Groovin' to the Beat, On Medicare

[copied from dland]

Haven't written in several days, even odder since I had Thursday and Friday off and had a lot more time. One of the tasks I accomplished -- and accomplishing tasks is probably my most favorite thing to do -- is that I re-organized all the .mp3 files on my computer. I have about 900 files, god knows how many gigabytes. I like my music.

Not great music, mind you, and a pretty strange mix. Most all of my .mp3s came from my own CDs. In my earliest memory, the music I remember is pop rock'n'roll, what my big sister listened to on the radio in 1958, when I was five (songs like "Running Bear" and "Tall Paul") and show music. My parents brought that home. By the time I was seven or eight, I could sing all the songs from The Sound of Music.

I have no music in me at all. I cannot sing, although I like to. I sing when I’m alone, or I sing to babies. I’ll sing the national anthem if everyone else in the stadium is singing it, too. But I can’t carry a tune and I have no sense of pitch or rhythm. I can’t play any musical instrument despite a few years of piano lessons. And I absolutely cannot dance. You can ask, but it won’t make any difference.

I almost never listen to music in the house, maybe because I’m so rarely alone in the house. I’m all alone right now, and listening. Mostly I listen when I’m in the car. When I listen to my music, I sing along, and dance, if you can call it dancing. It’s chair-dancing, or car-dancing, to be more accurate. I’m moving, but I still have no rhythm.

Here’s the thing: most of my music is 60s and 70s pop. It’s crap and I know it is. Right now the song that’s playing is “The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace. Next up: the Captain and Tennille.

God I love this stuff. Does it make me feel like a kid again? I don’t know. It makes me feel good. And the best of all is Motown. About a half hour ago, when “This Old Heart of Mine” by the Isley Brothers was blasting through the house, I got this picture in my head of a whole floor of rooms in an assisted living facility, say, 2025, when those of us riding the crest of the baby boom are all there. In each room, some geezer blasting Motown, or, in secret, wearing headphones and grooving along with the Carpenters. Or Springsteen. Or, most likely, the touchstone of our music, the Beatles.

I get so pissed off when I hear a Beatles song, or even Neil Sedaka, in a commercial. It’s not just that schmuck Michael Jackson who’s getting all the money for the Beatles songs; it’s that this is my youth, my soul, selling crap on TV. I wonder if this is how my mother felt when there were commercials in the 50s using Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman as their music.

I’ve noticed lately that the muzak in the supermarket is Creedence and Clapton. Can’t help but notice. Is it because there are more of us boomers than there are of anyone else? Have we got all the money? Are we the only people at the supermarket at 7:30 on a Saturday morning? In 2025 are we going to hear Kurt Cobain on the muzak on Saturday mornings, and on commercials?


ENTRY #18