the best song I ever heard

You know, I think I wrote about this before, but I'm way too lazy to go through my posts to see. I was in my weaving class last night and someone had an oldies station playing on the radio. Everyone was having fun because one thing you can depend on with oldies stations is that everyone knows the songs and everyone sings along.

You can especially count on this when you've got a classroom full of Boomers. Most of the women in the class are my age give or take a couple of years. Sarah, who is probably more opinionated than I am, started holding forth about how the best pop music ever came from the 60s. I started with my usual contrarian response about there being good music in every period. I believe that, but as I was riding on BART this morning, I was wondering what exactly it is about Boomer period rock/pop that has given it such a stranglehold on the popular imagination. In part it's ubiquity. These songs have been getting pretty constant play since they first hit the airwaves and most of them were written and performed during a time when people listened to radios and radios were playing every where. I may have a distorted view of this, growing up outside NYC, in a radio-dense area. But there were a ton of stations and lots of them were playing rock, pop, and soul music. Also radios were public music. I know 60s music, not because I bought all the 45s, but because the music played in stores, in the beauty parlor, out people's windows, and in cars.

I remember an ad in Rolling Stone back in the 80s with a young woman wearing headphones and listening to her Walkman contrasted to a guy heaving a boom box over his shoulder. Music became a lot more private with personal players. There is less of a public space for sharing music, the internet notwithstanding. But that's not enough to explain why these songs stick around so much.

In part, it's because they're good, singable songs. Even if you've got just an ok voice, you can sing along with just about any Beatles song, any Temptations song. These are easy melodies, with simple and straight-forward lyrics and choruses. But on a deeper level, I think these songs hold a certain position because that period codified the pop song (rock and soul versions). Just about every pop song ever since follows the same pattern. The only really breakouts there have been in popular music since say the 70s are electronic music (with all its flavors) and hip-hop/rap. It's like the way that the American Songbook became codified through the middle third of the 20th century. The pop songs of the 60s and 70s set the mold, established the form.

Of course one big reason why the women in my class love those songs is because they were the soundtracks of our adolescence and youth. They're going to be special for those reasons, even if they were crap.

And there is great music now, great new stuff all the time. I've been listening to Florence + The Machine for weeks now and think "Howl" is the best song I've ever heard (for now).