I have the habit of scrolling through comments on youtube videos while listening to videos - this is especially the case for songs, since it's the audio rather than the video that is of interest. Most of the comments are cliched and inane, some deeply personal and poignant and there is always a sprinkling of genuinely unhinged comments where you hope the commenter is seeing a therapist or has friends in the real world.
On the video to a rather popular, mainstream song (it has over 900 million views), I read a comment that said "I really miss this song". I paused for a moment to understand the comment - how can you miss a song that you can choose to listen to anytime you want? Pretty much every song ever made is a few clicks of a button away for most people.
I pondered a bit and understood what the commenter meant - it wasn't that he/she missed the song, but rather the time period in which the song came out. I'm sure we all have this - you listen to a song and this takes you back to a very very particular time when the song was popular or when you first came across the song and heard it several times within a short period.
The songs of the movie gaaLipatta take me back to the summer holidays of 2008, when I would spend the entire holidays either with my cousin visiting my home or vice versa, and most of the days were spent playing cricket on the street. The songs of Yeh Jawaani hai deewani remind me of the monsoon in Pune, since the movie was released in the rainy season of 2013, around the time I shifted from Bengaluru to Pune for college. That year saw a particularly rainy August in Pune and I enjoyed my initial days on campus, away from the city and traffic, surrounded by hills and greenery. (A funny aside - in that period I had just switched from a rudimentary Nokia phone-brick to my first smartphone. The Nokia phone could store at most 2-3 song files before running out of memory, one of them being the song Kabira from this movie. I somehow transferred this song file to my shiny new smart-phone and so it was the one song that I could listen to in the days of 100 MB/month of 2G internet. My flatmate said that whenever he wanted to find me, he would just wait for 5 minutes and move in the direction from which he could hear Kabira playing. :D )
Somehow these songs get interspersed with your life and memories. And nostalgia is always sweet - hindsight makes everything feel sweeter. You might have been miserable in the winter of 2015, but listening to a song associated with this period will make you feel like you are being reminded of some "good old days". I guess the point isn't that the days were good - more that the company of the song was good, even if the times were generally miserable.
I have a set of songs which take me back to a very particular time in my school days - those were the days when the bus driver would switch on the radio on the school bus. And the radio would also keep me company while I studied late in the night. When the wind was blowing in the right direction and it was late enough that the general noise of traffic in the city had died down, it was possible to hear the sound of a train horn from the window in my room. Whenever I visit home, even the distant sound of the train horn late at night is enough to bring back a flood of memories, a feeling of being transported back in time.
Recently I was doing some routine chores on my own with some music playing on youtube and something about the list of songs chosen by the youtube algorithm annoyed me - it was repetitive. I had heard the same songs in almost the same order a few days prior. I scrolled through the list of songs in the automatically curated playlists and saw the same theme - they were all songs I had relentlessly listened to in the previous few months. They weren't recently released songs - some were old songs. But they were all songs I had recently searched for.
Maybe this is particular to the Youtube algorithm rather than algorithms in general, but the repetitiveness of the songs youtube suggests has started to get on my nerves. Songs that made me feel pleasant a few weeks ago now feel jarring.
It's at times like these that I miss the days of the radio - it may seem quaint and naive, but I liked it when someone else made the choice of what I will listen to. What we have today is an excess of having exactly what we want all the time. We want the music that falls on our ears to exactly match our mood and mindset at that instant. And a small deviation can get us annoyed. And sometimes you want to listen to something, but you are not sure exactly what you want to listen to - all you know is that it's not any of the songs Youtube is recommending.
In the days of the radio, or music channels on TV, you just made it through all those advertisements and annoying promotions by the host and listened to whatever was on. When it was exactly what matched your mood or it was the song that happened to be stuck in your head, you were overjoyed. If it wasn't, well, hey at least something was on.
But for me this is beyond nostalgia - with radio, you got these songs that were insanely popular for a few weeks - they would play it literally every hour. And then they would fade away. You would forget them after a couple of months. But maybe 3 months later, you would hear it again. Then maybe 5 months later. It very naturally fades away and you move on slowly to the next nice thing.
If you truly liked a particular song or a set of songs, you made the effort to go somewhere, actually pay money to buy a CD (or a casette if you're older than me), maybe painstakingly make your own compilation by burning some CDs.
Today, we theoretically have all the options, but we are simply redirected constantly to the same stuff. When we had just one newspaper delivered home, we just read what was on it. Today we have information about almost any topic right at our fingertips and yet we easily get stuck in little echo-chambers of people who all think, speak and act in exactly the same way as us. There's no slow, constant change.
You jump rapidly from one thing to the other, and somehow stay on the same things all the time.