“Mystifications” is a bi-weekly column by Diego Del Aguila. Lingering on often overlooked questions hidden in everyday life, it seeks to re-mystify what has become naturalized.
It was during road trips that my parents found the time to share with me the music of their past. New Order, Soda Stereo, Grupo Niche—these came to be, in my imagination, the soundtrack of the Peruvian desert. Looking through the window, from the backseat of the car, I imagined the movement of their young bodies to the pulse of 80s synth-pop, Latin rock, and salsa.
At New Year’s parties spent with my father’s friends, I saw the recreation of this experience, the resurfacing of its trace. I witnessed the way they reconnected with these songs from their past, a confirmation that it was indeed true that once they were young and had dreams, some of which came to fruition, some of which were forgotten, never realized, and irrevocably engulfed.
Still a child, I took their experience—the music they listened to in their youth and would later recall in their adulthood—as a totalizing sign of an epoch. I equated this music and their stories with a reality that, in my naivety, I mistook as universal, as though their youth stood in for youth itself. “This, this is the music of my times,” my dad would say. And I would think: this, this is the music of the past. This interpretive move was characteristic of many other experiences I had as a child. In every art form, I saw crystallized the sensibility of an epoch, and I would fantasize, unaware of the force of nostalgia shaping my gaze, about how great those times might have been—the streets of Lima hosting the music of New Order and Depeche Mode and The Clash.
Today, however, I see how distorted my childish imagination was. I could not have imagined the songs being danced to just outside the clubs. Neither could I have imagined the many other local songs, defining signs of their times, that my parents didn’t know because of how much they gave in to the globalizing pull of rock and disco music. I wouldn’t understand until far later that most of the songs my parents listened to were imported, their experiences a mere fragment of a totality, shaped by globalization and class. To every cultural phenomenon, there are always those who remain unaware. My parents, too, in so many cases were the ones unaware: the rise of psychedelic cumbia, for instance, which grabbed the attention of thousands around the capital, remained completely inaccessible to them.
***
Paradoxically, it is only once we depart from childhood—when boundless curiosity gives way to a more sober awareness—that the irreducibly diverse panorama of the past reveals itself to us. Every period of time amounts to its own totality, containing innumerable experiences beyond the grasp of history. And yet this diversity obscures itself behind the signs popularly used to recall the past. Aren’t “80s music” or “90s music” shorthand periodized labels that condense a sprawling, innumerable immensity of songs and experiences into a single, enclosed, bounded unit?
If we take a look, for instance, at Spotify’s All Out 80s playlist, we can quickly realize that it mainly represents music from the English-speaking world. This makes sense given the market dominance of the English-speaking music industry, as well as the popularity and globalization of certain genres. At the same time, however, it excludes (and it does so quite passively) the sprawling and innumerable immensity I previously alluded to. Here lies, I believe, a very important tension: signs both flatten and recall. On the one hand, the label “80s music,” as used generally in digital platforms, truthfully recalls a reality: the songs in the Spotify playlist indeed were popular and once marked the lives of many. They reflect something real about market dominance and popular taste. On the other hand, however, they flatten the possibilities of imagining the past through its music; they reinforce the belief that popularity accounts absolutely for the sensibility of a time, obscuring the local genres, the marginal sounds, the music that never crossed oceans but still defined entire lives.
It is easy to collapse a decade into a genre, a movement into a playlist, a whole youth into a song. It might even be a necessity. Without reduction, we’d be paralyzed by the immensity of the past—disoriented, without knowing where to stand. Despite their apparent flattening, categorical labels can often be an entry point to the diversity and complexity of a time, like the Aleph of Borges: a single point that, if entered, contains all the possibilities of the universe.
But when we simplify, when we categorize, we obscure. This omission occurs, I am inclined to say, with every act of apprehending the past that we do. What we recall from the past is often fragmentary and incomplete, and this applies both to personal and collective memory. Oblivion is a necessary condition of our existence—it could very well be a cause for relief.
***
Our inability to go back in time leaves us condemned to engaging with its trace. We get to imagine times past through the artwork they leave behind, the texts written, the photographs taken. These media provide access to an unrepeatable past and an antidote to the pessimism of irreversibility. The past is still here—though invisible—refracted through its remains. While the archive itself does not shift, the gaze that encounters it does. A song once obscure can resurface as canonical; a photograph once dismissed as trivial can return as emblematic. What we see depends on what the past “was,” but also, and perhaps most importantly, on the shape of the present from which we look.
If perception shifts and traces are incomplete by themselves, then what we call ‘the past’ is, as Walter Benjamin suggested, already part dream, already a fragmentary mixture of what was and what we bring to it now. This, I believe, we tend to forget. We forget that our imagination in the now does a great deal of bridging the gap between our current reality and the unrepeatable past. Perhaps then it is true, as many throughout history have claimed, that fiction and poetry often portray more truth than what historical analysis can ever aspire to.
If the past is a dream, then it could be said that it has both manifest and latent content. There are things we grasp about it, but also things our very gesture of understanding exposes about ourselves. In other words, what we notice in the past often reveals more about our present investments than about the past itself.
When my dad said, “This, this is the music of my time,” he was right, because no one could take the memories away from him, and no imaginative exercise on my part could do it justice. Yet, at the same time, he was wrong, because the music belonged not to the totality of his time, but to only a fragment. And now, I could even say that in some sense, this fragment also belongs to me — just as so many others belong to us. What matters is not only the traces we inherit but how we choose to remember.