Nostalgia keeps trying to kill me
Is too much nostalgia bad for your art? What if I can't help it?
There used to be a badly drawn David Bowie mural on Division Street. Garish yellow skin. Oddly chiselled proportions. Everyone said it looked more like the TV presenter Pat Sharp. I grew very fond of it in all its campy strangeness. I think I can grow very fond of anything, no matter how ugly, once it’s been touched by nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a hungry beast. Writing about the past means feeding it. Casting gold light into the cracks. Colouring in all the empty spaces with half-remembered bus rides and trips to the supermarket. Returning to the same mundane muse time and time again like running your tongue back and forth over a chipped tooth.
David Bowie was not very nostalgic. He possessed a sometimes spooky instinct for divining the future, best encapsulated in this 1999 interview where he predicted how the internet would change the world.
Bowie would complete a project, drop it, and move on to the next thing. He described his childhood as “ordinary” and declared that none of that child existed within him anymore — perhaps unsurprising for someone who claims to have never been interested in having a teddy bear as a kid.
Bowie was so nostalgia-averse, in fact, that when he released Where Are We Now? in 2013, looking back on his time spent in Berlin in the ‘70s, critics speculated that he must be dying. He wasn’t. Not yet. But he would be soon.
I woke on 11 January 2016 to a text telling me that he was dead. I dressed in black for a first date and we mourned the rockstar over coffee and donuts. Later, I thought of him before we kissed in the cathedral crypt. The mural appeared on the street corner a few weeks later.
The stars aligned that day in a Bowie as God fantasy. When we broke up, his death felt like a curse. As though our love had been smeared with it from the outset. But it was neither a curse nor an alignment of the stars. Bowie wasn’t God. He had died. Later, we left the city and split up. During that week in January, these were just two of the many occurrences of love and death unspooling around us all the time.
It's been on my mind since Bowie died
Just checking out to hide from life.
In a 2011 essay for Artnet, ‘The Grey Dog In The Service Of Ghosts’, artist Tony Fitzpatrick writes, “I often get accused of sentimentality or nostalgia because I reference the past — but this is not out of longing. It is about remembering, making notice of what was and was not there.” Notice that nostalgia is an “accusation” that must be defended. A critic had “dismissed” Fitzpatrick’s work drawing from the Chicago of his childhood as “sentimental.”
I worried I might face the same criticism when I co-founded Fourteen Zine in 2022. The zine explored themes of coming-of-age and was strongly inspired by the digital spaces of the early 2010s like Rookie Mag and Tumblr, even re-publishing some work created during that time.
I was proud of the work we showcased but sometimes thought that others would perceive my interest in that era as a stunted yearning for my teenage years to return. Fitzpatrick’s essay concludes, “When I reference the past, I am remembering — not longing. Xerox this to your brain.” I could have paraphrased that on our ‘about’ page.
These days when I write about the past, I try to approach it through a more brutal and distorted lens, lest it all appear as misty-eyed sentimentality. The good old days? Fuck the good old days. It’s foolish pining for your teens and early twenties. We were all miserable then.
Nostalgia is a tired creative trope responsible for many ills – from unsettlingly bad but fairly innocuous live-action Disney remakes to the delusional, imagined past longed for by conservative wannabe trad-wives.
Yet nostalgia is inescapable. We all have a past. All art is nostalgic. Bowie talked about a kaleidoscope of inspirations from past eras; from Jack Kerouac and Fritz Lang to the Velvet Underground and John Coltrane. He was haunted, too, by moments from his youth; his parents’ emotional coldness, his brother’s schizophrenia, his stifling, small-minded suburban upbringing.
To credit Bowie’s forward-thinking-ness alone for making him a great artist is reductive and dismissive. As reductive and dismissive as accusing an artist of sentimentality just because they draw inspiration from their past.
In 2023, I returned to Division Street in the rain. It was the kind of fierce summer downpour that soaks through denim and seeps into shoes. One where every skin you’ve ever worn is washed away. The Bowie mural was washed away, too. They painted over it in thick black paint. Snuffing out another little piece of the past. The city sheds its skin. The singer dies. The club closes down.
And it was cold and it rained, so I felt like an actor
I wonder if anyone else felt saddened by the ugly mural’s disappearance. The week they removed it, a member of the public told the Sheffield Star, “I didn’t know they were getting rid of it, it’s quite sad.” Did they weep for youth and love and all their Bowie-tinged memories too? Did they feel nostalgic?
I think of everything else that street bore witness to. Thousands of first dates and first loves and second chances. Thousands of student one-night stands and friends with benefits and three-month flings. Thousands of people growing up and giving up and going back.
Thousands of soft hearts breaking whenever they revisit. Falling in and out of vintage shops. Sipping Proustian coffee to taste the past. Or walking down the street alone, the tinny sound of Changes playing in their wired headphones as the city rebirths itself once more.
I would like to be more like Bowie (ok lol who wouldn’t?!) I want my synapses to spark off into different lightyears and galaxies. Or to at least be more adept at living in the moment instead of thinking about the past. Yet here I am, writing again about the same city and the same love and an old painting on a street near where I used to live.
I gut the memory and feed off the scraps until it’s a rotten carcass with no more meat to spare. My nostalgia tries its hardest to kill me on the week of Bowie’s death each year when winter clamps down its jaw and there’s nowhere sunny to go to forget.
How hard should you hug a memory? Should you wrap your wings around it and crush it? Or should you hug it softly enough to let it go? To let it float like a feather down all the streets you used to walk along, eventually being painted over completely?
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Some things I have been enjoying this week:
David Bowie’s Low — On repeat while writing this and I found a new appreciation for tracks like Warszawa and Subterraneans.
Also revisiting Bowie’s Blackstar — To hammer in the nostalgic devastation <3
Ethel Cain’s Perverts — Took me a couple of tries to get into, but it’s grown on me with every listen. Best to lose yourself in on your own in a dark room or on a frosty walk through the woods.
Carol by Patricia Highsmith — One of those weird scenarios where I like the film more than the book, but the last two chapters were exquisite and it must have affected me because the story keeps worming its way into my dreams.
Nosferatu — So beautiful. I’ve thought about it everyday since and I’m so here for Lily-Rose Depp’s moment. I was obsessed with her circa 2015.
Platonic Husband Substack — The most stunning writing I’ve read so far this year. Go subscribe.
I adore this <3
Fourteen zine ♥️