All Intensive Purposes

Reviewing The R. Crumb Handbook, Ian Buruma proposes that Crumb shared a nostalgia with Bob Dyland and much of 1960s culture:

If there is one mood, apart from lust, that defines Crumb's work, it is nostalgia. But in fact this was also very much a feature of 1960s culture. . . .

A great deal of rock music of the 1960s and early 1970s was soaked in nostalgia for a pre-industrial, or at least pre-plastic-fantastic, Americana. There was, in an age of extraordinary mass-produced affluence, a deep longing for the handmade, the artisanal, the simple good life. "Plastic" was a general term of abuse for anything in the modern world that was deemed to be hateful: suburban mod coms, TV personalities, and so on. Country rockers folk singers, tie-dye weavers, and other enthusiasts of the organic and the "real" imitated the styles of an earlier, rougher, more rustic or proletarian culture. Bob Dylan, in his first steps to stardom, pretended to be a hobo. The Rolling Stones, nice suburban English boys all, pretended to be Edwardian rakes, or black men from the Deep South. [Robert] Crumb adopted the comic style of pre-war funny papers.

Like Bob Dylan, however, he transformed the style of a bygone era into something rather different and personal. Both artists reworked popular, even proletarian arts, and came up with something that could be played at Carnegie Hall or pinned on the walls of a fine arts museum. . . . Crumb certainly didn't use the techniques of a fine artist. On the contrary, it was more that, like Dylan, he used a popular idiom to express feelings and ideas normally reserved for more sophisticated forms, such as poetry or the novel.

Ian Buruma, "Mr. Natural," The New York Review of Books 28, 30 (April 6, 2006).

But surely artists draw on earlier styles without trafficking in nostalgia. Greil Marcus wrote about the continuity between earlier folk music and Dylan's Basement Tapes in Invisible Republic, now sold in paperback as The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. But I don't hear much nostalgia in the Basement Tapes.