LITTLE ROCK — Nostalgia means a longing for “good old days” that, for the most part, really weren’t that good.
Who, after all, would want to go back to Arkansas summers without air conditioning or a time before Netflix, cell phones and microbreweries?
This doesn’t mean that everything is better now than before. To the contrary, one can thing of at least a few things that have clearly gone downhill.
Professional basketball: The feats of Kobe and LeBron aside, watching NBA games these days is downright painful. It is perhaps the only major sport where the quality of play and the abilities of the players has declined rather than improved significantly over the past quarter century.
Bart Starr’s Packers would get pummeled by Aaron Rodgers’ Packers because NFL players are now so much bigger, faster and stronger, but anyone with even a passing knowledge of the game knows that no current NBA team would stand a chance against Magic Johnson’s Lakers, Larry Bird’s Celtics or the Bulls of MJ and Pippin.
Early entry is probably the most important factor in this decline, as the NBA is now filled with lots of mentally immature and physically underdeveloped kids with oodles of athleticism but only rudimentary basketball skills.
Jazz: Certainly, there are some good jazz musicians out there, but there has to be reason why 90 percent of the albums in my sizable collection were recorded before 1970. It can’t be nostalgia, since I didn’t startlistening seriously to such stuff until my thirties.
Perhaps in the same sense that classical music seems perpetually stuck reworking Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, there are no contemporary jazz counterparts to Miles, Ella, Bird, Louis, the Duke, Trane or Monk, just imitators. It might be going too far to call jazz a dead genre, but someone needs to tell me where to find something released in the past decade that compares in quality and significance to “Kind of Blue,” “Ellington at Newport” or “A Love Supreme.”
Movies: Subtract the sappy chick flicks, movies about comic book heroes, slash-and-hack movies, video games disguised as movies, frat- and buddy-hijinks movies, movies based on old (usually quite bad) TV shows, sequels and all the animated films for 8-year olds and there isn’t much left to see at the local multiplex.
It doesn’t help that so much of the remainder are either ponderous, overrated historical set pieces (”Atonement,” “The King’s Speech”) or dinky “indie” films that fully deserve their dinky audiences. A film like “True Grit,” itself a remake, seems refreshing only because surrounded by so much junk.
It wasn’t always this way. Any fiveyear period between the advent of the talkies and the end of the 1970s probably produced more great films than allthe years since then combined. The American Film Institute’s surprisingly good list of greatest American movies has just two in its top 40 from the past 30 years (Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” and “E.T.”). There are six from 1939-41 alone.
Before we reflexively attribute all this to the biases of geriatric film critics, we might try to identify films from recent years that could clearly displace earlier classics. Any takers for “The Departed” over “The Godfather”? For “Dances With Wolves” over “The Searchers”? How about “The Fighter” instead of “Raging Bull”?
Didn’t think so.
Rock/pop music: Yes, the soundtracks of our youth will always sound better than the music that came before and after, but you still have to feel sorry for kids these days. We had the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and The Who. They’ve got Lady Gaga, 50 Cent (?), The Black Eyed Peas and Beyoncé. Ouch.
Rolling Stone’s list of greatest rock albums features no less than 68 released between 1965 and 1977 in its top 100, with nine of the top 10 from 1965-72. VH1 has 67 from 1965-77 in its list, with more than a third (36) from just 1965-70.
Maybe it was because music mattered more as a unifying cultural force back then. Or maybe it was just the drugs.
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———Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 75 on 02/20/2011