Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Tragic Tuesday


I know you are thinking you are going to come to my humble abode here and not see me post further about Clay Walker. But you would be wrong for the time being.

Something crossed my mind on the long ride up to Duluth and I thought I would pontificate on it now. While flipping through radio stations I had to wonder what ever became of "Oldies" radio. It used to be, that back in the day, if you tuned into an oldies station you heard Bill Haley and the Comets or Buddy Holly. The oldies were songs from the 50's and 60's. That is the 1950's and 1960's for my younger readers. Throw in some Everly Brothers, Beach Boys, early Beatles and Elvis and you had yourself an oldies station.

Now if you tune into an "oldies" station you hear Culture Club, Genesis and Duran Duran. When did this happen? How, all of the sudden, did what I loved become old? I so loved Culture Club in high school, along with Journey and my never ending love affair with all things Barry Manilow. And who could forget Huey Lewis and the news or Bryan Adams. Heck, even back then Michael Jackson was the epitome of cool. Just beat it, beat it, beat it. Which I think is what got him in trouble in the first place. But I digress.

I believe it all started in 1988. I was pregnant with Frodo at the ripe old age of 21. We were driving out of state and it was late in the evening. I tuned into an oldies station and they spun "an oldie but a goodie." The song you ask? The Locomotion by Grand Funk Railroad. The song was released in 1974 and I still had the 45. Again, for the younger readers, this is a 45:

45s were made of vinyl and you had to be careful not to scratch them or the songs would skip. For the youngsters: think fragile mp3. And of course you would need one of these:

to be able to actually put it on your

What is a turntable? Just think of it as an early ipod but a little less portable. So the question is if a song is released in 1974 and played again 14 years later on the radio, does that make it an oldie? Don't cars have to be 20 years old to be classified as junk antiques? If I listened to oldies stations in the 80's and they played 50's music shouldn't that mean that oldies stations today should play songs that are 30 years old...oh wait...*doing math* Cripes. My songs are officially oldies if we use that theory.

I guess that means I am old. When the heck did that happen?

~ame

2 comments:

I think that the dating of music is very arbitrary and set up just to try to sell more merchandise.

Is that a roundabout way of saying I'm not old? Yipee!!

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