Remembering When: Nothing dates you faster than your music

By Keith Schell

When I was visiting my family over the Christmas holidays, we were watching Wheel of Fortune at my brother’s house one evening, and the Triple Toss-Up that night featured three Heaven-themed word puzzles.

Being of a certain generation, the answer to the third puzzle was obvious to me even before the letters started revealing themselves. It was the Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven.”

But when the first contestant rang in to solve the puzzle, the answer he gave flabbergasted both my brother and me. He confidently announced: “Staircase to Heaven.”

“Staircase to Heaven”??

When my brother and I finally stopped laughing, we both agreed that host Ryan Seacrest should have it written into his contract that he has the right to swat at least one contestant per season in the back of the head for giving a particularly dumb answer. I mean, “Staircase to Heaven”!? Come on!

But that being said, the contestant who gave the answer appeared to be in his early-to-mid thirties, and the odds may have been quite high that he had never even heard of the song in question. Stairway to Heaven was practically an anthem for much of my generation, but popular music tends to fade away as new tastes and trends rise with each succeeding wave of young listeners.

Nothing dates you faster than your music. And nothing changes faster than today’s music scene. Today’s hits quickly become tomorrow’s oldies, and yesterday’s music superstars quickly become today’s nobodies. They go from playing sold-out mega-stadiums at their peak to playing small and mid-sized casino halls in the present, performing for people of their own generation who are trying to forget about the headaches of daily life and briefly relive the glory days of their youth. No more mortgages, bills, or ungrateful kids — at least for those couple of hours — as the mature audience is whisked back to the days when they were young and free, full of dreams, and had no responsibilities whatsoever. They still had a “future so bright, they had to wear shades,” as the song goes.

Musical tastes and trends change with every generation. In one particular episode of The Simpsons, Homer tries to bond with Bart and Lisa and their friends while driving them to school by telling them about all the musical groups he followed in his youth, but the kids have no interest in learning about Homer’s “dinosaur bands,” as Bart put it. Homer later takes Bart and Lisa to a music festival in Capitol City featuring all the kids’ favourite bands, but as soon as they arrive at the festival, Bart and Lisa quickly decide to distance themselves from him — both physically and musically — no matter how cool he tries to act. They ditch him as soon as they can. Each generation must find a way to push away from the previous one musically, no matter how crass or disturbing the new type of music may seem.

When I was in my teens in the 1970s and just beginning to explore my newly discovered musical genre of rock and roll, I picked up an 8-track tape of classic ’50s rock out of the bargain bin at our local department store. Curious, I took it home, went into my bedroom, and popped it into my 8-track player — that being the coolest way to listen to music at the time.

One song in particular struck me as pretty cool — until my mother popped her head into my room with a big smile and told me it had been one of her favourite songs when she was a teenager. And, of course, once your mom tells you something like that, the song immediately goes from pretty cool to pretty uncool!

But it could be worse. One Christmas not so long ago, when our entire family was at my brother’s house, my then-high-school-aged nephew asked me what my all-time favourite song was during an intergenerational music discussion. When I told him it was a song by Simon and Garfunkel, he replied, “Oh, we studied them in history class. That’s hippie music!”

Sigh. Thanks, nephew. You made my day.

I keep thinking about a Facebook post I recently read that said, “My grocery store used to play old people music. Now they play all my favourites!” Kind of sums it up, doesn’t it? Thirty years from now, the cycle will repeat itself. The kids will be the old people, and the grocery stores will be rocking to all the oldies tunes of current stars like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Drake, The Weeknd, Bruno Mars, Adele, and Justin Bieber. And God only knows who — or what — their kids will be listening to.

In the end, every generation thinks its music is the soundtrack of the world — and in a way, I suppose it is. The names change, the beats change, the hairstyles definitely change, but the cycle never does. We all grow up, we all grow older, and eventually our favourite songs will all end up in our local grocery store or in the next generation’s history class at school.

Like sixties troubadour Bob Dylan once sang, “The times, they are a-changin’.”

And musically, they always will.