"I don't listen to music for the nostalgia"

With some context, I'm playing Minecraft and I had the music listening mood coming on. So this pc is loaded with James' music. Including vgm I love. However I noticed a lot of my favorable tracks were missing.

So I asked him why isn't there a Star Ocean 2 folder or a lot of Valkyrie Profile tracks or even Xenogears' Omen? He just replied that quote in the title. It made me think about my listening habits. Its true that a lot of excellent vgm were preferred by nostalgia for me... so my question is... am I just imagining things or is that really the case here?

Am I alone in liking vgm for the nostalgia? Or is there something more to this? Is it possible to outgrow vgm?

And for the record, I finally settled to listen to Jeremy Soule's Skyrim From Past to Present which is excellent on loop.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I'll be completely honest I've lost touch with music as I'm getting older.

I don't really actively search for good music anymore, if I like any kind of present day music its usually and completely by accident.

The majority of the music I listen to is stuff that I grew up as a teenager and video game music. To a lot of people my music tastes usually get mocked because for the most part I listen to a lot of 80's light rock, 90's dance music, ambient, trance, techno, house, and classical from time to time.

I guess the way I see it a lot of music can be absolutely timeless, and it doesn't have to be listened the moment it comes out to be truly appreciated. Its only been recently within the last few years I've been listening to Segovia only because a guy I shared my office with when I was working as an environmental monitor was playing it in the background and immediately took a liking to it.

When it comes to video games, I can't really think of any video game music I actually listen to from the 8 bit and 16 bit era except the odd exception such as Chrono Trigger and a few select others.

My interest in video game music really took off during the ps1 era and even know I still listen to a lot of music from the ps1 era not necessarily because of nostalgia but its because the music is powerful and actually very pleasant to listen to.

Yasunori Mitsuda will always remain my favorite video game composer of all time. I can simply listen to these tracks at any time.

Omen - Xenogears
Bond of Sea and Fire - Xenogears
Radical Dreamers - Chrono Cross
Garden of God - Chrono Cross

I don't think I'll ever outgrow video game music, because even though I never want to pretend I'm a music expert, I know what I like and what I like is for the simplest reasons.

Nostalgia can be a very powerful feeling, and even though I'm in my early 30's I'm starting to have the mentality that everything back in my day was better. I've come to realize is that the things I've liked younger can still be things I enjoy now not necessarily because of nostalgia but maybe because the things I appreciated is what I consider quality.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I thought I was losing interest in music a few years ago, until I upgraded my equipment. I was actually getting depressed because I had a full iPod of stuff I knew I liked and others I would like to listen to, but simply could not get into them. I was also using a pair of IEM's that emphasized bass over the mid range. I feel like with my current portable set-up (Cowon D2+, Digizoid Zo and Brainwavz B2), is much easier to take in and enjoy music. Both old and new. Very warm and dynamic.

As for nostalgia, I think it helped define a lot of my tastes and plenty of "classic" stuff is still pretty untouchable for one reason or another, but it doesn't hinder my preference for new music either.

One issue I have with new music is the loudness wars and when music becomes an absolute chore to listen to (as in, gives me a headache even when I'm enjoying it). It's kind of unfair to have to judge newer music when it is crippled by shoddy sound production. To me, it is far more dangerous to the industry than piracy is. Making your product a chore to enjoy is not good for either the sellers or the buyers.

And will the mod who put the below statement in my post kindly remove it? Thank you.

I realize I have sufficiently made my point about questionable mastering and am just being a whiny baby at this point.

Originally Posted by Goldfish from Hell

I thought I was losing interest in music a few years ago, until I upgraded my equipment. I was actually getting depressed because I had a full iPod of stuff I knew I liked and others I would like to listen to, but simply could not get into them. I was also using a pair of IEM's that emphasized bass over the mid range. I feel like with my current portable set-up (Cowon D2+, Digizoid Zo and Brainwavz B2), is much easier to take in and enjoy music. Both old and new. Very warm and dynamic.

This is an good point, newer ways to enjoy sounds are still being improved and allows us to enjoy the classics even more for what they were. There was a time when a lot of tvs' sounds were pretty gimped during the old crt days with dials when I only get hand me downs lol. And I've played a lot of nes and snes games on this darn tv but yet, I still enjoyed the music even then. So yeah, hearing it now with the proper playback tools of today... man.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Well the irony for music is that a lot of the digital players of today aren't as powerful as a lot of portable CD players from 10-15 years ago. The digital to analog converters are smaller and less powerful, which means weaker sound (and longer battery life). For my set-up, the Zo headphone amp makes a world of difference to the experience. The set-up without it becomes tiring to listen to very quickly. I really don't know how people listen to stuff with the iPod buds, they are awful. As for players, I love the Cowon when it is amped, but my old Sony Walkman CD player was a beast and was fun to listen to even with cheapo headphones.

