Nostalgia in Music I’ve Never Heard

And you just don’t get it, you keep it copacetic, and you learn to accept it, you know you’re so pathetic.

Those two lines have been echoing endlessly around my skull since listening to this song. Maybe that’s not such a surprise, though, considering the track is 32 lines long and only 8 of them are NOT some rendition of these words. I can’t complain when then tune is so catchy.

It screams 1990’s alternative rock, like Nirvana and The Offspring had a love child. Sure enough, Illinois band Local H dropped “Bound For Floor” in their 1996 album As Good As Dead — and it’s the best song on the album, I will not be hearing otherwise, thank you very much.

I mention the release date because I found something pretty fascinating (to me, at least…) when listening for the umpteenth time. As I was scrolling through my emails one very boring evening, the song suddenly walloped me with a sledgehammer of nostalgia. Which didn’t feel so odd until I remembered I was not actually alive in the 90’s. I was however alive in the early 2000’s in the back of my dad’s car rocking out to various 90’s rock classics, with a sprinkle of early Guns N’ Roses for good measure. “Bound For The Floor”, however — or any Local H song — did not make any appearances back then.

It got me marvelling, with a risk of sounding naff, how powerful music really can be. Some simple sounds can bring me back to my young childhood just because they sound a little similar to some other simple sounds. I’m aware it shouldn’t shock me as much as it did, and that’s just how memory works, but it was a fun realisation nonetheless.

If anything, all that underwhelming epiphany did was make me play the song more often. Even now, as I’m typing this with my playlist on shuffle, I’m not lying when I say those familar came on in the background.

And you just don’t get it, you keep it copacetic, and you learn to accept it, you know you’re so pathetic.