"Hold on, hold on to your old ways" : nostalgia in indie folk

Abstract

This thesis sheds light upon the nostalgic choices being made by people from the millennial generation in twenty-first century, or post-millennial, indie folk music culture. It suggests that where post-millennial creative work nostalgically invokes the past, it is an important tool for articulating the identities and ideologies of participants in the culture from which that work emerges. In response to their experiences of millennial life, indie folk's musicians and listeners may utilise the inclusion of certain images, sounds, themes and ideologies from the past to critique the present and experiment with imagined futures. For example, indie folk's nostalgic and sometimes sentimental treatment of nature's healing and inspirational spaces, independent of human interference, imagines an alternative relationship to the Earth than that offered in post-millennial discourses which often pivot around climate change's threat to nature. Indie folk's nostalgia for small-scale domestic communities and home spaces creates a counter-narrative to post-millennial life's networked, digitised and distanced forms of community. Indie folk's use of religious myths, stories and symbols constructs personalised ontological frameworks for a time and generation of participants increasingly disaffiliated with institutionalised religions.10 These alternative narratives are constructed through a careful process of selecting and discarding certain elements of the past, and combining these with new technologies, ideas and contexts.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English