is a huge section of my life and that like primary memory making
moment where I did not my reality was profoundly different than it is now and we are by no means the first generation to have this happen all of my dinner fucking people up like in the late 1800s and early 1900s and then like what wars due to people like all those sorts of things like this is not new but I do think that that is amplifying a sense of nostalgia that would also just happen if we were like any generation and just reaching this age I think that's that's a great
point and I think it's a bit reductive sometimes to think like oh my phone is the source of all my problems because my phone is the thing that bothers me all the time when when people need to reach me and I'm trying to relax it's the thing that just brings you know trolls and bad news and everything to me
and oh there was a time when this thing didn't exist like it's so easy to just think of a time before that and I think living with the memory of that makes it seem almost reachable again to a large degree which is a really interesting and kind of brings me back to that idea of of ontology even of like what would we do what I think about this a lot with myself because you know I don't have the power to enact you know global change of how we
use technology or anything like that and unless everybody subscribes to the newsletters you know I could say them that way no but I think of it of you know if I got my first smartphone today what would I do differently and how would I use it differently I don't know it's kind of it's a fun little thought experiment
but it's one of those things of like would I do anything differently and what would I be missing out on because pretty much everything I do centers around around this digitization but yeah I think it is such a I don't know how we fully wrap our heads around around
the way that the life has changed and the way that basically every single task is now done differently than it used to be yeah nostalgia is how we wrap our heads around it right like that that's the simple answer is we're like I can't really like grapple with this reality
so I'm going to think instead about like how different things used to be and how I appreciate parts of that one then there's also the parts that we you know we forget to appreciate so this next question grapples with that a little bit this comes from Tom is there some
bizarro form of nostalgia where people need to oversell the challenges of years past the way my parents talk about the 73 gas crisis you'd swear it lasted the whole decade I feel like I'm even beginning to see this a little bit with how people talk about the early covid lockdowns do we just feel a need to remember the trials of our past on the same overstated fashion we do our phone memories am I going to be lying to kids about how downloading off
lime wire was a capital offense I love this question and it reminds me of how my dad is so my dad grew up in Minnesota and when he would talk about like whenever we would complain about I don't know like walking to the bus stop he's like I had a walk outside in the Minnesota snow barefoot up health both ways and he had he had docks and they would like bite his armpit hair so he would always say with docks and hanging from my armpit hair right and this is his way of
overstating just how arduous it was growing up in a working class household in Minnesota in the 1960s and I don't know I think like we remember the past in melodrama right in shades of highest high and lowest low and so it makes sense that the hard stuff felt very hard like the thing that I just always talk about I'm so nostalgic about in terms of college is like when we didn't know where someone was like at night
if like you didn't know like where your friend was you just walked around until you found them like you walked around campus you walked through the basements of various houses until you found them right and that is true but it wasn't like I in my mind it's become this like can you believe it but I don't know if it was as arduous as we make it out to be I think this goes into sort of that idea of nostalgia being a way of rewriting the story of the past
to be a narrative that puts you where you are today and I think that yeah we do want to maybe think of things as tougher than they were because it makes us all the stronger for having having been through it of you know totally I made it through this time that means I'm tough and I'm great you talking about what your dad's memories are descriptions I always remember the thing my grandpa would say is he would describe how
hard something was and say and then the depression came which was always the idea of you know it was it's always harder and and yeah like there's always hard times to go through of course but I think that yeah that we do want to put ourselves in a position of being able to persevere through something that's really tough I think it is good to recognize whenever that turns into a you don't know how good you have it sort of
attitude because the flip side of that is that it's really easy to not see how hard something is for for somebody who's who's younger than you are going through a different experience but yeah I think that just it's part of nostalgia to look at the good experiences and make them better than they
were in the bad experiences make them harder than they were which ends up telling yourself that you've made it through that you're even stronger that that you can sort of do anything so it kind of you know really pumps you up sometimes which which could be really beneficial and that's like
