Saturday, February 09, 2019
The Music Man
As a general matter, I tend not to be very "up" on the "jams" the kids are listening to these days. I can't tell you who Halsey is and hearing the name Post Malone just makes me think about stamps. It's true that there was a time when I was all over the Billboard Hot 100, but that time was back when Alanis and Jewel were still tearing up the charts. (I even hosted an "alternative music" show on the local public radio station, which I interpreted broadly to include whatever the hell I felt like playing. Shostakovich is super alternative, believe me.) But now I'm kind of just listening to whatever I like, wherever it comes from, and I'm pretty used to not knowing half the songs on the radio.
Which is why it did not strike me as odd that I didn't recognize the music my gym was playing in the mornings while I work out. What did seem weird to me was that the music is on a weird loop so that the same songs seem to repeat on successive days during the time I'm there. Do they just have a 7:45-8:30 AM mix that they feel is super essential for that time of day?
Anyway, when I finally mentioned to Ian some of the songs I hear over and over there that I've never heard anywhere else, I was surprised to find out that they are not, in fact, popular or current songs in many cases. To wit, it turns out the song "Basketball" by Kurtis Blow is not currently sweeping the nation, but was in fact released in 1984, which I probably could have guessed based on some of the players referenced if my knowledge of basketball weren't as shitty as my knowledge of current popular music. Similarly, the song "Mama Said" by Lukas Graham is unlikely to feature heavily in the Grammys, but rather achieved success in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland in 2014, per Wikipedia. So the question is now more urgent that ever: who the hell is coming up with that playlist?
As a general matter, I tend not to be very "up" on the "jams" the kids are listening to these days. I can't tell you who Halsey is and hearing the name Post Malone just makes me think about stamps. It's true that there was a time when I was all over the Billboard Hot 100, but that time was back when Alanis and Jewel were still tearing up the charts. (I even hosted an "alternative music" show on the local public radio station, which I interpreted broadly to include whatever the hell I felt like playing. Shostakovich is super alternative, believe me.) But now I'm kind of just listening to whatever I like, wherever it comes from, and I'm pretty used to not knowing half the songs on the radio.
Which is why it did not strike me as odd that I didn't recognize the music my gym was playing in the mornings while I work out. What did seem weird to me was that the music is on a weird loop so that the same songs seem to repeat on successive days during the time I'm there. Do they just have a 7:45-8:30 AM mix that they feel is super essential for that time of day?
Anyway, when I finally mentioned to Ian some of the songs I hear over and over there that I've never heard anywhere else, I was surprised to find out that they are not, in fact, popular or current songs in many cases. To wit, it turns out the song "Basketball" by Kurtis Blow is not currently sweeping the nation, but was in fact released in 1984, which I probably could have guessed based on some of the players referenced if my knowledge of basketball weren't as shitty as my knowledge of current popular music. Similarly, the song "Mama Said" by Lukas Graham is unlikely to feature heavily in the Grammys, but rather achieved success in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland in 2014, per Wikipedia. So the question is now more urgent that ever: who the hell is coming up with that playlist?
