Day 12: Why My Generation Wins at Music

I didn’t have a car in high school but my best friend did, so whenever we went anywhere he would drive and I rode shotgun. When we were out we would usually listen to a cassette we could both agree on (frequently it was a poorly-recorded bootleg of a Bruce Springsteen show recorded in Kansas City), but if it was a Saturday night, the radio was set to the Classic Cruise. One of the local stations played hours of music from the late 50s and early 60s, the era of songs that made up the audio backdrop of “American Graffiti.” Listening to that show hadn’t always my first choice, but it was his car. As time went on I began to appreciate it more, and ultimately built a connection between high school Saturday nights and hearing that music. If I happen across songs like “Peggy Sue,” “Runaway,” or “Surfer Joe” now, I still feel a faded connection to those memories, and they fill me with a sideways kind of nostalgia for an era I never knew myself. 

That was only Saturday night, though. The rest of the time we were tuned in right where we should have been, with the dizzying amount of music of the mid-1980s flying out of MTV and the maybe three and a half good radio stations the Cities had to offer at the time. The thing is, I’ve recently noticed that a lot of the music from that time still gets radio airplay. As the songs from the 50s and 60s have been relegated to background music in cartoonish theme restaurants and late night Time Life CD collection ads, the songs from the 1980s, and even some going back as far as the late 1970s, still sound as vital now as they did when they were first released. 

One of our radio stations here has a format not that different from pressing the shuffle feature on an iPod, and can have songs from Fall Out Boy, Boston, Madonna, and Cheap Trick play consecutively while sounding naturally integrated. I’m willing to bet there are more people out there who would still be more likely to turn up and rock out to “Come Sail Away” by Styx or “Separate Ways” by Journey than any post-millennial releases from Foo Fighters or Blink-182. Just for perspective: “You Shook Me All Night Long,” “Shoot To Thrill,” and “Back in Black” all came from AC/DC’s “Back in Black” album. All of those songs still sound as crisp and rock just as hard now as they did when they were first released...thirty-eight years ago. In 1980.

The torch of influence was passed on from Buddy Holly and the Beatles to bands like Queen and the Ramones, then Metallica and Nirvana. Maybe it had something to do with recording technology or the evolution of the instruments and how they were played. Maybe it was an entire generation of musicians trying to figure out what Eddie Van Halen did on "Eruption," followed by a generation that had figured it out and wanted to show they didn’t need to rely on that skill to be taken seriously. 

There’s a marked difference between a song being labeled a “classic” or an “oldie.” Very little from the 1960s can escape that oldie tag anymore. This is also true for much from the 70s. Once you cross over into the 1980s though, as intentionally stylized as much of it was then and as dated as some of it sounds now, it’s still out there. I hear Bananarama and Bon Jovi show up on pop radio way more than *NSYNC, who, if memory serves, actually had an album named “Pop.” 

But you know who else had an album named “Pop?” U2. Who is still touring today, and very successfully. As is Bon Jovi. And Def Leppard. And even Fleetwood Mac, if they can stop fighting about who is officially in the band on any given week.

These were the bands and artists my generation grew up on. They’re still selling out arenas and casinos and getting steady airplay all over the country. 

There must be a reason.