I’m scrolling down, down, down Facebook into a Moria abyss with advertising, and one pattern I notice is post after post with photographs of those darling little Christmas bubble lights that fill me with nostalgia for my grandparents’ livingroom in my childhood, the rough-hewn wooden bowl of walnuts on the coffee table with the simple metal cracker I could not operate, the 8-track player with Lawrence Welk tapes arrayed beside in a primitive organizer. The photograph caption is always some kind of high and mighty “who out there has the moral rectitude to have seen these objects back in the ol’ superior days?” I get it; memories are fantastic.
I mean, they truly are fantastic in a literal way. They are great trances of fantasy that portal us into our past selves. To have memories is one of our most powerful metaphysical talents. They are nothing short of intoxicating.
But I have my own little Christmas bubble lights in my house. They’re plugged in right now, glowing as I type. I feel like many people have them now, and these Facebook posts treating them like a lost code of honor grow more straw-manish each year I continue seeing them.
These lost lights, they have essentially re-entered the culture as something of simultaneously now and ago. Don’t say “timeless” because we know they don’t belong; we have just accepted them as if Marty McFly missed his 1955 lightning strike and just ended up moving in.
And this is what the internet is helping us achieve together, an ever-past/ever-present that trades in deep nostalgia as fluidly as in the no-spoilers anticipation for the latest mech karate.
So “You Can’t Hurry Love” definitely is of a time of the purest gospel R&B artistry. It absolutely was the signature work of the Motown label that was still simply its own dream come true, not some regularly sold-off imprint under the umbrella of one media conglomerate or another.
But the internet has augmented that reality with literally the weight of everything else too.
It won’t ever lose its original context; we will just stop trying to remind everyone of those inventive, iconic days of American ‘60s Motown because it will still partially be the ‘60s for all times, and all the portals will be stuck open.