“An Age Yet to Come”: The Concept of Nostalgia in Music Journalism

Abstract

Music is a powerful repository of nostalgia. In this context, the term refers to a psychological state, defined by past-related emotional overtones, that fill our minds when we hear a relevant tune or lyrics. Similarly, a text can be analyzed as a hauntological phenomenon, in other words, “a spectral narrative transmitting voices of the past into the moment of reading” (Wolfreys, 12). However, the term hauntology, proposed by Jacques Derrida and later developed by Mark Fisher, suggests that it is, in fact, the future we feel nostalgic about. With the constant recycling of ideas, we revisit past events and re-imagine them in the current reality, thus creating our version of the timeline. One of the ways to fulfil the longing for the future is the reconstruction of the past through storytelling. Due to its capability to evoke shared cultural memory and express collective identity, this method has been employed in various fields including medicine and contemporary culture. We consider that narrative techniques apply to music journalism, especially that branch focusing on classic or cult pop and rock acts. This thesis examines three genres, namely feature, catalogue description and review, to show the unifying components such as non-linear narrative, zooming and prosodic features as well as literary devices, e.g. syntactic parallelism and anaphora. Among the media sources considered for the analysis are MOJO, The Arts Desk, and Bear Family Records website. The nostalgic image of the past represented in texts by means of aforementioned compositional elements and literary devices serves for the readership as a portal to other dimensions of time which is both an escape from “now” and one of the means to restore lost identity.