The Nostalgia Factor

Obviously, there were several massive news stories and events that occurred in the world of music festivals over the past few years.  While several received massive headlines (including the pandemic changing the world, Astroworld, and Fyre Fest), even more didn’t get the attention I expected (such as Woodstock 50 not occurring and the inaugural Blue Ridge Rock Fest dealing with all sorts of issues), and others largely only getting attention from me (especially a tornado going through Epicenter).  There is one story that I find fascinating that doesn’t seem to be getting a ton of attention:  Stevie Nicks being a massive name at festivals.  She has been booked for several big-name festivals over the past few years, including Sound on Sound, Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo, BottleRock, Ohana Festival, and Governor’s Ball, being near the top of the billing of each.  A few reasons this is intriguing is because she wasn’t promoting an album (her last studio album was released in 2014), she hasn’t had a recent hit (her last top-100 song was released in 1994 and last top-40 song came out in 1989, though “Dreams” did become popular again), and she hadn’t gone through a long period of not touring (while she performed some shows in 2019, she went on a massive tour in 2017).

What I find more interesting about this is that she is not the only artist who was popular in a different era who is suddenly getting a boost in popularity while touring.  Journey, a band who I thought many treated more as the band who made “Don’t Stop Believin’” than the group who released several hits throughout the 80’s, has suddenly become a legendary band who is headlining several gigs, including being one of the headliners at Lollapalooza in 2021.  There was also a massive stadium tour that to represent the return of Mötley Crüe in a co-headline show with Def Leppard featuring openers Joan Jett and Poison.  There also have been (or are currently on) recent big tours from artists such as Santana, Rod Stewart, Cheap Trick, Styx, The Cure and Roger Waters.  Even acts who were known in the 90’s and 2000’s have recently had (or are on) successful tours, including Backstreet Boys, New Kids on the Block, Smashing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction, Goo Goo Dolls, and a massive co-headlined tour featuring Green Day, Weezer, and Fall Out Boy.  Even Limp Bizkit, one of the most criticized and polarizing (to be generous) acts of my lifetime has found new life on their most recent tour, even performing a massive, potentially sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, and Nickelback sold out the main stage at Foxwoods on a recent tour before announcing a stadium tour.  This phenomenon in music is something I have found fascinating for many years and is something I call “The Nostalgia Factor”.

What is The Nostalgia Factor exactly?  A generic summary of the idea is that an artist who was once popular but fell out of popularity has rediscovered some fame.  In a little more depth, there are a few factors in particular that are important for this.  The first is that the act was previously popular.  While popularity can be subjective, I’m not considering a situation where an artist is “discovered” by more fans many years later, including Sixto Rodriguez, Nick Drake, and Velvet Underground.  The second factor is that the artist must still have found a decent level of popularity recently.  An example of an artist who I wouldn’t include in this case is Huey Lewis and the News, an act that was huge in the 80’s but now might best be known as being the subject of a Patrick Bateman monologue in American Psycho immediately prior to a murder.  Lastly, the acts are not necessarily popular due to new music being created or released, though this is not exclusive.  For instance, I would consider Def Leppard in the Nostalgia Factor despite their newest album reaching the top-10.  In general, these acts are more known for older music.  I would also like to note that this is different than reunion and farewell tours.  Adding the word “farewell” can add a few thousand dollars to book the act whereas adding “reunion” in front of a tour can add a few hundred dollars for tickets and several thousand dollars to book the act.  As such, I am not thinking of reunions from acts like Jonas Brothers, Spice Girls, My Chemical Romance, or Rage Against the Machine, nor farewell tours from artists like Kiss or Lynyrd Skynyrd.

I would also like to note that this is not a new phenomenon and continues to be repetitive throughout history.  While many recent examples come from somewhere between the 80’s and 00’s, Tony Bennet in particular is an example of this phenomenon:  he had success in the 60’s and early 70’s before falling out of the public eye until the 90’s and 2000’s.  I would also argue that the start of the British Invasion, an important factor in introducing the U.S. to music from the U.K. from acts such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and many others, qualifies as this.  Rock music was big in the U.S. during the mid-late 50’s before dying out while artists like Elvis Presley joined the army, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens both died in a plane crash, Chuck Berry was arrested for transporting a 14-year-old across state borders (though some have argued race might have also played a role in that one), Jerry Lee Lewis faced controversy for marrying a 13-year-old, and Little Richard decided to abandon rock to become a minister.  The Beatles (and many other British bands in that era) discovered rock music after it died down in the U.S. because it took a few years to reach the U.K., and suddenly this “new style of music” in the U.S. was really a bunch of British people performing music that was inspired by music which was popular less than a decade before.  For another example, orchestral music is notorious for consistently performing old music; one generous/newer example is when I went to a concert for a music class in college and the big headline composition was George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, a song written in 1924.  There were also instances of this historically where several musical genres found an additional wave of popularity many years later, including disco, punk, metal, and country, as well as subgenres like hair metal, nu metal, post-grunge, and most recently emo and pop punk.

While not a new factor, I find it fascinating that several eras of music seem to fall into this characterization.  While it continues to happen, music that doesn’t seem as old is also considered nostalgic.  I think part of that is because the kids from the 90’s and 00’s are grown up and theoretically have money to pay for these shows, allowing them to travel back to a simpler time.  While we often remember things in the past as better than they actually were, many artists are taking advantage of the fact that we remember things like Space Jam being an amazing movie (sorry, but it wasn’t), Nickelback was a band that many people loved (sorry internet users, but they were among the most popular rock bands of the 2000’s), and this era being a time nobody from a different generation could understand, allowing us to travel back in time and make us consider that maybe the music isn’t quite as bad as some other things were in past eras.