Another thing...For me, nostalgia tends to fade as my pool of music gets bigger. Good stuff is still good stuff, but those albums I "sort of" like get pushed down the food chain with each better discovery, to the point of being shelf decorations (or the files sit idly by in a folder on my computer). I have a lot of VGM albums that I liked early on, but just aren't that good anymore and a lot have tracks that I might have tolerated because there was nothing else really on the horizon.

I was speaking idiomatically.

TL;DR: Nothing wrong with liking VGM for the nostalgia, it's a normal reaction to like things which bring back good memories, and one of the main goals of a lot of music is to brighten our day.

Nostalgia in relation to liking a certain piece or album is really a pretty normal occurrence. The sentiment is more obvious when we think of VGM because we can generally link those tunes to a very precise imagery and setting. Hence, we relive the experience of the game in question and, if it was a favorable one, it produces a warm fuzzy feeling during listening. If you really think about it a lot people do this with just about every kind of music they listen to. Often times a piece or artist will be associated with a certain period of their life and the memories it produced. This will usually be an unconscious thing for most people, but in general discovering new music outside of one's comfort zone can be a challenging experience, as novelty will often times be unsettling.

I'm a musician, so part of my "day job" if you will is to actively seek to enrich my musical palette with new and different styles and artists I have not heard before. Still, when I start listening to a style of music that I've not had much contact with, it usually takes a few listens before I can say that I enjoy it effortlessly. Obviously, this will sometimes not be the case if my personal preferences align well with said artist or style, but I'm still making a conscious effort to figure out what it is that makes the music interesting or different. So repeated listening obviously breeds familiarity as well, and VGM again is a type of music where you will usually hear a given track a great number of times if you are listening to it in its original context, by the very nature and function of VGM.

Now, as I said earlier, for a lot of people this is true for whatever music they like, and the period of their lives that will be associated with positive musical experiences will often be starting in their early or pre-teen years extending into early adulthood. Unless a person takes time to actively listen to new types of music, the new additions to their playlists will generally slow down quite a bit after this. That's why most people of a given generation will tend to like what was the hip thing during their day, and look at anything newer or older as just plain weird or bad music. Teenage years are formative years, and since at that time of a person's life they generally don't already have a bank of comforting memories associated with a pool of given tunes, they will be more receptive to what they are hearing and more easily prone to being influenced into listening to something different. This extends to video games and by extension to VGM as well since the older we get, the less time we have to discover new games and the more we will tend to want to relive good experiences with our favorite games in the time we do have to play.

This, however, is somewhat reduced in severity by the fact that in opposition to music as a means of entertainment, video games are still quickly improving in terms of form and presentation by simple virtue of the technological improvements related to their production. So I imagine most people will more easily reach for a newer video game as opposed to an album by an artist they have not heard before. Music production in terms of recording techniques and equipment has improved over this time as well, but the leaps in quality won't be perceived as much by the general listener. Recording quality has been acceptable since at least the 1960's, and the pool of well written music extends to way further back than that.

Another thing that may factor into the nostalgia for older VGM is the fact that modern games often times have soundtracks which are much more varied, both in stylistic terms and in terms of the length of the tracks. I've noticed a lot of games will also have much more ambient sounds, the background music often being much more subtle, since it has to contend with the other aural stimuli present, than in the games of yore. The fact that many games are now much more cinematic in nature means that there are more tracks that will only be heard once during a playthrough. Granted, this was also often true in older games, at the very least for final bosses and closing credits.

Speaking of my own experience as an example, I've played many newer games where I genuinely enjoyed the music but I'd be hard pressed to sing more than the main theme for most of them. And that's only because I get to hear it every time I fire up the game in most cases. There are still games where this is not true, but most of these are either games which are part of a series that has well established musical themes (e. g. Zelda, Mario, Castlevania, etc.) or games like Starcraft II, Civilization, or Heroes of Might and Magic, where the situation is closer to a traditional use of VGM by virtue of the fact that the game itself is closer to a traditional board game than most video games. Typical level-based platformers, sports games, and multiplayer oriented games also fall under this umbrella. I don't have a decent portable gaming device or a smartphone, but I imagine these are medium where the situation is still closer to the older eras of games as well.

Of course, I've not said anything with regards to the actual quality of the music in any of these cases. This is for good reason, as in my opinion there have been some pretty awesome compositions since the early years of VGM, and I'm of the opinion that the situation is no different today. There has been awful and trite ones all along as well, but that is true of just about any style of music or art form anyway.

So if you like music from certain games to the exclusion of others, don't feel bad about it, as one of the greater functions of music is precisely to heighten our mood and enhance our enjoyment of life. And in that optic, what difference does it make if nostalgia contributes to our choices or not?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?