The Summer Soundtrack That Outlived Its Quality
The song was objectively terrible—overproduced, lyrically shallow, performed with the artistic depth of a puddle. But it played constantly during the summer I turned sixteen, became the soundtrack to bike rides and first friendships and the particular quality of freedom that comes with having nowhere important to be.
Nostalgia doesn’t discriminate based on artistic merit.
Twenty-three years later, hearing that song creates instant time travel to a version of myself who found profound meaning in three-chord progressions and lyrics that rhymed “forever” with “together” without irony. The song wasn’t good, but that summer was perfect, and now they’re inseparably linked in my emotional archive.
We’re nostalgic not for the music but for who we were when we loved it.
Bad songs from good times become more precious than good songs from ordinary moments.
The melody that played during school dances, at friends’ birthday parties, in the background of teenage gatherings where everything felt significant because we hadn’t learned yet that most things aren’t—these songs carry emotional weight that has nothing to do with their actual quality.
Context transforms mediocre music into emotional archaeology.
My wife laughs when I defend songs from my youth that even I admit are embarrassingly simplistic. But she doesn’t understand that I’m not defending the songs—I’m defending the person I was when they meant everything, the time when discovering new music felt like discovering new countries.
Protecting bad songs from our past is protecting our younger selves from present-day judgment.
The songs we loved before we developed taste reveal something pure about how music works.
Before I learned to be critical about production values and lyrical complexity, I responded to music with complete emotional honesty. Those terrible songs accessed joy, sadness, excitement without the interference of aesthetic judgment.
Maybe the worst songs from our best times are actually the most honest soundtracks to what it felt like to be young.
What objectively bad songs do you defend with nostalgic passion? What musical embarrassments carry your most precious memories? And what does it mean that the soundtrack to your innocence probably wouldn’t pass your current artistic standards?
Perhaps we’re nostalgic for bad songs because we’re nostalgic for the capacity to love things completely, without reservation, without the burden of sophisticated taste that makes joy more complicated but not necessarily more meaningful.