Music is not something that is integral to my life, not the way fashion and food are, which is a bit odd given how much I enjoy being creative, and the various fields of design and history. There have been several movies over the years that my companion asks, "Didn't you love the score"? To which my response has been, "wait, there was music"? So you get the point...?
The other night my husband and I were having a night-in together, watching TV. As he was scrolling through the channels he stopped on a station and I vaguely heard someone singing a song I remembered. It took a minute or two but it finally penetrated my brain and I put down the cookbook I was perusing, deciding on Thanksgiving recipes to watch and listen. He had stopped on an infomercial for the Time Life CD boxed set of 150 of the greatest hits of the singers/songwriters of the 60's and 70's and it was my childhood-right in front of me on TV. There was John Denver, Bread, Jefferson Starship, Eric Clapton, Jim Croce...the list goes on and on. I knew all the words to the snippets of the songs played...and each brought me back to a long forgotten memory. Watching Bobby Kennedy's funeral on TV when I was 4, the war in Vietnam ending, wearing my first pair of heels when I was 9, PM giving me my first kiss when I was 12 in the school yard (on the side of the building where no one could see), marching down 5th Ave protesting against the Russian government persecuting Russian Jews, Mark Spitz winning gold medals in the 1972 Olympics, the murder of the Israeli athletes also at the Munich Olympics, this miraculous country's Bicentennial and my elementary school's Bicentennial Fair in 1976, getting my own stereo in my room and listening to John Denver, Stevie Nicks so many the Time Life hosts were mentioning... So much of my life tied up in the world's history and in the rock world's great pieces of music...
It's so unexpected for me to think this way as today music, and only jazz, is background for dinner parties. I can't really see that 30 years from now I could write an essay about music that would make me cry as I am now as I type. I do love jazz, really, but it's because it's clever and cool, and smart-it smolders and indulges my flapper tendencies. (Jazz and cocktails being the 2 great artistic contributions of the United States to the world.) Though the singer/writers songs are no longer fashionable they mean more to be than other music as they tell the story in a way that is unique to that time and to my being a teenager.
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Posted by: Moncler Daunenjacke | 11/14/2011 at 01:49 AM