But when I was too young to really choose my music, those impressionable single-digit years when our brains learn how to make meaning, I was listening predominantly to oldies, glorified and “golden.” One of my earliest self-conscious memories is a moment when, as a kindergartner, I was singing along to Bobby Darin’s “Dreamlover” in the car. People of my generation, of course, had our own music, just as much a part of the fabric of our childhoods. It’s true that the music of this era has been endlessly mythologized, alongside the other notable events of those post-war years when our currently dominant media-makers and storytellers, the baby boomers, were coming of age. Like any radio format, oldies playlists are narrow in scope, but unlike other formats, they create a specific sonic world - fitting for a format borne out of a film, which in turn was born out of one man’s adolescent memories (that would be George Lucas, writer/director of American Graffiti). Oldies radio is not the place to go for the underground, the cool, or the experimental. But the real cultural contribution of oldies radio is of course its music and its spot-on curatorial ear, so unlike your average mix station or JACK FM that just tend to simply grab from the most popular tracks from the past twenty years and throw them on the air. Your mother aerobicizing to Richard Simmons’s Sweatin’ to the Oldies on VHS.
Four girls riding bicycles in Now and Then. Or maybe it’s Kevin Kline and Glenn Close dancing around with salad in The Big Chill. Drinking a milkshake at Steak ‘N’ Shake, or an equivalent faux-‘50s diner. What does that single, silly word “oldies” bring to mind? If you’re like me, you picture sun-soaked backseats, and fighting with a sibling on a family road trip.
(You see, millennials aren’t the only generation obsessed with reliving our childhoods we just do it via Buzzfeed.) The format had major longevity, and though it has been on the wane in the past decade (or, rather, as music of the late ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s has forced the ’50s out), there are still plenty of places to hear the “oldies” as they were originally characterized - satellite radio, for one, as well as a treasure trove of compilation CD’s in the used bins. Oldies radio, loosely defined as the hits of the “birth of rock” era - the late 1950s through the mid-1970s - came into existence in the early 1970s due to a surge of nostalgia for the music of the ‘50s, fueled by the film American Graffiti.
0 kommentar(er)
