Nostalgia and music
Penn & Teller's Bullshit, on Showtime, recently did a show called The Good Ol' Days. It focused on how nostalgia distorts people's identification of the past.
Bullshit focused on extremes -- talking to "ren rats" that go to renaissance fairs and think wistfully of days of old before indoor plumbing and electricity; people who wax nostalgic on the 50s, thinking it was all like My Three Sons and Leave It to Beaver; and people who reminisce on the 80s as a more carefree time.
I'm old enough to remember that the 80s were anything but carefree -- we had "gay cancer," we had Ronny Rayguns in the White House, starving children in Ethiopia, Iran-Contra, Bhopal, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, John Lennon's assassination, El Salvador and countless other examples of man's shitty behavior.
But the 1980s, when I was 10 - 20 years old, was also the most formative time in my life for music, and despite a ridiculous amount of banality, I still identify with a lot of that music very closely.
It got me thinking about the role that nostalgia plays in your musical selection. I like to think that I'm pretty eclectic when it comes to musical taste. With the possible exception of opera, I'm open to listening to just about any music. But I definitely cycle back around to listening to stuff that came out in the 1980s more than just about anything else, whether it's cheesy rock and roll (Red Rider, Lunatic Fringe), goth (Bauhaus, Bela Lugosi is Dead) or synthpop (Gary Numan, Are Friends Electric?).
There's a comfort level involved with those old songs, as silly as some of them sound now, that's inescapable to me. It's the comfort of the well-known and familiar, like a favorite sweatshirt or, for a child, a security blanket. It's safety, I guess.