Stranger Things is Gen Alpha's Big Chill soundtrack

It's teaching the youth about the music of the past but in a romanticized way

When I was growing up, my folks kept the Big Chill soundtrack in heavy rotation. If you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s a flawless collection of mostly Motown bangers, precision engineered to make early-middle-aged Boomers nostalgic. The movie itself is okay, but this soundtrack had a massive impact on my parents and their peers.

The thing is, my folks weren’t necessarily listening to all these Motown songs back in the 60s. My mom told me that when she was a kid, she was mostly about Perry Como and Bobby Darin, and she didn’t really start to appreciate the Temptations and Marvin Gaye until this soundtrack reintroduced them to her.

Meanwhile, I grew up experiencing what I thought was this coherent genre of “60s music”. When my parents and their friends rhapsodized about 60s music, this is what they were talking about. I didn’t realize until later that the soundtrack actually represents one person’s vision of that music: Meg Goldman, the wife of Big Chill director Lawrence Kasdan. She chose the songs, and she chose well, but they don’t belong to a specific genre; the Young Rascals, Three Dog Night and Procol Harum are outliers.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this because my daughter Bernadetta is obsessed with the soundtrack from Stranger Things, as are all of her fourth grade buddies. One key difference with my experience of the Big Chill soundtrack is that I didn’t see the movie until much later and wasn’t very impressed when I did. By contrast, Bernadetta and her friends adore Stranger Things. The immersion in 80s music they are getting from their multiple rewatches is arguably deeper than the immersion I got as a fourth grader in the actual 1980s. I certainly didn’t know who Kate Bush was back then.