Tuesday, March 22, 2016

oldie stationary

Most old things are stationary. My oldie station listening has me thinking about oldie stations as I sit stationary. I had to look up when oldies stations started. Wikipedia tells us, WCBS-FM (NYC) switched to oldies on July 7, 1972, becoming one of the first full-time stations in the country to use that format.

Apparently, if you listened to the radio back in the 50's you would be unable to find an oldies station. In fact, the oldies radio format (definition?) begins with songs from around 1955. The popularity of the movie American Graffiti is often credited with helping to spur the 1950s nostalgia movement in the early 1970s. That was a great movie.



what's he hiding under his hoodie


Since we are living longer we will need some new terms to distinguish in which oldie period a song belongs. I guess you could just add another descriptor to the term; old disco, old punk, old rap.

Listening to my favorite oldies lets my old mind walk through the land of my youth. Nostalgia can be nice.


Any follower of this blog knows my proclivity (I also like mixing up my word selections) for examining lyrics. The other day I was listening to Dylan’s “My Back Pages”. First I had to figure out the song title which thanks to the internet is as simple as searching on a phrase used in the lyrics. Searching on “I was so much older then I’m younger than that now” produced the title for me.

The search (not in the first page results but I often have time to go a few result pages deep) also suggested a post about the song’s interpretation. I found an interesting post about Dylan’s “My Back Pages” at the blog Ennyman’s Territory. Here’s a quote of wisdom from that post:

 "The goal is not to ace a test, it is to understand what the purpose of the test was and why we had to face it in the first place."

As the song suggests, I’m “using ideas as my maps” in my blog. Here’s the Byrds do a cover of Dylan’s song (I enjoy their sound better than Dylan’s

 

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