Pop Has Eaten Itself

On the strength of Bird Dog, I was all poised to strike the record button on my portable cassette player when the disc jockey announced that he'd play some Everly Brothers after the break. Turns out it was a song I hadn't heard before, Cathy's Clown. For years all that was played back was my disappointment.
    One song feeds into another. From old mix tapes, song orders are cemented in young ears. It would jar when it wouldn't follow. It's like when two songs that lead quickly into each other, forming a one-two punch of awesome rocknroll are hacked asunder by some FM radio robot, leaving you hanging. We Will Rock You must be followed by We Are The Champions. There is no need to explain.
    I wonder how some of these songs, forty years old now are still somehow around. I wonder if they have any contemporary analogues. Will there survive some listening structure of format that will accommodate today's songs in forty years ? One hit wonders from 1978 still get 3 million hits on YouTube. Will there be a YouTube to host all of today's songs in the future ? And how many mixtures are there ? Playlist after playlist, burnt CD, the revived cassette, the film soundtrack of curated oldies. So much to sift through.
    There's no way of telling which of today's songs some kid will make a tape of. Like the death of saturday morning cartoons, a focused kids culture exploded into distinct VHS habits changing from family to family. Once all kids were hooked into Bugs Bunny, then some kids demanded Winnie The Pooh to be looped endlessly by desperate parents while others sunk into the sickening appeal of Caillou. A generation torn asunder, unwoven, disentangled. Watching space shuttles blow up in the sky. Sampling can only go so far, what could they do but mash-up ?
    And now we have what once was a years work primed for a conceptual showing in an art gallery along with impenetrable text presented as another anonymous GIF tossed off into the slop trough of our collectivity, shared reactively for the moment and then forgotten.
    That stack of vintage art magazines ? Track down the cover artists. Let's see how they did.

Baker Street

I'm curious about how many deaths have occurred in which metro stations. I'd think that some of the busier stations have seen their fair share of jumps. But what about the smaller stations ? The ones that lead to some more dismal part of town, nothing fancy ? Does Sauve get any suicides ? Jarry ?
    I'm curious and I know the information is out there but I'm not curious enough to track it down, chart it up and share it. I'm not even curious enough to google it and see if this information is snippety-snap available.
    Today the rains came thundering down and fed the greenery. We stayed in, after our accountant left with our tax documents, and had tea and cake in the window room, baby playing on the mat, oldies dialed up on youtube. Baker Street. Baker Street. What a song. One can be judged on how they relate to Baker Street.
    Sometimes I feel like the old cokehead in that song that wants to move away from the big city and forget about everything. I'd never jump, that's for sure. But I always hug the wall when I'm waiting for the tube. That human pull can be strong. What would it feel like to have that pressure meet my flesh ? I hug the wall, scanning the platform for folks standing way too close. Don't tempt the fates, you kid.
    I want to make a playlist of songs from 1978. I want the kids to hear them. One hit wonders, love songs that make the goosebumps rise. It would stop anyone from jumping. The longing in some of those songs.
    I want to spend more rainy days, taxes done, reading fantasy and listening to smooth rock as my lady sews and my kid slobbers on wooden blocks. It makes it all so easy. I want the kids to know which soundtrack works for these sweet middle aged moments.
    I never going to commute again.

