Last week, I was covering a senior’s event at the Town and Country Centre here in Airdrie. The event featured cake, door prizes and music – some I recognized, lots I didn’t.
I approached an organizer for the event and got some details about the event.
“Oh, and later, one of the artists is going to be singing (some song) by (some artist),” she said offhandedly, the reference obvious to her.
She turned to me and quickly registered the look on my face as something approaching “yeah-I’ve-never-heard-of-that-in-my-life.”
“Oh, you don’t know that song,” she smiled. “You’re just a baby.”
And I was probably the only one at the event who didn’t know the song. When it was played, a quiet murmur went up amongst the guests. Clapping ensued.
It was pretty clear the songs played were special to the crowd gathered at the centre. Knowing and enjoying the same music brings people together, and nostalgia created by certain music is very strong because it can be representative of a certain time or place.
When the event concluded, I went back to my car and plugged in my iPod to the stereo. At the touch of a button I had access to hundreds, maybe thousands of songs.
And yet, if I were gathered at an event with hundreds of my peers, there’s unlikely to be a song out of those hundreds that would be recognizable to everyone in attendance. At least, not one that would be received warmly. We would likely all know stuff by Taylor Swift, though maybe we wouldn’t clap.
Now, I’m no authority on music. Every so often in casual conversation people will bring up the first album they ever bought – U2, Nirvana, Radiohead – I try to stay as quiet as I can so I don’t have to admit my first tape was the Flubber soundtrack.
But there seems to me to be a strange lack of modern generational voices in music today. I’m saying that there isn’t an obvious or prominent young Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen rising in the ranks. The big names, the ones who people these days talk about in hushed tones.
I always see trailers for movies about the 1970s and 1980s with taglines like “the music that inspired a generation.” Well, where’s the music that defined my generation? I know that Firework by Katy Perry is all about finding yourself and blasting off into the sunset but it doesn’t inspire me to start a revolution.
Could it be the way music is treated now? When I download digital copies of music, I listen to it absent-mindedly, on-the-go, and it becomes buried in a unmanageable computer collection.
And then I see older people who have enormous record collections, which they organize and file. They can physically take a record off the shelf, read the liner notes, look at the album art, treat it with what I might term “respect.” Music collection by-and-large isn’t a hobby the way it used to be.
I guess it’s strange that I’m nostalgic for a time I didn’t even experience. Perhaps it wasn’t as magic as movies make it seem.
And perhaps the real music revolution of this generation isn’t in our shared experience of one narrative that defined us (we don’t really have anything like Beatlemania or Woodstock) but in the Internet and the way that it opens multiple narratives.
What I mean is that in 20 years, I don’t expect people to be able to look back and pinpoint three or four guys who defined the era’s musical experience. I expect that we’ll see it as a different kind of musical revolution – an audience tuned into artists worldwide that catered to their specific tastes.
It’s true that there’s no clear-cut modern-equivalent of Neil Young defining an era for us, but thanks to the Internet it’s entirely possible that some guy no one has heard of recording in a basement in Tennessee could be the one who gets someone through a hard time. That guy could be someone’s back-pocket album.
And maybe one day when I’m an attendee at a senior’s event myself, and some men’s quartet gets on stage and belts out Justin Bieber, some doe-eyed young journalist intern will approach me and ask me what song they’re singing. And I’ll look at them, smile, and say, “you’re just a baby.”
