I am in the sixth cycle of life, according to Rudolf Steiner. The Austrian esoteric thinker, who died in 1925, split a person’s span into seven of these cycles, each linked to the Moon, the Sun or a planet. Dismayingly, at the age of 52, I am one away from my final cycle: Steiner’s framework ends when a person is 63. Spookily, he himself breathed his last when he was 64.
It’s easy to mock this kind of reasoning as astrological hocus-pocus. In schoolboy lingo, Steiner’s crackpot planetary guff clearly emanates from Uranus. Yet I can’t help feeling he was on to something too. On our spinning globe, where day follows night as surely as night follows day, the lure of cyclical thinking is powerful. And nowhere is it stronger than the artform once thought to harmonise with the motion of the heavenly spheres.
Music is shaped by cycles. Songs and melodies often begin and end with the tonic note around which all the other notes and chords are arranged. Repetition is key to listening enjoyment. Read the same sentence over and over again in a piece of writing and our eyes glaze over. But musical compositions rely on repeated phrases. Their circularity is epitomised by the billions of records manufactured in the century since Steiner devised his cycle-of-life theories. The rotating black disc with a groove spiralling round and round holds a totemic place in our musical imagination.
It’s scarcely surprising, then, that we should think of music in karmic terms, as something that goes around and comes around. In this view, the songs of the fathers, and mothers, are visited on the children. Each generation assimilates the music to which they were exposed via their parents. Just as the Britpop of my youth was a 1990s spin on British rock from previous decades, so the charts in the 2020s have been filled with noughties throwbacks.
“They say these are the golden years,” Olivia Rodrigo sings knowingly on “Brutal”, a 2021 hit precisely fabricated in the 2000s pop-punk mould of Avril Lavigne. It tapped into the golden hue of noughties nostalgia that bathes the present decade. Lavigne’s first Glastonbury Festival appearance last month drew a huge audience estimated at 70,000, too many for the area facing her stage. Her fellow Y2K alumnae, the girl group Sugababes, also attracted tens of thousands of people to their set, causing entry to their stage to be shut down.
How Glastonbury’s organisers managed to underestimate the power of 2000s nostalgia is a puzzle. The current upsurge of affection for the era conforms to a Steiner-esque calculation about the passage of musical cycles. According to received wisdom, it takes about 20 years for a revival to take place. So it doesn’t require a seer to realise that the stars must be aligned for renewed interest in crunk, Britney, Brooklyn indie bands, “Murder on the Dancefloor”, Girls Aloud, and so on.
To those of us in the sixth cycle of life, such a turn of events ought to bring an autumnal chill. It should mean that the music of our younger days has fallen from vogue. Ahead lies the purgatory of growing irrelevance, culminating at some dismal point in the future in the indignity of a care assistant absent-mindedly patting our hands as we mumble about seeing Nirvana play at Manchester Academy in 1991. “Old people’s music”, those casually cutting words — is that what the writing on the wall spells out?
The answer once would have been a blunt yes. Generational conflict used to be to the fore in the waxing and waning of musical cycles. Punks in 1970s Britain derided hippies and their elaborate psychedelia as geriatrics. Meanwhile, the punk scene itself, despite posing as a year zero, was actually an act of revivalism. It unmuzzled the primitive noise of the original rock and roll revolution, neutered by record labels on its arrival to British shores in the 1950s. The Sex Pistols did not so much represent a new start as redeem a past betrayed by the emergence of milksop British rock and rollers such as Cliff Richard.
Such churn between the generations is no longer so pronounced, at least musically. Friction still exists, of course, evident in online flare-ups between Gen Z-ers and millennials, or the united front they form to bemoan the dead hand of the dreaded boomers. (Meanwhile, we in the sixth cycle, Generation X, largely go ignored: the ironic sense of uselessness that defined our outlook has proved ironically prophetic.) But music stands apart from all this jostling. There we find a more harmonious situation.
Revivalism has burst the banks of the generational divisions that previously defined it. The 20-year cycle still operates, as with the current Y2K influences, but it is accompanied by numerous other cycles, all spinning away merrily at their own pace. The vinyl revival, for instance: last year, sales of vinyl records, those totemic black discs, reached their highest level in the UK since 1990.
Country music, a genre with a pronounced awareness of the past, is also resurgent. Four country songs topped the US singles charts in 2023, the most since 1975. Cycles are crucial to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which treats her albums as planets in the Swiftverse, the music of the spheres centred on pop’s biggest star. “Guess who’s back, back again?” Eminem choruses on “Houdini”, the lead single for his new album, heralding the umpteenth return of his Slim Shady alter ego.
Nostalgia has become a free-for-all, unmoored in a digital cornucopia where music from all times and places can be found online. A leading contender for this year’s “summer song”, the hit judged to be the season’s inescapable anthem, is a case in point. Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” has a 1950s-themed video in which the former Disney kidvid star sports vintage swimwear on a beach. The song’s musical cues are taken from a different era, however: its buttery groove is redolent of the early 1980s.
Musicians have always plundered the past. But the past has never been as present as it is now. We live at a time when hit songs from the dawn of the record industry in the 1890s are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Everything is up for grabs. TikTok’s random fads, like a recent craze for TikTokkers to do battle dances influenced by 1980s arcade games to a trance remix of New Order’s “Blue Monday”, are symptomatic of the result. It is nostalgia gone mad — and I welcome it.
I used to distrust retro-music. It struck me as regressive, lazy, a cheap thrill. I recall seeing a band I adored as a teenager, The Pixies, return for a reunion show in 2004 having split up 11 years earlier. Although the gig sounded decent (their musicianship had improved), the chemistry was gone. It felt like a betrayal.
Now, however, I’m a convert. Perhaps that’s a function of being in the sixth cycle, like welling up at manipulatively sentimental scenes in television shows and films. But there’s something invigorating about the wild nostalgic energies that our high-tech culture has unleashed. They bring renewed life to the past. The cycles of music won’t stop turning.
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