ABSTRACT
Introduction In their quest to restore the purported Edenic era in which music really mattered, the younger fans express the hauntological structure of feeling. Believing that contemporary music lacks originality and its own unique zeitgeist, the fans attempt to immerse themselves in what they deign to be a more “real” musical past. I argue that this belief that there is no unique musical sense of “Now” is also an expression of the hauntological structure of feeling. This feeling is characterized by a paradoxical yearning for an allegedly more futuristic and authentic past and is exhibited in the fans’ comments concerning their vicarious nostalgia for the times they never had the fortune to experience nor, shall we say, the misfortune to endure. In this way, this chapter makes an important original empirical contribution, as the existing and very impressive empirical studies by Bennett in particular (2000, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2013; Bennett and Hodkinson 2012; Bennett and Taylor 2012) tend to present the appeal of twentieth-century popular music and formats as the preserve of older generations such as the babyboomers and Generation X. By contrast, the data presented in this chapter illuminate the role of a generation unit of millennials born post-1980 in sustaining the continued popularity of twentieth-century music and formats.
