For The Record- 06. April. 2024

She works at Liberty Travel, she got a heart made of gravel

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Welcome to another edition of For The Record, the weekly newsletter that brings the world of music news straight to your inbox. Part essay, part good old-fashioned link drop, this is a benefit for paid supporters of On Repeat.

On Repeat is 100% reader-funded. You can back independent ad-free music journalism for less than $1 a week.

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This week, we’ve got news on Taylor Swift, Lizzo, and Lush.

All that and a LOT more, including Sweeping Promises, Watt from Pedro, and Petra Haden.

Let’s get to it!

📻📻📻

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I’ve been working on some things this week that had me swimming in the waters of the early 90s (stay tuned!). The sounds have been on my mind even more so than normal lately. So it felt on brand that friend of On Repeat

Mallie Hart

posed this question on Tuesday:

Click the picture to click through to Mallie’s Substack.

It’s a fun thought exercise, the sort of thing that consumes the online music community the same way asking which version of Van Halen is better (My take is that we should never look back at the Gary Cherone era).

Jokes aside, which is better? Forward only? Backward all day, every day? A mix? From a strictly analytical lens, I know which bands generate more clicks/open/comments (aka ‘engagement’), but I want to hear your thoughts. ¹

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I always heard that the music you like in your late teens and early 20s is what sticks with you—and that’s certainly true in my case. Those are our formative years, and it makes sense that one’s musical taste would be one of the many character traits forged in that time.

Every generation makes the case that their music is the best and that whatever the kids are listening to/making today is garbage. Again, this is an easy (if lazy) argument to make when much of your identity is tied to what you listen to. And doubly so when coupled with the memories and nostalgia that these tracks evoke.

Plenty of studies have been done to explain the phenomenon and title it with fancy names like “reminiscence bump,” which leads you to text like this:

Music is often intimately linked to identity, as evidenced by the high value many people place on musical activities and the way in which music can become seemingly effortlessly coupled to important memories from throughout one’s lifespan. Previous research has revealed a consistent reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory—the disproportionate recall of memories from between ages 10 to 30 years in comparison with other lifetime periods—which also appears to extend to music-related memories. The present study represents one of the largest explorations of the musical reminiscence bump across adulthood to date. Participants (N = 470; ages 18 to 82 years) were shown the titles and artists of 111 popular songs that had featured in the charts between 1950 and 2015 and rated the degree to which they had autobiographical memories associated with each song, as well as the degree to which they were familiar with and liked the song. We found a reminiscence bump in adolescence (peaking around age 14) for both ratings of the autobiographical salience of songs featured in the charts during that period and the familiarity of these songs. Liking ratings showed more divergent results depending on a participant’s current age, including evidence for a cascading reminiscence bump, in which liking ratings from young adults increased for music from their parents’ adolescent years. We also revealed new evidence that music-related autobiographical memories appear to invoke similar retrieval processes to the common methodology of eliciting autobiographical memories via word cues. We contextualize these results in relation to general theoretical accounts of the reminiscence bump, and age-related differences in the bump are discussed in relation to various sociocultural and technological changes in music listening habits

Which, I mean, okay.

Or we could just say that it’s a safe bet that if forced to list your Desert Island Discs, most—if not all— of them come from music made in your late teens or early 20s or artists you discovered from that same era later on.

Heck, if you’re of a certain age, even hearing that term will send you on a trip down memory lane, doubly so if you had Tower Records near you and made sure to never miss an issue of their in-house magazine, Pulse.

In my case, ours was an anchor story in the local strip mall. For us, it was a place for discovery. It also managed to transcend all the weird orthodoxies around music in the early 90s. Penning a eulogy for the store a few years ago, I noted:

And, of course, the novelty of Pulse! Magazine. We always skipped to the Desert Island Discs section. Heroes and villains were made of complete strangers based solely on the ten records they'd most want with them if stranded on an island.

Those days are long gone, and unfortunately, so is Tower—at least in the US anyway. But the music and the attached memories remain. I mention this because Mallie included The Sugarcubes’ ‘Regina,’ in her post—a track I described as a great song on an okay record. YMMV. It also happened to come out while I was in my teens, so there’s that.

What I’ve spent more time with since then is just how firmly my memories are, not of the song so much, but of when I bought it, who I was with, etc.

For being so distant, they’re incredibly clear.

I’m also willing to bet that as I stood at the register, I had the latest issue of Pulse rolled up and stuck in my back pocket and that whoever they’d asked to pick their DiDs that month picked ones from whenever they were in their teens to mid-20s.

Reminiscence bump, indeed.

Links are below the jump: