In March, the rock band Weezer announced plans to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their self-titled debut, known to fans as “the Blue Album,” with a special tour: At every stop they would play the album in full, from front to back. I may not have enjoyed Weezer’s new output in decades, but the Blue Album was a fixture of my teenage consciousness, as it was for many my age; I was tempted to buy a ticket and spend an evening among my cohort, transported back to that time. But as I watched the video announcing the tour, I also felt a nagging sense of déjà vu.
I assumed I was just reacting to the whole ritual of touring years-old albums, a concept that has become a staple of the industry. It emerged in the mid-2000s, with a curated series of relatively small concerts self-consciously titled “Don’t Look Back” — but within a decade it had become big business. In 2016, Bruce Springsteen toured the world playing the entirety of his 1980 album “The River”; U2 came aboard in 2017 with a massive tour where they played the whole of “The Joshua Tree,” from 1987. Now these exercises are commonplace: Just this year, concertgoers could catch anything from the rap icon Nas playing all of “Illmatic” (30th anniversary) to the country star Clint Black playing “Killin’ Time” (35th) to the pop-punk band Green Day playing both “Dookie” (30th) and “American Idiot” (20th) — albums mostly from an era when people expressed their love for records by actually buying them.
Then it came to me: It wasn’t just that Weezer’s Blue Album tour was the sort of thing every band seems to be doing these days. It felt familiar because it was something that Weezer themselves had already done, 14 years earlier, on their “Memories” tour.
Back then, I remember finding the conceit intriguingly novel. Today that aura of novelty is itself a distant memory. Notices of new album-anniversary tours pop up incessantly in my inbox and social feeds. Taken together, they do not feel like fun experiments or celebrations of beloved albums. They feel like the onward acceleration of a culture industry that is unsettlingly dedicated — not just in our concert halls but on our screens and everywhere else it can reach us — to monetizing our nostalgic attachment to media from the past.
It’s easy to sympathize with everyone involved. For fans who grew attached to these albums when they were originally released, the concerts function as powerful shortcuts back to poignant memories and distant modes of feeling. For new fans, they are a chance to reconnect with cultural moments they might have missed the first time around. As for the bands: Many are scrambling, looking for ways to pay the bills as album and tour revenues plummet for all but the most successful artists. Presumably, booking agents are reminding artists that these nostalgia exercises do help sell tickets, while streaming stats are reminding them exactly which of their albums people listen to most. Speaking to Yahoo News in 2017, Art Alexakis of the band Everclear noted that merchandise sales at their anniversary tours were almost twice as high as at their regular shows. (Nostalgia is a hell of a drug; side effects may include buying two vinyl LPs and a T-shirt.) So musicians become jukeboxes — playing exactly what the data says people want to hear, minimizing the risk of boring anyone with new material or new ideas.
‘That means that all the good songs were up at the front.’
The more of these anniversary shows I’ve attended, the more they’ve heightened my appreciation for the old-fashioned, standard-issue concert. There is, for one thing, the simple pleasure — so simple you don’t miss it until it’s gone — of never knowing what song is coming next, or how it might be played differently on this particular tour, this particular night. Making these choices lets musicians tell a story about their work and their growth over time. But such variation is rare on the album-anniversary circuit. The implicit promise is that old songs will sound like old recordings — that the musicians will play, but only to recreate choices they made years ago.
This monetization of nostalgia has always had a place in the business of culture, and music in particular. (Remember those commercials for six-disc compilations of the hits of yesteryear?) But it now feels turbocharged: More and more of what we’re offered, in venues or on TV, feels motivated by the logic that what people want, or can most easily be sold, is what they already liked before. It does not help that our world is so media-saturated that our sense of time — our sense of our own lives, even — is increasingly demarcated by pop-culture products; we are constantly prodded to connect with the past via the things people watched and wore, played and listened to, all of which are equally available to us, laid side by side online as though time didn’t exist at all. Self-consciously embracing the cultural products of a past era used to be called “retro,” and there was something faintly kitschy about it. Album-anniversary tours feel like a way to make that impulse more dignified: What might otherwise seem like a date-marked gravestone on a stalled career is instead presented as a proud landmark, a celebration of an album’s enduring life — and a tribute to “content” that has more cultural purchase than the people who made it.
I don’t think I’m the only one who, faced with all this repackaging of recent history, feels a little weary. This year, the pop-punk band Bowling for Soup did a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of their album “A Hangover You Don’t Deserve.” A video taken by an audience member captured the band’s singer, Jaret Reddick, dissecting the tour’s premise in less-than-flattering terms, reminding people what 2004 was like in reality, not wrapped in the gauze of memory. “You’re going to be frustrated with us,” he said. In 2004, he reminded the audience, Apple’s iTunes store was only a year old; at the time, its users were allowed to preview an album’s first three songs (30 seconds of each) before deciding whether to buy the whole thing. “That means that all the [expletive] good songs were up at the front,” Reddick explained. Albums also grew longer, stuffed with tracks to make buyers feel they were getting their money’s worth. After all those upfront hits had been played, Reddick predicted, all but the most die-hard fans in the audience “are going to be looking at each other like: ‘What the [expletive] is this? What’s happening?’”
Artists and art-producing businesses face steadily greater pressure to identify the most monetizable material at their disposal, and to relentlessly maximize that monetization. At the same time, audiences are increasingly habituated to being told up front almost exactly what they’re going to get. Economically, this sounds nice enough: Who doesn’t like to know what they’re paying for? But of course, getting exactly what you want isn’t really what art is for. At its best, art surprises us, sneaking past our defenses and becoming a part of our lives in ways that are valuable precisely because we could not have predicted them. This is how music becomes special to us in the first place: by showing us something about who we are and how we feel that we didn’t know before.
It would be nice to think this album-concert trend is on the verge of burning itself out — that, having gorged ourselves on opportunities to revel in what we already like, we might come to miss experiences that feel new, or at least dictated by a slightly less transparent relationship between art and commerce. Even if that is wishful thinking, though, the fun of these tours is clearly starting to feel forced. As his speech to fans ends, Reddick sounds less like a rock star and more like a personal trainer coaching his audience — and perhaps himself — through a grueling workout. “It’s 18 [expletive] songs. You stick with us, we’ll get through this album together.” There must be better ways of sticking with the things we love.
Source photographs for illustration above: Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images; Al Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images; Chris Walter/WireImage; Photo by Mat Hayward/Getty Images; Steve Jennings/Getty Images; Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc
Peter C. Baker is a freelance writer in Evanston, Ill., and the author of the novel “Planes.” He edits “Tracks on Tracks,” a newsletter about how people experience songs.
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