1968

I was born in 1968 making someone born in 1972 a mere child. This of distance has somewhat diminished since I've accrued decades. As a kid one year apart makes a huge difference. My brother was born in 1967 which is altogether a cucumber year as opposed to a tomato year like 1968. These distinctions are crucial until all of a sudden they aren' anymore.
    Being born in the late sixties gives one, if they manage to survive, an early to mid seventies childhood. One understands iconographic images like blunt tipped stars trailing rainbows, pinball machine graphics and bubble windows on chevy vans. One is torn between disco and rock until one isn't. One is iron-oned, bell bottomed, bowl cutted. One has a 1980s adolescence. The eighties took me from twelve years of age to twenty two so any subsequent eighties revival made me cry foul for it's revisionism. This also made me wince at the nostalgia for the mid seventies that also came about. I still wince seeing certain trends return from the grave at revolving door speed.
    I too am guilty. I adored the 'sixties'. I idealized LSD research and crash pads, underground commix and sitars. I also read up enough about it all to be cynical, knowing Death Of Hippie preceded The Summer Of Love, Altamont followed Woodstock and Speed Kills. I also knew that the patchouli and dreadlocked didgeridoo hippies of the 1980s were way off base and nothing I could relate to. As I aged I gravitated towards the early seventies for my music. As I grew my hair and experimented with my mind, man, my friends were getting into punk rock. I'd tag along and also loved that scene to a point. As an amateur rock historian it was my duty to find the roots of things and dug those early raucous sounds that of course i missed out as a five year old. My personal aesthetic was long haired t-shirt patched and ripped jeans suede or corduroy jacket and a bit of a sneer to my smile. I'm not  hippie and I don't love you was my line, though I may have passed pretty well.
     In the eighties I was up on what my very up friends were digging. I was sick of U2 by grade eight, way before you got sick of them. The local scene was revealed by the end of high school and with it forms of music I recognized as part surf and part garage and part just plain weirdo. It was a revelation of course. My eighties were Bauhaus not Joy Division, Smiths or The Cure. They just made more sense to me. They fit in better with Jon and Vangelis.
    Right now when I'm browsing books I can spot a 1972 poetry chapbook from  four feet away. I now the typefaces and the design. I collect them if they don't suck.
    I have friends that were born in the seventies, eighties, nineties. They are all just as mature as me. They teach me about all the art and culture I've missed out on while I was on my own path. Music from the twenties. Painting from the fifties. Time behaves funny as one ages. It wiggles and changes places. It isn't a steady stream, it's a many armed river and it flows backwards and stays still.
    I stopped wearing baseball hats when I was ten.

On Yearning

Some songs make me yearn for something heavy. Nothing in particular, just solid, deep yearning. Some songs just punch you in the heart and open this place where longing and bittersweet pain mingle and confound you.
    Longing is something I've long associated with. I reckoned it as a major force in my life early on. I would yearn and long and weep and swell my heart. I would imagine how incalculably awesome it would be to merge with old mossy walls, to enter the landscape. No, it wasn't imagination. It was imageless. It was pure emotion. My kisses turned to bites. I needed union with X. No matter how far away, I reached out my heart strings, those auric ropes that when severed make you grind your teeth and rend your clothing. I would reach out those tendrils and they would wrap themselves around the object of my longing.
    Often it was a girl, someone who I fixated upon, someone who would complete me. Of course, it's now that I see it was the yearning itself I wanted. I loved the state, so romantic to need something distant, other, removed, transcendent, spectacular. Craving, relishing future morsels, ordering a second burger half way through the first. Not necessarily living in the present, caught somewhere between past and future, skipping over what was directly in front of me. Preferring some moment yet to come, maybe never to come.
    Some songs make every pore in me quiver, gasping for air. Every pore puckering, gulping as much love as they can. Arid stretches where I simply walk weakened with thirst, giddy from hunger, light headed because some something greater than I hovers near but still just slightly out of reach. Curves to dwell on, trees that make you ache, skies pounding out cloud after cloud of intangible handfuls.
    Some songs make me wail, make me mourn, make me shudder sobs, make me cry, simply put, make me cry. Open wounds, cracked scabs oiled over and peeled away, heart, heavy, hope, words like that. Vastness of feeling, reaching, failing, gasping. All that.
    Very few songs do all this. Songs I can't tell you which ones. Songs I don't know right now. Music I can't play, can't understand. Some soul, some blues, some folk, some dirge dragging every widow from grave to grave, baskets of flowers, dumb struck children following closely, staggered greys all around, threat of spring, threat of summer, threat of full life ripening, forever always.