Thinking about treasured memories from the past made the test subjects more optimistic about the future. The group steeped in nostalgia was found to have boosted self-regard, social interconnectedness, and interpersonal competence. One group would be asked to write in detail about a nostalgic event that had occurred in their lives, while a control group wrote about an ordinary event. Researchers at Southampton began bringing in groups of people to attempt to measure the effect nostalgia had on their demeanor. Another professor said this bout of nostalgia clearly indicated he was depressed. Constantine Sedikides, one of the coauthors of the aforementioned study, had formerly taught at the University of North Carolina and felt nostalgic about his time watching basketball there (during the Dean Smith era). In the 20th century, the perception of nostalgia began to shift, but no one had empirically proven its effects until a social psychology professor at England’s University of Southampton got in an argument with a colleague about, among other things, his desire to talk about the Tar Heels. In a 2013 paper, a group of social psychologists wrote that, “Though speculations about the causes of nostalgia varied, they had one common feature they all ultimately viewed nostalgia as abnormal and problematic.” Over the next 200 years, doctors and military leaders tried a variety of strategies to cure the disease, from leeches to death threats to rituals of public humiliation, according to The Atlantic. Young men trapped on battlefields far from home, who carried symptoms ranging from melancholy to loss of appetite to irregular heartbeats, were said to be suffering from nostalgia. The term was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688 as a diagnosis for mental and physical problems suffered by the country’s soldiers. In one of his most famous ad pitches, Don Draper called nostalgia “the pain from an old wound.” That characterization - nostalgia as a fundamentally negative, heart-wrenching, malignant force - is the way the sentiment was viewed for centuries. And that’s how I figured it out, as I scanned through reactions from other people who were having the same perplexed, disbelieving, ecstatic response as I was: This is the goddamn menu music from Super Mario 64. I returned to Twitter, the font of all human knowledge. I was going to go mad listening to a SoundCloud rapper warble over an arcane piece of ’90s flotsam, lost to the sands of time. I flipped through my favorite television channels in my mind: Was it the theme song from a One Saturday Morning cartoon? I rummaged through my mess of a closet: Was this the bumper music from a 2-XL tape ? Maybe it was the tune my Bop It played? No, this is way too dope for Bop It. I was transported back to my childhood home in Montgomery, Alabama, and I started investigating. I was in a legit panic when “Run/Running” kicked off with a buoyant pan flute, a sound that I immediately knew was an integral part of my youth but couldn’t immediately place. We roll our eyes when Hollywood decides to make a mature Mighty Morphin Power Rangers reboot because we, unlike movie studios, know you can’t tug at heartstrings with a tow truck.īut when nostalgia comes after you out of nowhere, while you’re just minding your own business, it’s different. We visit our college campuses knowing every square inch will be overrun with vivid coming-of-age memories. We go into Toy Story 3 ready to weep for our own lost childhoods. Then the eighth track, “Run/Running,” comes on, and a #throwbackthursday bomb detonates inside my head. “Minnesota” demonstrates Yachty’s clear debt to fellow ATLien and featured artist Young Thug. “Wanna Be Us” has immediate potential as a giddy summer jam. The songs are fun and ephemeral, like perusing your friends’ Snapchat stories on a hungover Saturday morning. I bobbed absentmindedly through more of the tracks. His wailing “hellooooooo” sounds simultaneously forlorn and euphoric. Then, halfway through the song, he Digivolves into an otherworldly singer, bleating emotions rather than words. When Yachty does eventually step to the mic, his bars are adequate but not head-turning. The opening track samples the “just keep swimming” dialogue from Finding Nemo, a millennial mantra that every person under 30 in America has muttered to themselves during at least one final-exam cram session or exhausting late-night shift. The first person you hear on Lil Boat is not Yachty. Word was, the project sounded like cotton candy, river tubing on the hottest day of summer, and a 24-hour marathon of Disney Channel original movies wrapped into one. I discovered Yachty in March, when the Twittersphere was hyping Lil Boat, a new mixtape from the 18-year-old, red-beaded Atlanta MC. Do o you remember what it felt like to fly in 1996? I’d forgotten, until a teenage rapper named Lil Yachty (who, in his own words, sounds like “ a fucking cartoon character”) reminded me.
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