Sonny wrote a post this morning, and I’m pretty sure he had somehow crawled into my head. Because I’ve been thinking about the same thing ever since I heard that ’80s band at Friday Fest a couple of weeks back.
Music.
How incredibly cool music is. After Be Kind, Rewind (the band) stirred up all those old memories at Greeley’s Friday Fest a couple of weeks ago, I told Apple Music to start throwing random ’80s songs at me on the drive home.
Huey Lewis. Genesis. Heart. Chicago. The Cars. Styx. Journey. The Police. Hall & Oates.
Sweet, glorious, overproduced, keyboard-heavy ’80s pop cheese.
And I loved every second of it.
I worked Top 40 radio from 1982 to 1991, which means I actually got paid to play that stuff while the rest of you were at home yelling at the stupid disc jockey who kept talking over the intro to your favorite song while you were trying to make a mixtape.
In retrospect, what a privilege.
Both to irritate you personally and to have a tiny part in the soundtrack of an era.
Sonny wrote about how a song can instantly transport you back to another place and time. That’s exactly right. That’s what music does. That’s its job.
It sneaks past the rational part of your brain and attaches itself to memories, people, places, first dates, breakups, summer nights, road trips, bad decisions and hairstyles we should probably agree never happened.
A song comes on and suddenly you are 19 again.
For three minutes and forty-two seconds, anyway.
Then you try to get out of the car and your knees remind you that the Reagan administration was 36 years ago.
But here’s where my mind wandered.
I don’t listen to much music radio anymore. Mostly podcasts.
And when I do listen to radio, it’s usually talk. Because I want to be informed, right? Except I’m not sure most talk programming is really about information. Not primarily.
It’s about emotion.
And I say that as somebody who spent the better part of forty years trying to build audiences.
I know the game.
There is almost nothing that binds an audience tighter than making people FEEL something. Music does it. A great morning-show host does it. A favorite disc jockey does it.
And talk personalities absolutely do it.
An issue gets presented. An opinion gets attached. Somebody is the villain.
It’s their fault.
Those people.
That politician.
That party.
That group.
And somewhere on the other side of the speaker, we nod along. “Yep. That’s exactly right.” Emotion rises. Audience loyalty grows.
Then social media took the whole thing and bolted a turbocharger onto it.
Now the audience has an audience.
We hear something, share it, comment on it, add our own outrage, find somebody who agrees with us, argue with somebody who doesn’t, and feed the whole thing back into the machine.
The flame gets hotter.
The tribes get tighter.
And eventually you have to ask:
For what?
Well, in many cases, for money.
Attention is monetized. Anger is monetized. Fear is monetized. Outrage is monetized.
Again, I’m not condemning the whole business. To some extent, I participate in it.
Opinion has a place. Politics matters. Being informed matters, probably now more than ever. But there is a difference between being informed and marinating all day in somebody else’s emotional stew.
Talk radio on the drive. Podcasts at the gym. Fox News, CNN or MSNBC at home. Facebook afterward – or during. X before bed. Everybody explaining why civilization will collapse by Thursday unless you stay tuned after this commercial break.
Maybe we need some music.
Not instead of being informed.
Alongside it.
Maybe society would be a little healthier if we regularly listened to something that made us feel something besides anger, fear and tribal loyalty. Make a playlist from the first decade after you graduated high school.
Seriously.
Put on the songs you loved before every waking moment became an argument about politics.
Remember who you were. Remember the people you loved. Remember the places you went. Remember the stupid things that made you laugh. Remember that the guy across the political aisle probably has a song that takes him right back, too.
Maybe it’s even the same song.
There’s some perspective in that.
Because underneath all the noise, most of us still want pretty much the same basic things. Peace. A little happiness. People we love. A place where we belong. A community that feels like home. Some kindness along the way.
And, speaking only for myself here, maybe a little less time being professionally irritated.
Music can be salve for an aching soul. It can also be common ground with somebody who isn’t in your tribe.
That seems worth something right now.
Oh, and the picture.
I didn’t take many photos in the ’80s because, unlike today, none of us walked around carrying a high-definition television studio in our pocket.
This one is from KSAQ in San Antonio.
“The Q Morning Crew with Scott K. James and Kathy Romero.”
I don’t remember the name of the blond-headed kid. I think he was an intern. Age will do that to you.
The other two?
Milli Vanilli.
Yep.
I don’t remember which one was which.
But I do remember this: Neither one of them could sing worth a damn.
And somehow even that feels like a pretty good ’80s memory.
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