Last
night I took the boys to see a play. I didn’t plug in my ipod before we started
driving, so when I was displeased with the selection of music on Classical 89,
I started flipping through the stations to see what else I could find. I
happened to come across a song that I knew, so I quit surfing. Luckily for me,
my boys are just young enough that they don’t get ten kinds of embarrassed
about the fact that their mother sings along with the car radio. So I was
belting it out, “Don’t you forget about me, don’t don’t don’t don’t,” just a little
bit pleased to realize that I still know all the words. That was when I
happened to notice the song info scrolling past. Don’t You…Simple Minds…Oldies.
Oldies?
Seriously?!
Since
when are the songs of my youth considered Oldies?! But then I stopped and did
the math. I am nearly 40, a fact I lauded just last week, and that would make
all the songs I grew up with 20 to 30 years old. But just how old does
something have to be in order to be classified as “Oldies”? I’ve always had
such eclectic tastes in music and movies that to me everything seems kind of
timeless. I grew up listening to Chopin, Beethoven, Frank Sinatra, ABBA, Elton
John…I could go on but suffice it to say it is a list that spans centuries. I
love classical music and let’s face it, if anything deserves to be called old,
it’s classical. But I’m not sure that twenty years should really be classified
as old. I mean, can you imagine Beethoven saying, “Dude. Let’s find another
opera house. This one is playing ‘Oldies.’ I mean, Mozart was so two decades ago.” Somehow I just can’t
imagine that. I think that some things, like people and music, just get better
with age…unless they were just stupid to start with (Achey, Breaky Heart—shudder).
So maybe
to the younger set, U2 and Bon Jovi are outdated. But you know what? I still
like them. And suddenly I’ve got a very serious hankering to put myself together a
rockin’ 80’s mix tape playlist. Oops. Just showed my age there. Good thing I’m
willing to claim it. :-)
