Have you ever heard the saying “The only constant in life is change?”
I have often thought about, and more often fought with, that notion. I don’t know how you are, but from an early age, I started to cling to things, wanting certain things to stay the same… the same, dammit, always the same! Of course, this might have been a reaction to experiencing an overwhelming amount of change as a kid… when my parents split up when I was nine, for example. It could also have been in my sensitive nature that caused me to seek predictability and routine…. change tends to be anathema to these things.
Yet this irrational (and futile) notion that things should stay the same isn’t just a personal quirk. We live in an amazing (and sometimes overwhelming) time of change, where EVERYTHING seems to be changing! Let’s just take the subject of technology, specifically how technology has changed the means through which music is now accessed and listened to.
The last 20 years has seen a revolution in the means of hearing recorded music the likes of which has NEVER been seen in human history. When I was a kid, you listened to recorded music on the radio, or at the supermarket, or on a CD player, car stereo, cassette player, or record player. Oh yeah, and then there was this thing called MTV. If you wanted to listen to a song, you had to buy it, swap it from a friend, or record it on a VHS tape (if it was a music video on TV) or cassette tape. Admittedly, this was already quite a lot of options. Yet there was some legwork involved, and often some money, in order to have the option of simply listening to a particular song when you wanted. Also, there was the physical wear-and-tear factor, since all music was somehow played through a physical means: whether the tape of a cassette, or the little grooves on a CD. Either way, there were certain constraints that applied.
Nowadays, through the genie’s lamp that is the Internet, all of us have basically unlimited and never-ending access to all the music we could ever want to listen to, generally for free (or for a nominal monthly fee of under $10) in whatever format we want, whether mp3, streaming, or video. And no physical deterioration can occur through over-use! This is an EXTRAORDINARY quantum leap of change from only a few decades ago. And yes, this increases the diversity and quantity of what we can listen to, and of course, the ease with which we listen to it. You can argue pretty easily that this progress is a “good thing.”
And yet.
And yet.
And yet I admit it, inside myself (and I’m sure I’m not alone), there is that part of me that still misses “the old days.” Those days of record stores, and CDs, and MTV. Not because it’s inherently better (because by the objective standards of diversity, quantity, and ease, it is not). But because it is what I got used to... it was part of the fabric of what my life was then, as intrinsic in my memory as my friends, family, the streets I drove down as a kid, the camping trips I took, and childhood Christmas dinners.
I don’t think I’m alone here . As someone in the music field, I pay attention to other people’s attitudes about this topic. Although I cannot verify this other then through my own observation, it seems to me that when it comes to music, people generally don’t like change! I would even go so far as to make the bold (though unsubstantiated) claim that most people spend their entire lives preferring the music (or that which is like the music) they grew up with, specifically 1) the music they got exposed to as young children, from their parents, TV, friends, etc, and 2) the music they and their friends listened to during their high school and college years.
My gut tells me that this probably accounts for much of people’s life-long music tastes (If you have evidence to refute that, by all means, please share). What this means is that, in a time in which our technology and culture seems to be massively upgrading itself (to use a very apt computer metaphor) at least every 10 years, the actual desired rate of change of most human beings, especially most adults, at least when it comes to music tastes, is MUCH MUCH lower. That is because on a fundamental level, by the time we have reached adulthood, most of us pretty much know what we want to listen to, and even how we want to listen to it… namely, we want it the way we had it when we came up in the world, got used to the way things “are,” and formed our identities.
And then they had to go and change everything…
Of course, I am being slightly facetious here. When compared to a CD that can easily get scratched or a tape that can get ruined, there really is no contest with the infinite access of the Internet. And yet old ideas, and old ways, can die hard. I think people are prone to getting attached. So I don’t really think change is truly a nemesis. And as history has always shown, we humans are highly adaptable creatures, much more flexible and able to change than we give ourselves credit for…
I will remember that the next time I miss the days when it really was “the way it is done” that if you wanted to hear an album, you had to put a physical CD (or record or tape) into a physical player.
