When: 6:30, Saturday night
Where: Sam Goody’s in Frederick, Maryland
Who: two teen-aged counter clerks sporting blacker-than-natural-black hair in a bed head style, a twenty-something mom in line asking for Mortal Kombat for PlayStation and me buying a Barry Manilow CD.
I’ll pause here for a moment while you laugh at that last part.
OK, to continue … I used to practically live in “record” stores, but for several years I’ve mostly purchased CDs online or at Border’s. Tonight I went to the local mall to buy a birthday present for my sister, a brand new Barry Manilow CD filled with old songs from the 1960s. In the 60s, Barry would have been the same age as the mom and the original versions of the songs on this CD were released on records. CDs and Play Station hadn’t been invented yet. Mortal combat wasn’t a game for kids.
This odd combination of factors struck me as funny, but in a sad way.
The just slightly older than Boomer age Barry, whose career ain’t what it used to be, records songs from his youth, our youth. My 50-something sister likes these songs wants to hear Barry sing them. The music is on a format we could not have imagined in our youth, the CD. This media format that still seems new to many Boomers will be as rare as records in another five or ten years, replaced by another thing we couldn’t have imagined a decade ago: downloads.Boomers may rule the world, but we sometimes do two things our parents did that we didn’t like – judge young people and dwell on our own youth. I’m doing a little of both tonight. For a moment I found myself judging the hair and clothing styles of the counter clerks, just as my parents judged mine at that age. Then I began to compare the music buying experience and it’s place in life to how I felt thirty years ago and wondered how the very private ear-bud listening iPod pattern of today’s youth could be nearly as important as the camaraderie resulting from the very public “whose got the best-sounding stereo and the newest album” music-sharing of our youth.
The irony of this whole scene makes me laugh. But I’m not sure it’s funny.
4 comments:
Every generation goes through this. For my grandfather, it was television and Elvis.
Still, there are some upsides to new technology. I think that iPods are a good thing compared to the boom boxes of the 80's. Would you really want to be forced to listen to these kids' music?
good old barry. so what's your favorite song? i like mandy myself. and i can't smile without you.
I liked Mandy when it first came out, and even met Barry then. He's a nice guy. But I don't really like his music any more. But my sister is a big fan.
When I was about 9 years old, I LOVED Barry...it's really funny now. I begged and begged my grandfather to buy me this in concert double album. It had every Barry song you could imagine on it. My grandfather didn't want to buy it for me because it was something like $20...I guess he thought I wouldn't take care of it or really listen to it...somehow I got him to buy it for me...I played that record ALL the time! I was and still am such a geek. ;)
"Her name was Lola...she was a show girl..."
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