So there I was in my favourite record store, following my usual weekly routine of flipping through the new arrivals in the used CD section, when it appeared in front of me. Like a ghost from my past, it sat there, with a little sticker marked $10.99. Sure, the last time I had seen this little treasure, it was on cassette, the sound quality was horrible and the album cover art was pinched and squashed. Still, it was unmistakable: this was an album I had listened to many a time when I was in my early teens. How could I resist the allure of Joan Jett's Album?

Well, I did, at first. Randy, the clerk behind the counter, told me something that I knew already: "Sometimes it's best not to go back." With that I nodded and headed out the door, leaving it on the rack.

I've been burned by nostalgia before. When I was 6 years old, my favourite thing in the whole world was to plop myself down in front of the television and lose myself in the amazing world of Space:1999. Great special effects! Fantastic stories! Adventure! Action! How can you go wrong? It all became very apparent when I sat down to watch a few episodes recently and found it embarassingly shallow and badly-written. "Got a problem? GET OUT THE NUKES! It doesn't matter, shoot first and ask questions later! Yeeee haw!" Needless to say, the tastes of a six-year old do not have much in common with a thirty-year old, even if both of them have spent time inside the same skin.

Surely this would be different, however...this was Joan Jett. Besides, there's a vast difference in the tastes of a six-year old and fourteen-year old, right? Surely the thirty-year old I had become could find some common ground with the fourteen-year old lurking deep within me? Okay, so I had a crush on Joan Jett when I was 14. She rocked, she wore black leather pants, and she was cute in that rebel kind of way that teenaged boys found so attractive. Not only did I think the album was the greatest thing I'd ever heard, at that moment I wanted to marry her. Further, she was the inspiration for one of Bloom County's best recurring guest characters, Tess Turbo. In the years since, she's been hailed as the inspiration for many famous women in rock, including L7. How could I go wrong? Of course, I went back and got the CD.

From the opening riffs, it was like sinking back into my past. Although scent is probably the number one thing that can drag you back into the past (usually unbidden), music can do it very easily as well. If you associate specific music with various parts of your life, all you have to do is pop it on the stereo, and emotionally you can relive those days. Why do you think oldies radio stations are so popular? The important thing is, you have to make sure they were good days. Let's be blunt for a minute: it's not really much fun heading back in time to a point when you were covered in zits, your body was stretching out unpredictably and everything was awkward both physically and socially. And Joan Jett plopped me right back into the middle of that stage of my life. What fun!

The music critic in me, on the other hand, started to dissect the album. Pretty basic loud rock music, with a good dose of roll thrown in. There's some Zeppelin, some Stones, some AC/DC, and you can even hear bits of Eddie Cochrane in here if you know what to listen for. And you can certainly hear the punky edge that many claim inspired the Riot Grrl movement. Lyrically speaking, though, it's pretty lowbrow, with lyrics about sex, masturbation, dirty love and more sex. The opening number, "Fake Friends", actually has something reasonably salient to say about loyalty, be it personal or fan loyalty. Hardly anything else on the album could be considered profound, but it wasn't meant to be. It's loud, it's obnoxious and it's fun. But is it where I am these days? Nope. Not at all.

I've tried other shots at the whole nostalgia thing, recently. Pop Will Eat Itself's This is the Day This is the Hour This is This is still quite a good slab of fun, although if you aren't careful it'll lull you into a false sense of the worth of bands they inspired, like EMF and Jesus Jones. I picked up a few pieces of Alan Parsons vinyl and realized that well-produced nothing is still nothing. Ultimately, the best bit of nostalgia for me was not even my own bit; I caught someone listening to Curtis Mayfield's SuperFly album, and I realized that I had to have a copy. I'm not generally big into modern soul, but I can certainly get into some of the classics. Even weirder, I'm not really a big fan of the kitsch value of the 70s, with polyester suits and muscle cars and pimps and big dadblasted sideburns everywhere you looked. By that measure, SuperFly should be a disaster, but it's not. It's classic soul, with a great groove, and thoughtful lyrics about living a life of drugs and crime (instead of the glorification you hear so much of). Lawd lawd, yeah yeah yeah.

Maybe if it had been a part of my past, it would be embarassing to go back to SuperFly, I don't know. It speaks volumes about 90s culture, though, where those darned kids would listen to anything that sounded like it came from the 70s. Why not? It was all fresh to them. You, me and that other guy over there suffered through a billion plays of "A Horse With No Name" on the radio, and we remember Elton John when he actually rocked. Just the thought of some of it makes me feel queasy, but rename these guys Kravitz, Folds or Weiland, and the Big Pants Brigade would lap it all up. Am I any different? No. I used to dig Joan Jett, and she was really just putting a minor spin on the Stones doing Eddie Cochrane doing... So, what have I learned in the end? Well, that hopefully some of the Big Pants Brigade will look back in fifteen years and feel profound shame and embarassment about their old records. That, and the fact that I shouldn't feel so proud of my own taste in music through the years.

You can never go back again.