Nostalgia Friday - part II

No, this has nothing to do with cheese or lofty moral dilemmas. It has to do with one thing, and one thing only - nostalgia. Nostalgia is a funny thing. It occurs when we miss something that is no longer there, and potentially never was. Nostos means homecoming - but it is not any home you have or had, but rather the mythical, perfect home of your dreams. Our memory tends naturally towards exaggeration, the good is ever better, the bad that much worse, when sifted through the neurons that comprise memory.  We long not so much for that which no longer exists as for that which we imagine existed. Nostalgia, then, is akin to utopia, which could mean either the perfect place or, depending on the intention of the man who coined the term, no place. Duality and disappointment are wired into the linguistic makeup of both words.

So why a semantic exegesis on your Friday read, you may ask? Well, a friend posted the link below on his Facebook page. It is about a song - Africa by Toto - that I personally heard in 1991 when I was in the army. I was on a brief brake in Eilat with a few army-met girlfriends. We were all super nerds, fresh out of our little nerdy parental homes, pretending unsuccessfully to be more worldly and wild than we were. Africa was playing in a beach-side bar, lights danced on the rippled surface of the dark water, and I still remember how I felt when I heard it for the first time, what aspirational fantasies coursed through my head at the age of 18. No, I never wanted to bless the rains down in Africa, I never even wanted to go there, but the easy sentimentality of the song resonated with the actual sentiments of an 18 year old. That's what cheese songs do - and why they work.

It is also why the following thorough take-down of the song is so damn great. Enjoy ladies. You can thank me later:

Hat tip: Aaron Tillman.