Back Together Again. Hall and Oates. 1976. RCA Victor.

 Nostalgia is the sometimes overpowering need to recreate the details of a lost, temporal Utopia through fantasy, and then impose those details onto our current reality. At its best, musical nostalgia is an attempt at capturing the spirit of the music it is reviving while conveying it in a recognizably contemporary style. Hall and Oates sneak into rhythm and blues by way of a Whites Only rear entrance, bringing with them an assortment of instrumentation and production values that move them towards the niche marketable non-genre specific category of mid-seventies rock that also gave us the Alan Parsons Band’s “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You,” Toto’s “Georgy Porgy,” Boz Scaggs’ “Lowdown,” David Bowie’s “Right” and “Fascination,” the bulk of the Steely Dan catalog, and Joni Mitchell’s “Help Me”; innovative works of funky pop sophistication that, to sympathetic ears, still resonate with vitality and adult clarity. Back Together Again easily transcends nostalgia’s novelty-song-like limitations by rejecting its slavishly formal rules, and instead the duo trust their instincts, adhering to commercial pop’s somewhat more fluid conventions, which together they had clearly already mastered. This move by the mainstream towards jazz and R&B influenced expression may have been a response to the emerging punk aesthetic; if you couldn’t get your bona fides with moves borrowed from the Bowery or Soho, then maybe you’d accrue them with an open plea to the Philadelphia or Oakland markets. Nostalgia isn’t only a yearning for an idealized fantasy of the past. It’s also a bourgeois vice whose details, like those in pornography and religion, are shared across a broad public spectrum. Unlike pornography, however, which relies on a very specific set of visual and audio dynamics to have considered itself functional, the focus of the nostalgist’s attention is always himself. The dysfunctions he has identified within his culture, and which by definition he rejects in hopes of locating a livable, model alternative from that same culture’s recent or distant past, are often those social deficiencies the rest of us have chosen to live with, either with humor or madness or a sobriety-challenging combination of the two. The nostalgist, however, has chosen to inhabit his vista of disrepair, unembarrassed at inflicting the outrage of his obsessions at the world outside of it. Usually while shaking his ass to Macho Man at a pre-election cult gathering masquerading as political rally.

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