*snif karf*

I got up early, took my morning shower, and got dressed, all ready to head to work this morning...only to call in sick. Geh. This cold that hit me all this weekend just won't go away. :(

Going to nap for awhile, hopefully I'll feel better later on...

RTS Presents: Getting the Kids Off the Lawn--Our Music Is Now Classic Rock

(Please bear with me...after a bit of vegging out and catnapping, I seem to be shaking off the cold I had this weekend, but my head is still a bit loopy, so this may be a bit disjointed. I'll do my best.)

Okay. You knew it was going to happen sooner or later. As much as you didn't want to admit it, as much as you didn't want it to happen while you were paying attention, it happened. The stuff we grew up on, the music we held so dear as THE music of our own generation (hell with the hippie 60s! Hell with the cheesy-ass disco 70s! We've got New Romantic/New Wave/Progressive/Punk/Nonconformist COLLEGE ROCK, baby!!), has sure enough slipped into the mainstream under the guise of--*GASP*--Classic Rock.

I know what you're thinking. I'm pretty sure everyone's very first reaction to this news is this is classic rock now?? DAMN, I'm old... which we will then either brush off ("yeah, but it hasn't really aged well, has it?") or, like me, go into fits of nostalgia, make up playlists of our old cassette compilations, and think about how life was during the mid-to-latter half of the 80s.

This comes on the heels of an AP article that popped up on the 19th (you can find it here on the SFGate site) that of course made my prick up my ears and made the gears in my head start grinding. Of course, as mentioned in one of my earliest Radio Radio posts, I pretty much grew up on Classic Rock radio. Having three older siblings meant I had the heads-up on a lot of stuff that came out in the 70s and 80s. WAQY 102.1 out of Springfield was pretty much the main classic and hard rock station in the area, so if I needed my Beatles/Led Zep/Clapton/Rush/Loverboy/Eagles fix, that was the place to go. The interesting thing, however, was the fact that it wasn't exactly "classic" per se, as it played new stuff too. Of course, this was back in the day when mainstream rock was still straight-ahead rock without all the permutations it has now.

So when MTV brought in all the video-friendly stuff from the UK that wasn't being played on regular radio--the Culture Clubs, the Duran Durans, the Eurythmicses, all the "new wave" stuff that shocked the parents with the androgynous singers and the prefabricated drumbeats--it was an early 80s musical revolution. It was my elder siblings' revolution, the new weird stuff that was fun to listen to, great to party to, and dang it, the singers were the same age as its listeners. Pretty soon most of the radio stations were tweaking their playlists to accomodate these bands, much to the consternation of some listeners and to the excitement of others.

Which, of course, made it completely harmless.

See, as much as we don't want it to happen, and as stupid and inconsequential as it may sound, it's true. The best way to make something harmless is to get everyone to like it. The outcome is twofold: saturation takes control and one gets used to it, and the nonconformists are left defenseless once again. How can someone rebel against the mainstream when the source of rebellion becomes part of the Top 40? Well, either go even deeper and become an elitist alternageek, or say hell with it. Which of course brings up the usually-shocking realization that being part of a crowd really isn't all that bad, in fact it's quite refreshing...which only adds to the formerly-shocking music to becoming all the more popular. And why Rhino's box sets sell as well as they do. ;)

[In an interesting aside, I remember having a conversation with my sister once as to why I thought New Order was considered 'college rock' and the Kylie Minogue-style dance-pop of the day wasn't, especially when both kinds of bands were pretty much using the same instruments and making danceable pop. I pretty much summed it up by saying that New Order's lyrics had a little more meat to them than the cliché-ridden pop saturating the airwaves. I also rather snottily predicted that pop music would become the bubblegum-pop and the one-hit-wonders, and the stuff I listened to would have a much longer shelf-life. Well, in retrospect it's kind of gone both ways for both styles, but at the time it's all a matter of how one looks at it.]

And as much as we don't want to admit it, it happens over and over again. The Beatles made 60s rock harmless. Led Zeppelin and others for the 70s. The above bands for the 80s. And harmless alt.rock for the 90s. Eventually, our 90s music will become the playlist on the classic rock stations. As much as we don't want to admit it--because putting "I remember when this came out" and "classic rock" in the same sentence immediately makes us old--we'll be calling it our own version of classic rock. And as an added punch, our children will eventually be wearing the styles of the late 80s and early 90s, just like the 70s is in fashion now.

Everything is a cycle, just like the spinning of vinyl, cassette spools, cds and hard drives. We'll get back to our roots eventually, in some way or another.