My life has been lived to a soundtrack. Growing up in an age of ubiquitous car radios, restaurant juke boxes, record players and later stereos, it seems like the popular songs of the day were always playing in the background, over and over. Music affects us emotionally and can evoke strong feelings of all sorts in the listener. In my case it also became a sort of storage mechanism for a lot of those strong feelings.
Forty years later I can hear a pretty mundane pop song like Tommy Rowe's “Dizzy”, which I heard constantly when I was in my junior high years and I can be overcome with the feelings of being that young teenage boy with a crush on a girl but afraid to tell her or even talk to her. Those sort of emotional memories stay with you and I believe shape you subconsciously.
A couple days ago I noticed that my son Eric had posted the following on Facebook...
I made a playlist of the fifty songs that had the most impact on my life between the formative years of 2001-2009 (ages 15-23). They aren't necessarily my favorite songs (though some are), but rather those which influenced my development the most. They are ordered chronologically according to when they had the most significant impact... Anyways, I think it's a cool excersize and would encourage others to undertake something similar and share their results.
Given my relationship with music that I have just shared with you, I was excited to try this exercise as well, and spent a good deal of time compiling this list and writing this extensive post. Like Eric I have identified the name of the song and the artist who performed the version that I remember most, and I have listed them as best I can in the order when they had an impact on me developmentally (though not necessarily when they came out). In some cases it is difficult because I may have heard a song for a while before that impact kicked in.
Unlike Eric, I have taken the additional time to write a sentence of two about what the impact of the particular song had on me. I find it interesting that there are some songs where a particular lyric phrase is burned into my consciousness, like “I was raised on the good book Jesus, 'til I read between the lines”, from Laura Nyro's “Stoney End”, but the rest of the song not so much. There are other songs that I knew were very significant to me but I really struggled to be able to delineate what made them so in a sentence or two. (Those songs may require an entire blog piece some day!) Some of the developmental themes are very personal while others I share with many other baby-boomers like myself.
I really don't know how other people's minds work, but in mine songs are often playing. A song I have not heard for years will suddenly start playing in my head over and over for days before it stops. And then another one will seemingly randomly fire up and get stuck in my head next. Sometimes an obvious event in the present triggers a memory in the past tied to that song, but other times I have no explanation for the triggering of that particular musical memory. I can even have a physical reaction to a song with a lot of emotional meaning for me... I can literally get goose bumps all over my arms!
Given this acoustic world I inhabit, the ideas of Marshall McLuhan continue to resonate with me about how electronic media is creating a more sophisticated acoustic environment for us humans and contributing to what he called “retribalization”. I think I understand that concept, and have been retribalized to a large degree, with all this music that has flowed with me through my life playing a large part of that transition. In McLuhan terms, these voices of the singers and their lyrical message are exhortations, advice and encouragement from my virtual acoustic “tribe” to live my life more fully and more ethically and to keep to the developmental path despite the obstacles life throws in my way.
Anyway... having built the list with a focus on trying to recapture the particular memories, feelings and resulting developmental impact associated with each song, it was not until I had finished that I kind of stepped back and looked at the list as a whole and saw some of the major themes and things the totality of it might say about me at a more macro level.
The most obvious thing I noticed was that I love pop songs, usually those with less cliché lyrics, but occasionally maybe a sappy cliché one as well (like “Dizzy”). They of course are generally the songs I heard a lot on the various radios and juke boxes that seemed always on in the background.
The next thing that came clear is that I have been moved all my life by the type of song they call “anthems”. These are generally mostly up-tempo “we” songs that are encouraging all of us to rise to some ocassion, to keep on keeping on, or whatever. I have always been a person driven by inspiration, and often find even today, when I hear a song (even if I only hear it from memory in my own head), it can energize my whole existence at that moment.
And as to the major themes, certainly the shy kid's longing for but discomfort with romantic relationships jumps out at me. Though I have only called out a couple Motown songs on the list, the music of “The Motor City” (Detroit) in the 1960s was all about trying to find love under difficult circumstances, a quest that really resonated with me.
Another big theme is my mom and dad's divorce in 1965 when I was ten years old and the impact it had on me, my mom, my dad and my brother over the the subsequent years. For me it was a lot of struggle, sadness, but also always a looking for inspiration to move beyond.
A third theme is my own budding activism, inspired even by a perhaps sophmoric lyric like “The kids know what the game is, they're getting run around every day... We're going to be taking over, you better get out of the way” from MC5's “High School”. Sounds pretty oppositional I know, but it has been inspiring to me in more of a positive vein.
I think perhaps the most influential song in the bunch for me and maybe my entire generation of male counterparts is Harry Chapin's haunting cautionary ballad, “Cat's in the Cradle”, about a dad who avoided spending time with his kid only to have that kid grow into an adult that avoided spending time with him. I suspect that many of the more parentally engaged boomer dads out there today were influenced by this song.
And looking at the list as a whole, and who has been singing to me significantly, I have to acknowledge that it is mainly other white men like myself, certainly with a fair amount of exceptions.
So you may or may not be interested in plowing through these fifty songs I've called out and my attempt at a “why” for each. I can say that it was a worthwhile exercise in my case and triggered some new insight on my own development.
I'm not going to try and post the 50 here on DKos, but if you want to read the version of this piece with the list, go to my blog at this link.