Introducing the Google Nostalgia Filter

There’s a new Nanci Grif­fith album in the world. Every time she releases a new one I am briefly over­whelmed, taken back to 12th grade, when her music changed my life.

I haven’t always been able to tell the dif­fer­ence between good songs and bad, but I have always felt them deeply. I knew the words to “Fol­som Prison Blues” the first time I heard it on my grand­par­ents’ radio when I was a kid. Coun­try music was bro­ken by the time I started pay­ing bet­ter atten­tion in the 80s and 90s, though; it got reduced to plat­i­tudes, binary states. The only way to be in those “hot new coun­try” songs was in love or in despair. Every lit­tle thing was life or death. I couldn’t help it; my fevered teenage soul took it to heart.

photo credit: Great Beyond

My senior year of high school a friend insisted that I bor­row a copy of Nanci Griffith’s album Flyer, the first thing I’d ever heard that wasn’t coun­try or pop music. I couldn’t fig­ure out what to do with it, but I kept lis­ten­ing to the songs, read­ing the lyrics as Nanci sang. The verses were dense, there wasn’t always a cho­rus, and the melodies and har­monies were more com­plex than what I had grown up hear­ing. Nanci’s voice wasn’t as smooth as the ones on the radio, but its cracks and unfa­mil­iar into­na­tions made me believe she knew what she was singing about.

And the songs…they were full of choices, full of com­pro­mises and alter­nate paths and res­ig­na­tion. They were songs about how essen­tial it is to acknowl­edge how you get to each point in your life and then to press on. What could I do but fall in love with this music?

Being a bit of a com­pletist, I dove into Nanci’s exten­sive back cat­a­log, which is about as com­pre­hen­sive an intro­duc­tion to folk music as you can get, thanks to an album of cov­ers called Other Voices, Other Rooms. From that one album I learned about Kate Wolf, Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, Woody Guthrie, and finally, I learned what the big deal was about Bob Dylan. I had a lot of catch­ing up to do.

Even­tu­ally I exhausted my men­tal and finan­cial reserves try­ing to get as much Nanci Grif­fith into my life as pos­si­ble, which was just as well, because it wouldn’t be long until new albums came along. Like the brand new one I’ve been lis­ten­ing to tonight.

Unless you’re writ­ing a Greek epic, do not under any cir­cum­stances explic­itly invoke the muse. It pisses her off.

In a career span­ning 19 albums, there are bound to be a few duds. Chalk it up to van­ity projects, con­cept albums, the occa­sional overindul­gence of sen­ti­men­tal­ity that evi­dently comes with age, and more van­ity projects. She once recorded “From a Dis­tance,” god help her. The last few Nanci Grif­fith albums haven’t seemed up to her usual stan­dards, so this new one, The Lov­ing Kind, had me wor­ried, and not just because of the title.

I lis­tened to it on lala​.com, where you can lis­ten to the whole thing, once, for free, with­out hav­ing to sign in or set up an account or fill out any form of any kind, because some­body in the music busi­ness finally fig­ured out how the god­damn inter­net works.

First up is, unfor­tu­nately, just the kind of latter-day Nanci Grif­fith song that makes me stabby. It’s called “The Lov­ing Kind” and is about Mil­dred and Richard Lov­ing, who wanted to inter­ra­cial marry the way folks want to gay marry these days. I’m all for using music for social com­men­tary, which Nanci has a his­tory of doing well. These days, though, it seems she feels the mes­sage has to be both over­sim­pli­fied and very explicit. No shades of gray, no sub­tle metaphor, just straight­for­ward this-is-what-I-think song­writ­ing. It’s like turn­ing the holo­caust into a Dis­ney car­toon and still believ­ing you’ve deliv­ered any kind of weighty social commentary.

photo credit: elmada

Another song men­tions “the muse” not once but twice. Per­haps worse is some­thing called “Things I Don’t Need,” an anti-unnecessary-plastic-objects anthem. That turns into a love song. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem so bad, but con­sider that the same woman once pref­aced a song with a 5-minute long story about the charms of Wool­worth stores and the unnec­es­sary plas­tic objects therein, this new song approaches scandal.

The best new mate­r­ial is basi­cally just a mediocre cat­a­log of plat­i­tudes and gen­er­al­iza­tions (see “Party Girl” and “Sing” and “Still Life” if you’re curi­ous). When I hear some­thing like this from some­one whose music used to be so nuanced and thought­ful, I can’t tell if they can tell the dif­fer­ence. It would be one thing if she’s just tired of peo­ple not get­ting the point and decided to bust out the sledge­ham­mer, but I can’t be the only one who’d rather chew off his own ears than be preached to.

This isn’t just a self­ish wish for a new col­lec­tion of amaz­ing songs; I think of any­one out in the world today, ready to dis­cover some­thing that changes the way they look at the world, and worry if this is what they find. Of course, what worked for me isn’t likely the touch­stone that some­one else might need. This is a les­son I have trou­ble remembering.

What con­cerns me more is another pos­si­bil­ity: what if all the old songs that woke me up are just like these, but I was young and mal­leable and couldn’t tell, and now through the nos­tal­gic fog I remem­ber them as more elo­quent, insight­ful and inspir­ing than they really were. This prospect both­ers me more than it should. It doesn’t really mat­ter; I got what I needed out of those songs when I first heard them. But if I can’t eval­u­ate them strictly on their own terms, if I can’t get out­side of my own skewed per­spec­tive, that seems like a problem.

A prob­lem Google should be able to fix with a sim­ple tweak of their algo­rithm. They already col­lect more data on me than I can fathom, so they should be able to apply a fil­ter to elim­i­nate my par­tic­u­lar shade of rose col­ored glasses. Click here to denude your child­hood heroes.