.Rar Blogspot Nostalgia is Now in Full Effect (And It Makes Me Feel Old)
If there’s one thing I learned from Sergeant D during his many years of soothsaying for MetalSucks, it’s that whatever the kids are into today will experience a wave of nostalgia tomorrow. When yesterday’s teens mature and reach their mid twenties, the age at which they can first fully exert power and influence over culture, nostalgia will take hold and the media will suddenly look back favorably on the trends of yesteryear, whether they were unbearably cringe-worthy or packed with lasting artistic merit (but usually of the cringe-y variety).
The history of metal is littered with such examples. Korn. Suicide Silence. Attack Attack! Jungle Rot. The list goes on. Yesterday’s young musicians who were made fun of mercilessly at the time are now heralded as heroes.
With that in mind, get a load of this tweet I happened upon while scrolling through my Twitter timeline over the weekend:
younger kids don’t know shit about going to several blogspots trying to download and find shit you all have spotify and when mediafire went down and you had to find mirrored files for mediafire. forget about it.
— Cannibal Corpse Thong (@SKI_MASK45) June 14, 2019
Wow. Lots to unpack here!
First of all, I remember the days of Blogspot .rars (and the myriad other sites that hosted illegally downloadable albums), and they fucking sucked. Pages would get squashed by their hosting companies one after the next, and the MediaFire, MegaUpload or SendSpace links they plugged would be zapped out just as quickly. They were difficult to navigate (good luck finding the download link amidst all the ads), and you never knew if what you were downloading was what it said it was. It was a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Why would anyone feel nostalgic for doing that? It’s so much better now! Almost all the music you could ever want is available at the click of a button in high quality audio, sortable and searchable any way you want!
Second, the “younger kids don’t know shit” attitude has always been, is, and will always be complete horseshit. Ten years ago folks in my generation whined about how “younger kids” didn’t appreciate the dedication of going to the record store on release day to stand in line before going home and indulging in the ritual of cracking open the cellophane and pressing play. That generation, it was said at the time, was beholden to inferior, bullshit CDs; vinyl was the best way to appreciate an album, whatwith its “warm” tone and large-format artwork. I don’t know what the generation before that said about their version of “kids these days,” but this line of thinking eventually takes us all the way back to younger kids don’t know shit about having to ride a horse and buggy to get anywhere dealing with feeding it and shit you all have these fancy-pants automobiles now. forget about it.
Here’s the thing: being a music fan is so much better now than at any time in the past! Why have any kind of nostalgia at all for the past other than a quaint recollection? Ten years from now some 26-year-old will try and make the argument that Spotify and YouTube were REAL, man, and this newfangled brain implant music listening technology is bullshit!
Finally, it’s just plain weird that we’ve already reached the point at which Blogspot .rar nostalgia is a thing. Didn’t that era just happen? It wasn’t long ago at all! Aren’t people still arguing about the merits of CDs and vinyl?
The heart of the matter here, I think, is that witnessing the entire cycle of .rar Blogspots from fruition to irrelevance and back again to nostalgia makes me feel old. I guess the lesson here is that I really ought to take my own advice and stop whining about it. Yes, the Blogspot .rar era happened, yes, it sucked, yes, things are way better now, and yes, predictably, there is an entire generation of teenagers who grew up on it that are now fondly reminiscing about that era. It’s all part of the process.
Now, about that brain implant music listening experience… how far off is that? Sign me up.
