Experts explain why nostalgia-inducing music continues to provide succour to many during the uncertainty of an endless pandemic
Familiar music can take people back to a happier past
This is a personal account of how a band arrived like a knight in shining armour to rescue this writer from the doldrums when the pandemic first hit. It was April 2020. The world had shut down like a Venus flytrap when an insect sits on it. Things made as little sense as algebra does to an eight-year-old kid, but then The Strokes launched their sixth studio album, The New Abnormal, its prescient title summing up the times that we were living in. And for a while, the crippling uncertainty of that period faded away as we played that record on loop, the music taking us back to a happier, more familiar time because I’ll try anything once — another song by the same band — was the soundtrack for our wedding.
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The Strokes gave new life to indie rock when they launched Is This It, their seminal debut album, in 2001. Pic/Getty Images
Music has this curious effect of transporting people back to the past, igniting memories that lie dormant in the inner recesses of the brain. And it’s not just us; familiar music has provided succour to millions around the world over the past two years, according to data that Spotify released in mid-2020. The streaming giant revealed that there was a 54-per cent hike in the number of times listeners played nostalgia-themed playlists during the pandemic. The reason, says Mumbai-based musician and music educator Aditya Ashwath, is that just like a certain perfume can bring back memories of a long-lost lover, music, too, can take us back to a more soothing past when the world seems topsy-turvy. Ashwath says, “You derive a certain comfort from it, because there is a sense of familiarity.”
Blast from past
It’s an experience most of us are bound to have had, but what exactly is nostalgic music? Just like one man’s meat is another man’s poison, one person’s idea of nostalgic music might be wholly different from someone else’s. Ashwath explains, “There was a study that showed that how, for a lot of people who are not musicians themselves, their taste gets crystallised in their teens and college days. The music they heard then is what they carried throughout their lives. But people who are on Spotify usually started listening properly only at the turn of the millennium, and nostalgic songs for them would be those from the early 2000s, maybe some alternative rock and R&B. If you were to talk to someone in their 60s on the other hand, they’d probably tell you that it’s classic rock for them.”
Samay Ajmera and Aditya Ashwath
Different musical strokes for different folks, in other words. But the point remains. During the pandemic, people collectively turned towards nostalgic music, whatever notion they might have of it. “It’s an easy way to access a memory, taking you away from the present and back to the past,” Ashwath reiterates, adding, “But we have a skewed perception of the past — we tend to overlook the bad things that have happened. We look at nostalgia with fondness. That’s why it’s comforting.”
What he’s saying here is something that city-based life coach and music therapist Samay Ajmera agrees with. Ajmera also tells us about a concept called iso principle used in music therapy, which negates the notion that if a person is sad, they should necessarily listen to a happy song to lift spirits. “You can listen to a sad song too,” he tells us, explaining that the idea is to match the music to your mood before shifting it in another direction.
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Sometimes, though, it’s not even a particular song that evokes nostalgia. It’s a mere sound. “Take Pink Floyd for example,” Ashwath says. “You don’t necessarily need to listen to the band. A similar sound will ignite the same channels and circuitry in your brain. And with Spotify, the algorithm is such that it’s really good at making playlists that put matching sounds together. You don’t think a lot about what next to play. So, you can just put on a nostalgia-themed playlist and you can trust that the algorithm will come up with something that you’re looking for.”
What that means is that with the third wave of the pandemic now upon us and the tumultuous days of 2020 seemingly back again, help is just one mere click away. And it works, if we are to test the theory on ourselves, because the entirety of The New Abnormal is by now entrenched in our brain. In fact, both Ashwath and Ajmera have a point when they agree that people tend to look at the past with tinted glasses, mainly remembering the happier days. It’s been almost two years since the pandemic. April 2020 seems a long time ago considering how time has dragged on in the meantime. And if we were to now look back that period with any sense of nostalgia, our fondest memory would be of playing that Strokes album.
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