“The roots of ‘nostalgia’ can probably be traced back to a time when to leave home for long was literally to risk death. Our current use of the word, though, is distinctly modern and metaphorical: the home we miss is no longer a geographically defined place, but rather a state of mind. Nostalgia, or homesickness, is no longer (perhaps never was) about the past but about felt absences or ‘lack’ in the present.

The historian Frederic Jameson talks (disapprovingly) about ‘nostalgia for the present’: the unhealthy desire to hold on to disappearing worlds – the day before yesterday, rather than that of the old Elizabethan sea-dogs, medieval chivalry or Gothic architecture…

Jameson’s conclusion, which is presumably one that would have been shared by Dylan at the time, is that “nostalgia for the present” represents a loss of faith in the future. This loss of faith has produced a culture that can only look backwards and re-examine key moments of its own recent history with a sentimental gloss and a Vaselined lens. Angela McRobbie has summarised Jameson’s position thus: “Society is now incapable of producing serious images, or texts which give people meaning and direction. The gap opened up by this absence is filled instead with cultural bric-a-brac and with old images recycled and reintroduced into circulation as pastiche.” Steps, in other words. Kylie. The retread of Starsky and Hutch. The plague of tribute bands to Abba, Queen, the Beatles and others.” —Guardian.UK