They are moments that are few and far between. Those rare occasions where I can actually listen to my music in the car with my family. To be honest, my taste in music isn’t exactly categorized as, shall we say, family-friendly in nature. However, my son has started to develop a taste for some of the cleaner versions of his dad’s rock music, much to his father’s delight. He says that he loves the sound of the crunching guitars and pounding drums. The apprenticed apple apparently doesn’t fall very far from the tree…
Coming home from my son’s karate practice one evening, I started flipping through some stations on my satellite radio. I came across a song that flooded me with an abundance of great memories. An essential CD from my days back in college. My son immediately took note of my reaction to it and sat forward.
“Dad, what song is this?”
“A great song. It’s called ‘Plush’ by the group Stone Temple Pilots. My band back in college used to play this song. I loved playing it.”
“It sounds like old people music. Can you put some good rock music on?”
I nearly lost control of the car…
“Old people music”? When did such an influential song from my early twenties gimp along to that geriatric point? When did a very relevant band from the 1990s suddenly become elevator music to an eight year old? I must have missed the obituary and their iconic performance on the “Lawrence Welk Show”.
Now granted, the song was released roughly twenty years ago, but I can still vividly remember rehearsing that song in our dorm room…much to the dismay of our Resident Advisor. I can also still mentally picture the music video on MTV in my head.
My shoulders slumped as clarity began to rapidly fill the car. CDs? Actual music videos on MTV? In the name of Stevie Ray Vaughn, it is old people music!
Thinking back to high school, I remember listening to certain songs on the radio that were classified as classic rock, merely because they were played on the local classic rock station. Groups like Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Aerosmith, Queen. Music that was considered classic rock by the mid-1980s, even though they weren’t more than 10 or 15 years from their original release date. There was no debating that the sound was a little more antiquated, but I always attributed this more to the technological advances in instrument amplification and digital recording, rather than the songs just being flat-out “old”.
So where does this leave me with the expiration date of relevance as related to the cherished music of my youth? The question bothered me throughout the evening, even as I continued to privately sneer spitefully in my son’s direction. Just when exactly does a rock song get reclassified as classic rock?
In order to attain any semblance of sleep that night, I did what any respectable academic scholar would have done in a similar moment of encyclopedic crisis. I searched for the answer online.
Most results pointed to around the 20 year benchmark from original release for any relevant song or album to attain that “classic” status. If you were to use the definition of a classic car as an example, most insurance companies reference anything 15 years or older. Most classic car clubs use the 20 year benchmark as well. The more I read, the more it became painfully evident. Much like the classic rock being played on the radio to a teenaged version of myself some 20+ years earlier, the era of my college music was now officially shelved under “J”…for Jurassic.
Perhaps, if I had paid more attention to my surroundings, I would have seen this milestone coming a lot earlier. Probably the most obvious indicator would have been from a TV commercial that has been getting a lot of airplay recently. A commercial for a family-sized vehicle in which the 40ish parents and a carload of school-age kids are driving downing the road and singing Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”. The epic anthem of heavy metal’s original madman, a man once censored by Tipper Gore’s Parental Music Resource Center (PMRC), now the subject of a family car commercial. How did I not trip over that enormous headstone while wandering through my playlists on iTunes?
Unfortunately, the “old people music” insanity doesn’t just stop at the newly-labeled classic rock that is near-and-dear to the ole PaceMaker. It seems to be popping up in different areas fairly regularly in my everyday life now as well.
While reading a Berenstain Bears book to my daughter recently, the story referenced the characters listening to a jukebox. A puzzled look immediately flashed across her face. Knowing exactly what the next question would be, I tried to put it into a 21st century perspective for her.
“It plays songs. It’s like a giant iPod.”
I’m not sure which hurt worse. The fact that I had compared an archaic, 800-pound piece of acoustic furniture from my youth to an electronic device the size of a binder clip…or the fact that I distinctly remember going to Pizza Hut as a kid and dropping four or five dollars worth of quarters into one so that I could hear my favorite songs played on vinyl 45s.
Vinyl 45s. Yes, I believe that this is where the old phrase “beating a dead horse” comes into play. You may now drag my petrified carcass to the glue factory.
Since the vast majority of my beloved music base has obviously ridden the path of the setting sun, I guess it also entitles me to make musical references that only my older colleagues would get. For me personally, I love the puzzled looks that I receive from my son as I plug in my guitar and explain to him that I’m going to crank my amplifier up to “eleven” in an English accent. Simply because it’s “one louder than ten”.
It’s the punch-line that keeps giving. Thank you, Nigel…
I do find myself sometimes holding on to that occasional waning ray of melodic hope though. Those times where I get to witness my daughter bouncing from room-to-room while humming the tune to the seemingly timeless and multi-generationally acceptable song “Low Rider” by War. With pride, I get to happily bounce right along beside her and sing “take a little trip, take a little trip, take a little trip with me”.
Unfortunately, it appears as though that “little trip” will now include driving a twenty-foot Cadillac to dinner at 3 o’clock in the afternoon to grab the “Early Bird Special”...all while playing early 90s grunge rock on the cassette deck.