one of these joys of nostalgia when it's you know applied in a way that isn't going to be you know all encompassing trying to rebake the world or something is this idea of get something to think about and something to to sometimes be proud of and as long as yeah you
don't tell people that it was some experience maybe that it that it was it doesn't necessarily I mean we also made it through the threat of federal prosecution for using lime wire and Napster and our dorm room so there was a there was like a commercial of the kids who got
sued wasn't there I thought yes like an apple commercial yeah I remember I definitely did have some some fears that like federal agents would come in and like take the family computer and it's like this is all the evidence we have against Gabe Bullard the giant like gateway desktop
just like yeah like calling out a huge face tower yeah full of full of really low quality MP3 so that's okay so last question is for Mary and it's also about the way that we talk about nostalgia just generally what's with the emergence of the phrase core memory what are
its origins why am I seeing it everywhere now and what might we have called the same concept three to five years ago if it even had a name have we as a society ever been focused on creating specific types of memories before I feel like this is a social media thing and then I also think
that it's a intensive parenting thing by intensive parenting I mean like the set of practices that are most familiar to bourgeois parents that involve like parenting meaning a lot of parenting like a lot of activities and supervisions and things like that create core memories right so
a core memory could be like you have you feel like oh well we haven't done anything like incredibly special with our kids that they are going to remember forever and that will also somehow imprint the like I am a good parent I think there's something to do with that too like I think this is I think there's a lot of parenting stuff going on I don't know what is your thoughts on this this phenomenon I think you're right and I also think this is maybe like the the concept of the multiverse almost
something that our understanding of it really comes from like sci fi and movies it's sort of like the the what do they call them in the spiderverse movie the canon events but inside out had core memories that was like the right part of the plot and I feel like maybe that's something too that is kind of keeping some of our understanding of that is is looking at what pop culture is telling us that is happening in our minds or or is important to us and kind of shaping that you know we have that
drive we want to understand things as narratives we want to understand that something happens because of something else and I think because of that we want to make a narrative of our own life and these are you know these are the canon events these are the core memories and it's interesting
because every time you remember something your memories going to be a little bit different and over time it's going to shape and it's going to to sort of fit the narrative the way that you want it to and yeah I wonder also I think this applies really to the parenting angle too
of how much are you letting something like that or pushing for something like that to to almost define someone's self image of like my childhood was like this because I have these core memories of this this and this or my child's memories will be good because I am in plant like it's yeah
definitely this idea of really trying heavily to shape the narrative through events and then shape the narrative through the description of those events over and over and over right I mean it's so smart picking up the the side I'm part of this and the fantasy part of this
because I think that that actually contributes to this understanding that like we all have this memories are not what I think like my mom would if my mom like when she was parenting us was like okay what are the things they're really going to remember right not the things
that like she wasn't going to be like oh she's really going to remember the hungry hungry hippos commercial right or like she's really going to remember the precise look of the shirt and the thought at the roll away in second grade right like that's a roll a ring in my hometown
and I don't like or the cats that were in the barn at my great aunt and uncles like it's not the things that you think it's going to be so you can't really control it I think like you can create core feelings of like you know I can't remember a specific time
when I was a kid where like of my mom hugging me and being like I love you so much right I remember feeling very loved and very safe right so that is a core feeling but I don't have like a specific memory of it exactly yeah I don't think you can deliberately
make a core memory I think that's impossible the more you try to make a core memory the less it becomes a core memory yeah the I remember being a kid and thinking sometimes I want to remember this but I remember thinking that I don't remember anything that I thought that about and like I just remember being a kid at types that you like I want to remember this I want to remember this moment or something and and I have no idea what it is I mean yeah if I could if I could choose my memories
maybe I wouldn't have the big red jingle memorized and I would remember you know a lot of a lot of other things either either educational or just you know spending time with certain people that sort of thing but but yeah like we can't we can't control it the core memory is just going to be something that I that slips in there and and yeah we'll be there forever no matter what I also think that the way that we document things is changing maybe how we conceive of this so there are many
