In Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, we see Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs imparting the film’s protagonist, 15-year-old wannabe critic William Miller, a stand-in for Crowe, with some koans of the trade. "True music, it finds you," he tells him, as if both their lives depend on it. But what about when someone finds it for you first?
It’s 1969 in Almost Famous when William’s sister Anita gives her little brother a bag full of her favorite records, a time when rock was still a tangible corrupter of youth, a rejection of tradition. But in 2000, the year Almost Famous hit theatres, rock was far from that disruptive, cultural revolution. When Anita gave William these records it was like she was giving them to the 15-year-olds in the audience: at a time when Blink-182, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park were rock’s monolithic envoy, Almost Famous was trying to sell us on the majesty of Zeppelin.
Fifteen years later, Cameron Crowe’s love letter to the music of his youth continues to stimulate (false) nostalgia in young fans who long for a sincere group sing-along of "Tiny Dancer" that their self-consciousness could never allow, who are searching for a short cut into discovering what music is significant. Gifting musical memory in film, through a mixtape, a song that will "change your life", or, in this case, a stack of pre-loved records, is a familiar and loaded film trope. Just as Almost Famous is trying to recapture a moment (even if that moment was the death rattle of Rock and Roll™), the gifting of music is a fight against the end of something. It’s a way to relive that feeling of the first time you hear a song that enchants you, by stoking that same feeling with a surrogate song or album—ultimately it plays into our love of pre-packaged nostalgia.
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Almost Famous filled our brains with the romance of girls who named themselves after Beatles songs, mustachioed critics who’d would stay up all night on speed just to fucking write about the experience of an album, and people sitting around and discussing music with all the divine weight reserved for God or death. It should, by all means, have been a 90-minute parade of saccharine garbage, but it wasn’t.
The film hinges itself on the scene in which Anita passes on her record collection to her lonely little brother. When 11-year-old William discovers the stash of LPs that Anita has left him in the wake of her leaving home, he flips through them carefully, pausing to gasp at Pet Sounds and trace the faces of a Jimi Hendrix Vishnu with his fingertips as Simon and Garfunkel hum softly in the background. This scene is longer than it needs to be, which is exactly why it is perfect. It should be indulgent because receiving this kind of gift has emotional weight, particularly for a sheltered kid who obediently stares into a candle flame while listening to "Tommy", as he was instructed to do. Self indulgence isn’t always a bad thing; it’s about devouring the things you like without shame or discipline, which is what being a fan is all about. Anita promises William that "one day, you’ll be cool" and encourages his interest. Four years later, as he listens to Lester Bangs wax lyrical about the "vast scenic bridges and angelic choirs" music creates in your brain, he smiles because he knows he has found his people.
Anita’s gesture changes William’s life. His obsession with rock music gives him access to a cadre of fellow weirdos bonding through the currency of "being uncool". In the Miller house, rock'n'roll is a distraction from true art, a trivial trend about "drugs and promiscuous sex". To Anita, these songs are expressing what she can’t, which young people will never stop advocating at times when it’s true, and times when it’s not (it’s romantic to say, "I can’t quite explain it; maybe this song can," as if your emotions are so profound and complex that words just won’t cut it). Anita gives William her record collection because she wants to offer him escape from their restrictive home life and introduce him to the language of her rebellion, because she knows these songs and albums are transportational.
In most portrayals of these a-ha moments, these gift of music scenes, the giver is much less generous than Anita—they are condescending snobs, high-minded scholars—with High Fidelity serving as prime example. Record store owner Rob makes a potential girlfriend a mixtape because he finds her a "promising" student. Music is not about freedom or rebellion in High Fidelity, it is something to be studied. There are rules to constructing the perfect mixtape. When Rob realizes himself to be a bit of a manchild asshole at the end of the film, he completes his emotional journey by making a mixtape full of songs that he knows his girlfriend already likes. Suddenly, music is no longer a way to assert his cultural dominance and superiority; it’s an affirmation of his love. Conversely, in Pretty in Pink Andie uses music as a way to flirtingly mock Blane’s mainstream-ness but also invite him into her world. Blane asks Andie for musical recommendations at her record store job as a way to show her that he’s cool with her scene; even if Madonna is a little too "deep" for his tastes. Initially, Andie recommends a "white hot" Steve Lawrence record, in part to tease him but mostly to test him out. Pretty in Pink uses music to show the gulf between Andie and Blane’s worlds, but also their curiosity about each other.
The film that comes closest to Almost Famous’ desire to mythologize musical memory is The Perks of Being a Wallflower, in which, upon hearing "Heroes" by David Bowie for the first time, teenagers Charlie, Sam, and Patrick actively decide to have a ‘moment’. They cast their musical memory in amber while it happens, and when Sam later finds the mystery song on a mixtape and gives it to Charlie, they try to relive the moment again. As they listen to "Heroes" while tearing down a scenic bridge at night, Charlie rhapsodizes about the passing of time and reflects on that feeling when "you’re listening to that song, on that drive, with the people you love most in the world" while that moment is actually happening. This yearning to crystallize a perfect musical moment is achieved through gifting someone else your memory just so you can live it again. This kind of recreation never works in the same way, because trying to duplicate a perfect moment rarely does. But Charlie tries to parrot Sam’s reaction to first hearing "Heroes" anyway because it makes him feel a part of something, it makes him feel "infinite".
How authentic can our feeling be when we’re conscious that our reaction to gifted music is meant to mirror the receiver’s reactions? Maybe it doesn’t matter. In the case of both Almost Famous and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, to share in nostalgia, even if it’s secondhand nostalgia for a time you didn’t experience, is to feel like you belong someplace. Just because music is gifted in these films to produce a particular reaction does not lessen the receiver's appreciation of it. Music is used as an anchor to memory, and the past will always hold more resonance than the present ever does, because we can tweak it to our liking. In Almost Famous Anita wants William to also be "set free" by the records that inspired her own rebellion. By the time that William is 15 and actually able to engage with the culture, he’s told it’s too late. But just like 15-year-old rock fans watching Almost Famous in 2000, he’s happy that "at least I’m here" for a little taste.
Almost Famous is an embodiment of the gift that sets its narrative in motion. Just as Anita passes on her memory to William, Cameron Crowe does so with his audience as to preserve it in a time capsule. It’s a romantic celebration of what he considers to be rock’s salad days, of being at a creative epoch that could never be repeated, of the glorified idea of a time and the ways that it probably wasn’t all that glorious. It gets to the heart of fandom: nothing is quite as good as that first high, but you try to repeat that feeling anyway. In the film, Sapphire the Band-Aid explains that to be a fan is to "truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts". Like fandom itself, Almost Famous refuses to be embarrassed by the earnestness of reliving this memory. Gifting a musical memory makes you vulnerable as hell, but Cameron Crowe knows this. All he wants for us is to feel exactly like he did the first time he stood side of stage at a rock concert, with other teenagers pretending to be grown-ups, who closed their eyes and swayed to the music, committing a feeling to memory before it had even finished.
