Anemoia in the Streaming Age: What Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” revival in Stranger Things Netflix TV series tells us about young people’s connection to the music culture of the 1970s and 1980s

Generations born after 1990—Millennials and, notably, Generation Z—show an attachment to the folk-rock of the 1960s and 1970s: music made before their birth, associated with countercultural values they never experienced, yet capable of eliciting nostalgia. This feeling, termed anemoia in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Koenig, 2012), refers to longing for a time one has not personally known. Drawing on a systematic review of academic literature and available streaming data, this article investigates how folk-rock—from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Simon & Garfunkel, and Fleetwood Mac—reaches young listeners today. It considers the values they attach to these songs (authenticity, political commitment, community, resistance) and the routes through which they encounter them: streaming algorithms, TikTok, and television series. This pattern extends beyond folk-rock to the wider musical culture of the 1970s and 1980s. A clear case is the renewed popularity of Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill” following its use in Stranger Things Netflix TV series a work from an earlier generation became part of young listeners’ playlists and creative practices online. From a communication and information sciences perspective, folk-rock appears as a set of musical and visual signs that circulate across media and acquire new meanings in changing social settings. The Kate Bush case helps clarify how audiovisual fiction, platforms, and audience participation can revive an older repertoire without making it part of folk-rock. In dialogue with an earlier study of the commercial use of folk-rock counterculture in automotive advertising (Gimello-Mesplomb, 2026a), this chapter shifts attention from Boomer audiences to Millennials and Generation Z. It asks how the same countercultural imagery can support both retro-marketing and younger listeners’ sense of identification with a past they did not live through. The discussion also addresses contemporary heirs to folk-rock (Phoebe Bridgers, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Taylor Swift) and the vinyl revival as a symbolic practice. It closes by asking whether listeners can critically reclaim this musical past within platform capitalism.