Yesterday once more: I’m a millennial hooked on the nostalgia of old music

In these bewildering times, songs of the past can offer a comforting certainty and sheer bliss

- Toh Wen Li

In June, at the age of 63, British musician Kate Bush became the oldest woman to top the UK singles chart. Running Up That Hill was first released 37 years ago, but its inclusion in the Netflix hit series Stranger Things this year sent it sprinting up the chart again.

“It’s hard to take in the speed at which this has all been happening,” Bush, obviously thrilled, posted on her website. “So many young people who love the show (are) discovering the song for the first time.

Stranger Things, about a group of teens in a 1980s American town who reckon with supernatural forces, has fuelled – and fed – an obsession with 1980s pop culture.

Why does the past have such a hold over us? It is hard to deny the nostalgic pull of, say, National Day songs like Tanya Chua’s Where I Belong (2001), which I revisited last week. Or, for those of us with a penchant for 1960s and 1970s music, to not feel a twinge of sentimental sadness at the deaths of Australian legends Olivia Newton-John and Judith Durham.

I love old music. You’d think, based on the ads I get from Google, that I was a middle-aged man. My playlists, filled with the Eagles, George Harrison and Simon & Garfunkel, have fooled the algorithms into thinking it should send me ads for hearing aids and “Asian mums nearby”.

Many of these songs were the soundtrack of my parents’ youth. They played them on the stereo at home when I was growing up, so these tunes became the soundtrack of mine too.