A Song for All Ages

Have I mentioned before how much I love music? How evocative it is for me, an aural Proustian madeleine. Yes, I believe I have, in a prior post, somewhere. But I'm aging, people, and we tend to repeat ourselves as we go, so forgive me.

I was listening to the TV the other day. Literally. PBS was running one of their interminable pledge drives which feature a bar here and a chord there of songs from yesteryear. They have the original groups on, or what is left of them, to sing the full version of the hit, and the station splices that in between the pitches. I love the music. What I don't love is that the singers have aged so, so, ungracefully. By which I mean: they've gotten old. Lined, wrinkled, puffy, gray. Can I tell you how depressing it is to see the heart throb of your youth looking just like someone's grandpa? The only thing worse is the frequent cuts to the audience who are all bopping along to the song the same as they did the year it came out. Except they are really lined, wrinkled, puffy, gray. Probably, one must conclude, as is one, a thought which instantly stops one's own bopping on one's sofa.

So it is that I listen to these programs, but I don't watch. And thus am I able to preserve a modicum of self-delusion. That self-delusion enabled me to focus on the songs. It occurred to me as I was listening to the television that every major decade in my life has been marked by a specific genre of music. Wouldn't that be a cool frame for a memoir? A memoir! Shit, I'm not old enough--. Oh, I guess I am.