(This post goes out to Change, oh unruly spirit! who casts its agents upon us at all moments, in every day, and forces us forward in this march called life, sometimes against our own will… and yet we adapt. Thank you, oh strange and exotic ways of the Universe!)
Three things I miss most about “the old days” as it relates to music: 1) The comradery. Sharing music with your friends, in person, 2) The radio stations. Back then the radio stations played a lot of variety and tried a lot of new stuff. Today most radio stations (with very few exceptions) seem to sound the same and to churn the same old music that we’ve been listening to forever, and 3) hanging out in the record store.
From the earliest that I can remember, all of our music was passed between us in one of three ways:
1) We would hear something cool on the radio, wait until the song was over and for the DJ to announce what the song was called and who the artist was. Then we’d rush to the record store and buy the LP. We would gather our friends ‘round and listen to each other’s newest finds.
2) We would go to the record store and they had little booths with record players. We could pick any LP that seemed interesting and go into one of those booths to listen to it. If we liked it, we bought it. We would go with our friends and hang out in those booths for hours.
3) We would go to concerts. If you wanted to see an artist play their music, you had to go to a concert; you couldn’t just stream it on the internet and this was even before MTV. A bunch of friends would pile into a car go see our favorite artists, live. Often the opening band would provide us another way to find new music.
There were no easy ways to get the song lyrics (you couldn’t just look them up on the internet). The way that we would memorize the lyrics to a song would be to put the record on, and listen to the first few bars and write it down; lift the needle and replace it back a bit to catch the next few bars. It could take hours and by the time we were done we knew every aspect of the song intimately. Once we had all the lyrics down, we’d hand copy them and give them to our friends. Sometimes we heard the lyrics incorrectly and we didn’t find out until much later that we had been singing a song incorrectly for years.
It was 1979 when I first got a cassette tape player in my car (up until then, it was an 8-track player). That was when we started passing music to each other via mixed tapes. But what was funny was that we would sit in each other’s cars, listening to the tapes together and gauging each other’s reactions to the music.
Those times are nostalgic for me primarily because of the social interaction that occurred with the sharing of music. I think now, more often people browse the internet and find music on their own. They might send you a link to the music and you might listen on your own and text a comment back. Some of the social “in-person” experience of sharing music has been taken away. It’s much like catching up with someone via FB vs. knocking on each other’s doors.
One thing I can say, and I may not be in the majority here, I do not primarily listen to the same music that I did when I was younger. My musical taste has expanded and evolved, over the years. I am forever on the search for new sounds and my music collection today is much different than it was when I was younger.
That said, there are still some of the old songs that I might hear on the radio that will instantly transport me back in time, usually to one single moment, like a snapshot picture of a nanosecond in my life; and a rush of feeling will come over me as if that moment happened just yesterday.
Very well stated, Vanessa! There is so much more I could say about this topic, some of which you state quite nicely here.
Another aspect to the discussion is that there are at least two sub-topics here: one is the styles of music people enjoy, the other is the medium they use (such as CDs/records/tapes/tv/radio in a former time, the Internet today) to listen to it. I mostly deal with the medium being used, yet people’s tastes in music is a whole other can of worms that is probably even more emotionally charged for people.
Also, you make a very valuable point about the social nature of music. I do not believe that has changed at all. I believe youngsters who have been raised on the internet and social media are still just as social in their tastes as they ever were. The difference is, a lot of that interaction is now online, where it was obviously more likely in person prior to the 2000s.
I’m not a big fan of change either. Change and the unknown are usually synonymous to me and that causes fear and anxiety to creep in. I like me some routine too! lol As for music, it strikes a chord deep inside of me (no pun intended.) When I hear a song from my past, I’m flooded with memories so clear, it’s as if I’m reliving that moment again. I guess in a way, certain songs are like photographs…snapshots of the past that come to life when I hear them ❤️
Music is a mystery, yet its power seems to impact almost everybody in the way you described.