core memories and this is not a unique phenomenon to me that I have like extrapolated from a handful of family photos right I'm like oh yes this was what it was like when we went to Prius Lake when I was six and I fell in the mud or this is what it was like when I caught a fish by myself and it's all very much rooted in like a single snapshot and me being like this is what it felt like trying to like recover the the kind of like the palpable experience of
that whereas I think if you actually have video of it which many kids are going to have an abundance of video of their childhoods is it a memory or is it just video is it documentation or is it a memory yeah this is something that I have been really curious about as well when the documentation doesn't match up to what our memory is to like if we're rewriting these memories and and if we are getting you know the nostalgic benefit from that reframing what's going to
happen whatever we go back and look at it and and it's not the way we remember it like it's this sort of disconnect that that goes against all the ways that we're kind of wired to to remember things and yeah it seems like that that our ability to recontextualize is going to be lost almost by having this this exact replica of what was there I think on the on the core memory thing too one thing I kind of worry about sometimes with it is you can almost put and
I don't think this is a generational thing I think this is maybe just a natural tendency everybody has if you put so much importance on one event on that event rather than like you were saying on the feeling then you could become really really defensive of everything surrounding that and super protective and hostile times and I think we see that a lot with the media people are nostalgic for sometimes of just being so defensive of it of like no I watched this movie
a hundred times when I was a kid and it is perfect and you can't say anything about it and if you do you're wrong that sort of thing or you rewatch it and you don't have those same feelings or maybe parts of it don't hold up and it's kind of a crisis of like well wait a second what does that say about me but I think you're right in saying you know the feeling is the important part the feeling is the yeah is it rather than the exact event rather than the exact you know media
property rather than the exact toy that was purchased and made by you know a giant corporation like the feeling around it that's the thing to capture and kind of remember and and hold dear rather than this product is the thing that that is the key to my past and no one can say anything bad about it.
You know I have recently rewatched some Star Trek the Next Generation which was a staple of my childhood I would come home and it was on syndication so it was on at 4 p.m. on ABC every single day and it was my way of unwinding like I would have some bagel bites and I would watch Star Trek the Next Generation from 4 to 5 p.m. and you know the especially the first seasons are like you can tell like the first season is made like in 1989 1990 and then it's like
just not very good quality and then there's all sorts of episodes that are kind of weird and like doing some real things with gender politics so many of them are so good but you know none of that changes the fact that this show felt like home to me I put on that intro sequence and the rush of like
release it's like an exhale to me and nothing like there's part of me that doesn't even need to revisit more like I like having that feeling but it stays so precious in my mind for that reason that doesn't mean that I can't also realize all of these ways in which it is a flawed text that doesn't change the feeling that would wash over me when I sat down at 4 p.m.
Yeah I think that's a great point because yeah it's like that that idea of you can get the benefits of the past without having to relive the entire past you can just you know your memory such a powerful thing or our memories are such a powerful thing that yeah we can just think back to
those times and you know that's that's what nostalgia is is it's still the thought and there are things that can induce it in us there was one study I read about where people were shown pictures of the school supplies that were very popular when they were kids to to a douce nostalgia so I think
they're you know there are all sorts of things that can induce nostalgia but our own brains are the ones that you know that's what started it and we hold those memories and we can kind of think back and just kind of have that moment and still recognize you know that not everything was was
great about it nostalgia is a really personal thing that the danger happens when you try to make it something that has to apply to everyone maybe a lot of people in the 70s thought hot rods were cool when they're watching you know American graffiti they're not all gonna agree on like
the Eisenhower administration's policies or something like that and so it's like keep your reverence for the car or something like that or you know enjoy it it's yours it's your memory it's your it's part of your life you don't have to you know force it on someone else or force the
world to to rebuild itself for it because you you just have it in your head I think that's a great place for us to end so Gabe if people want to find you on the internet where can they find you yeah they can go to Gabe Bullard dot com and links to the newsletter of the freelance
writing I do everything is there awesome thank you so much this has been such a pleasure thank you it's been great thanks for listening to the culture study podcast be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts because we have so many great episodes in the
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