Before Charli XCX with “1999” or, ahem, Bowling for Soup with “1985,” there was Madonna lusting after the past and all the wonderful ways to get drunk on nostalgia via “This Used to Be My Playground.” Released at one of the most predatory for going for the nostalgia jugular moments in the year–the beginning of summer–the song quickly shot to the top of the charts in 1992 despite being a ballad. For music industry forecasters should never underestimate the fact that longing and sentimentality in a pop song always spell solid gold.
Asked to write the song for the A League of Their Own Soundtrack (at a time when she was on a very different thematic track while in the midst of recording sexually charged tracks for Erotica with Shep Pettibone) as a result of her closeness to the project (she also provided a supporting role in the form of Mae “All the Way Mae” Mordabito), Madonna molded the lyrics both to the fictionalized account of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and the natural human condition of wanting to return to the past–when it was supposedly (and actually) better.
Lamenting the lack of understanding and compassion most have regarding the “overly” sensitive person’s inability to “just move on” after a heartbreak or loss, Madonna pulls at our heartstrings through the power of the auditory by bemoaning, “And before you know/You’re feeling old and your heart is breaking/Don’t hold on to the past/Well that’s too much to ask.” So it is for not just most millennials (perpetually obsessed with the 90s even if they were barely cognizant during said decade) at this point, but essentially everyone in the epoch that will later (if anyone is left alive) be referred to as the post-apocalypse. And yet, despite the fact that we’re all very aware of how awful our dystopian existence in the present is, we are told, “Keep your head held high/Don’t ask them why/Because life is short.” Yet how long it can feel when you’re in constant pain and agony over ruing the loss of the past, and all of its associated grandeur.
While those of the fire sign variety (Madonna herself included) might try to argue that life is best when lived in the moment, there are those of a more delicate (ergo possibly “too human”) sensibility who simply cannot let go of the perpetual ache of yearning. Of desperately trying to, at the bare minimum, re-create some semblance of the time in their lives when it was all so simple, so easy. Typically, this period traces back to childhood and adolescence (rarely appreciated when had), which Madonna does her best to conjure in her equally as nostalgia-inducing music video for the song, in which the pages of photo albums are turned to connote her unshakeable remembrance of things past (and, on that note, yes, Proust probably would’ve gotten really hard for this single).
Singing of someone from her youth that has disappeared (possibly an ex or a best friend or a family member–that’s how multi-faceted the lyrics are in their applicability), Madonna admits, “I wish that you were here with me…I can see your face in our secret place, you’re not just a memory.” Considering that Madonna herself lost her mother at a young age, her bewailing over the absence of not just a certain time, but a certain person is only all too real. So it is that she returns to a place of particular nostalgic value to attempt recreating the feeling, describing, “This used to be my childhood dream/This used to be the place I ran to/Whenever I was in need of a friend/Why did it have to end?/And why do they always say: no regrets?”
For yes, who among us isn’t filled with them as we look back upon our lives and wonder what we could have done differently to make it better–what opportunities we could go back and not squander in the arrogance of our youth and all that presumed “time left”? So it is that Madonna demands of her now overly cherished, sentimentalized era, “Why did it have to end?” Possibly so as to give you something to get drunk off of in the form of wistfulness when you can’t even afford to drink wine out of a paper bag in a playground that did not necessarily used to be yours.
