Nostalgia, a good adventure or a challenge for our next self?
We all have a past. This past sometimes seems bad, dark, sometimes the opposite, happy, in an almost immeasurable way. We get sucked into emotions – and the more we remember them, the more we see what we don’t want to see…or what we always wanted to have.
Our imagination takes hold of us and everything we’ve done or want to do.
Today we pick up the remote… sorry, the console. It’s time to go back to 1988, to the days when portable video game consoles were the real thing – and our imaginations were sucked in by that little screen that took us to other worlds. Meet the gnomes.
From the UK to Berlin, nostalgia is synonymous with gnomes, the name of the band that comes from a boat channel called The Gnome of Risthon Too.
And it’s a song that appeals to the heart from the first moment, were it not for the Game Boy, Nintendo’s famous console, one of the first audiovisual experiences for many young people at the time. The small screen brought the possibility of exploring various Worlds in various shapes and forms, at any time of day, anywhere.
And that’s what memories are made of: that tiny memory of a moment that we recall over and over again in our heads.
Gameboy, 1988, is sung in our ears as part of that journey: a ballad, in dream-pop format, where we feel like we’re on a cross-cultural journey with our past life – and all those moments we once spent. We are, were and will be happy: and the song pulls us into the feeling, from a nostalgic perspective in which what has passed is gone, but we keep it in our heads, with our memories and ways of seeing life.
The voices, balanced by a very dreamy instrumental, cosy us up on this journey: more than a song, we’re talking about a story we’ve been through and want to remember.
We’ve woken up from our dream, and it’s with the gnomes that we smile: how good it is to see our growth, our evolution as human beings – and how it’s possible to portray all this in a song.
A WtMM recommendation.