I am a kid of the 1980s, though in truth, I am no more a "kid," as birthday 53 is looming just over the horizon. I still remember when, in the words of kitsch pop group "Bowling for Soup," MTV still played music.
Since Bruce Springsteen, Madonna
Way before Nirvana
There was U2 and Blondie
And music still on MTV
Her two kids in high school
They tell her that she's uncool
'Cause she's still preoccupied
With 19, 19
1985
At that time, there was a throw-away line from an old Van Halen song that said something to the effect that, every day, your life is growing shorter while your memories are growing longer. Of course, it's undeniably true. Time is relentless. It is unforgiving.
Read last night as I was heading off to sleep that another former high school mate has left us behind. Death comes for us all. It just comes for some too soon.
One thing that today offers that yesterday did not was the ability to summon music on command. Spotify, YouTube, and even (a bit earlier), Napster allows us to curate playlists that, 40 years ago, we had to patiently create by placing cassette tapes into clunky tape decks, await our favourite songs to be selected, and then wait for the deejay to end his "talk up" to press, simultaneously, the PLAY and red RECORD buttons.
Going back generations, writers of science fiction have talked of time machines. HG Wells. Stephen Spielberg made a time machine, famously, out of a DeLorean car in 1985.
Time machines, of a sort, in essence already exist. They exist in sound.
Maybe I am alone in thinking this, but I find that certain songs, more than any other medium, have the ability to take us, instantly, to a specific moment in time. On New Year's Eve, we were counting down with ABC, and Duran Duran were one of the guests. Hearing Simon Le Bon sing "Hungry Like the Wolf" immediately took me back to walking home from seventh grade, stack of books under my hand, with my Sony Walkman and foam headphones. As a young adult, "Bittersweet Symphony" or Marcy Playground conjure up an image of the day I moved into my first house. Even weirdly enough, the Seals and Croft song "Summer Breeze," which was on the recorded track at Cleveland Municipal Stadium for between innings, reminds me of the first time I ever saw a professional baseball game in the cavernous, and now gone, stadium. I can smell the fresh grass and hot dogs when it appears.
Now that I have Spotify, I can put on a playlist from 1982, 1995, or even 2005 (when my son was born), and I do not need 1.21 gigawatts.
No plutonium needed.
