“Your taste in music is very 
retro, I’m impressed!” my father 
said as we drove our way across 
the East Coast of the United 
States on a 10-day long road trip 
two summers ago. I had assumed 
control over the aux, queuing an 
endless number of songs by iconic 
’70s rock band Fleetwood Mac. 
Little did my dad know that the 
new fixation I had developed with 
classic ’70s rock had emerged after 
I had partaken the challenge of 
reading 10 books during our road 
trip and had stumbled upon Taylor 
Jenkins Reid’s “Daisy Jones & The 
Six.”
I’d been breezing through most 
of the books I was reading on the 
trip, not because I was particularly 
enjoying them all, but because I 
wanted to advance on my yearly 
Goodreads goal. That vicious 
cycle suddenly came to a halt 
when I picked up “Daisy Jones & 
The Six.” The novel recounts the 
story of fictional legendary ’70s 
rock band Daisy Jones & The Six. 
It tells readers how they came to 
be, details the highs and lows of 
their musical career and how their 
rise to fame led to their inevitable 
break-up. The novel is written in 

interview format, which makes it 
interesting yet simple to read. It’s 
also categorized as a historical 
fiction novel, given that the band 
is loosely inspired on Fleetwood 
Mac’s history, both musically and 
personally.
When I started reading the 
novel, I had no idea that it had 
taken inspiration from Fleetwood 
Mac. I initially bought a copy 
because I had just read another 
novel by Reid and was enamored 
by her writing style and the unique 
stories she creates for her readers. 
But as I read on, I felt like the 
fictional band’s story echoed that 
of another iconic band that was 
known for its outstanding musical 
career as well as its tumultuous 

personal 
relationships. 
After 
lengthy and profound analysis, I 
concluded that Fleetwood Mac 
had inspired Reid while writing 
“Daisy Jones & The Six,” and once 
I searched for a confirmation to 
my theories, I discovered that I 
was correct. 
Now, two years after reading 
the novel for the first time, the 
songs that comprise the fictional 
band’s hit album Aurora have 
been released, anticipating the 
upcoming 
TV 
adaptation. 
I 
have thus begun establishing 
comparisons 
between 
the 
released songs and some of my 
favorite Fleetwood Mac tunes. 

As time presses on, the 
definition of “newness” begins 
to blur: What is the distinction 
between art that is truly new 

and art that has not yet been 
experienced by a particular 
observer? In the 21st century, 
it sometimes feels like there is 
no distinction at all. Thanks 
to the internet, there is more 
art available at the click of a 
button than any human could 

experience in a single lifetime; 
there will always be something 
out there that is new to you.
Art is, by nature, derivative, 
built on the trends that came 
before it, meaning that the 
evolution of art often happens 
too slowly to truly recognize. 

But, 
despite 
the 
seemingly 
limitless 
amount 
of 
new 
and old art, and despite the 
persistence of artistic trends 
which obfuscate the age of a 
work of art, there’s something 
special about old art that has 
somehow withstood the test of 

time and still has its presence 
widely felt in modern times: 
retro art. We can’t go back in 
time and engage directly with 
the past, but we can engage 
with the art that previous 
generations left behind for us. 
The Retro B-Side is a place to 

celebrate that art: the classics 
that stand and hold years and 
decades later, the hidden gems 
buried by the sands of time, the 
art we lovingly accept from our 
parents and their art we less-
lovingly reject outright.

In 1977, punk rock was on the 
verge of an explosion in popular-
ity in the United States. The music 
industry took note, already in a 
position to capitalize on the pas-
sion behind punk despite not fully 
understanding it. But even if indus-
try executives thought the punk 
movement could be a huge money-
maker, they prepared for punk to 
fail. As music critic Robert Christ-
gau for The Village Voice wrote of 
music industry executives, “they 
know … that the rock audience is as 
put off by the rough, the extreme, 
and the unfamiliar as they are. This 
rock audience is the one the execs 
created — more passive and cau-
tious than that of a decade ago not 
just because kids have changed, 
although they have, but because it 
is now dominated statistically by 
different, and more passive, kids.” 
If this new, harsher, riskier music 
was going to fail — and it did about 
as quickly as it came to be in the late 
’70s — it was not the listeners who 
were to blame, it was the big-money 
interests in the industry who had 
trained listeners not to engage with 
art outside of their comfort zone. 
Listeners were no longer trained 
to view this music as art at all, but 
rather as a product to be consumed.
And so punk failed, for a number 
of reasons, but not least of which 
was that it was an art form posi-

tioning itself politically as anti-con-
sumerist as possible.
It’s no surprise that the lifes-
pan of punk rock coincided with 
the moment the American left had 
an opportunity to push back and 
reclaim the power it gained in the 
1960s. Coming out of the Nixon/
Watergate era of conservatism, 
a struggling American economy 
meant that the door was open for 
the country’s left wing to cement 
itself as the leading political fac-
tion. But Jimmy Carter’s admin-
istration did little to stymie the 
country’s economic distress, and 
America shifted even further 
to the right with the election of 
Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Rea-
gan Revolution sparked a wave of 
individualism and consumerism 
that, coupled with an eventually 
recovering economy, meant that 

there was more money to be made 
and more money to be spent by 
the average American, and people 
wanted more. “Greed is good,” as 
Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas, 
“Ant-Man”) says in “Wall Street.” 
This was American culture in the 
1980s: one obsessed with money 
and products over all else. 
This is a culture that does not 
lend itself to the creation of great 
art. Great art takes risks, it tries 
to push its medium forward, tries 
to do something new and bold. 
Sometimes great art does become 
incredibly financially successful 
— e.g. the music of The Beatles, 
the films of Steven Spielberg — 
but these works are not typically 
radical. They do new things while 
playing into popular sensibilities. 

JACK MOESER
Senior Arts Editor

MITCHEL GREEN
Daily Arts Writer

GRACIELA BATLLE CESTERO
Daily Arts Writer

Let the ’80s die

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‘Daisy Jones & The Six’: a 
retrospective ode to Fleetwood Mac

Design by Emily Schwartz

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Wednesday, March 15, 2023 
— 5

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