I think it’s actually a tribute to the quality of some of the music from that era that young folks like to listen to it. My 16 year old son loves “American Pie”…that along with Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” are two of his all-time favorites. He also enjoys some of the classic country music that I grew up with but hardly ever play. He’s discovered Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams JR and a few others on his own. And it’s not just him…I’ve noticed a lot of his friends enjoy it too.
The 50’s-60’s-70’s time period was a watershed era in music with new styles being developed, new recording techniques, greatly increased broadcasting, and there was a lot of very good music. Good music is timeless, and even kids can recognize quality. By contrast, MY parent’s music, generally WW2-era tunes was strictured and limited and somewhat jaded. Not to say there wasn’t some good stuff in it, a few classics have survived. But the musicians of that era were pretty limited in terms of what was acceptable and could get recorded. The best music of the first half of the 20th century was niche music…folk, blues, bluegrass, for example and didn’t have much of a market.
SS
In one of my CPR classes, I pointed out that the infant is so small and flexible that two fingers is all you need to do compressions; they are as flexible as Gumby and Pokie.
All eight students looked puzzled and said, “Who?”
I realized that I was now an old man so, I gave them an old man answer, “Look it up on the internet!”
I also would not have recognized the song, but I would have been thrown by the misquote, not lack of exposure to the source material. I spent a few years as a dj in college and that’s exactly the era of music we played, so I know tons of it. It wasn’t a student station, this was in the late 90’s, but the station director put the playlist together in order to increase his appeal at the bar. He wanted it to be the favorite station of every divorced or single 40-something woman in the broadcast radius.
But look on the bright side. As fuel prices increase your likelihood of getting $69.21 on a future gas fill-up do too!
Several years ago, I heard a couple such arrangements of Kiss songs in a grocery store. “Beth” was bewildering enough, but a future trip brought “Rock and Roll All Nite”!
I’ve been puzzled on a few occasions by rock ‘n’ roll staples showing up on the Lite Music channel in town - if it’s 20 or more years old, all of a sudden a rock tune becomes a lite tune? Maybe it’s just because I’m old enough to remember when Song X was causing a shit storm by being so controversial, and now it’s a lite tune. Sigh.
I’ve got you beat by decades. Back in 1976, I was working at a small resort in the White Mountains. On their Muzak loop that I had to listen to every morning while vacuuming the lobby, one of the songs was a Muzak version of Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
In 1985 (when I was 18) I worked briefly as a bagger at Safeway. My shifts were spent grinding my teeth having to listen to Muzak arrangements of songs like “Spanish Flea” and “Java”.
Fast forward 25 years, and I’m 40-something, doing my grocery shopping at Safeway … and realize I’m hearing Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” coming out of the speakers. Not a “lite” arrangement, the original song :eek:
