COLUMN: Change the CD, I dare you
For most people, gangs are just something you read about or see on TV. If you want to really experience gang mentality in the relative safety of your home with minimal damage, all you have to do is invite a group of people with greater than a five-year age spread over to your house and try to play some music.
The last time I had a party at my house I made the mistake of trying to mix people in a roughly 22- to 50-year-old age range. I’m still hearing about it.
“You call that music? You can’t dance to that, it has no beat. It’s too loud. It’s too boring. It has no lyrics.” Or, the
most arrogant, “I’ve never heard of them.”
I’m open to musical suggestions. I’m a gracious, Emily Post-ish host. In my most polite, Miss Manners voice I eloquently tell
my guests “No, please go ahead touch that dial – change the music as long as you don’t mind spending the rest of your life trying to type with one hand. Please, make my day.”
I know it just goes with the territory of having a party. You can’t please everyone, but it was like having gangs over to my house. The people in the house were clustered into five-year age groups. “OK, you divert Dennis’ attention, while we storm the stereo with the Aretha Franklin’s Greatest Hit boxed set.” Fortunately, the digitally remastered Saturday Night Fever gang never took over the party.
I have no doubt that the next great scientific advancement after using the Hair Club For Men as a nuclear test site will be isolating the “all-music-after-this-date-sucks” gene.
I haven’t been able to pinpoint it myself, but somewhere around age 22 the gate of Copy Ed 11/13/03 musical? musically acceptance seems to slam shut tighter than country western music video jeans. Do you want to experience flashbacks without the nasty side effects of drugs? Just examine the music collections of any of your over-age-30 friends.
Somehow I’ve remained somewhat immune to this. I never got too attached to the music of my generation. I had the foresight to see that eight-track tapes would have the shelf life of the average bunch of green bananas and that there must be some technology better than running a sharp needle over vinyl.
In short, I didn’t invest much money on ’60s and ’70s music. Maybe this is the key. People stuck in the musical twilight zone are there because they fondly remember spending military-budget-sized percentages of their burger flipping incomes on Rolling Stones or Grateful Dead albums.
Maybe my formative music years were warped. My dad was a cop. I got free Doors albums from police evidence lockers sales of contraband taken from real arrested St. Louis hippies. My closest friend was a Hungarian immigrant who could play all the bass guitar licks from Jimmy Hendrix’ “Are You Experienced?” His brothers constantly played Motown hits around the house. At the time, they were the blackest people I knew.
I should have grown up to be a Big Chill, flower child, summer of love, give-peace-a-chance kind of dude. Although I still catch
myself instinctively reaching for my credit card when those 12 CD Greatest Hits of the ’60s late night ads come on, I stop short. There’s too much other music out there to experience. Wasn’t that the ’60s too … experience new things?
I mean I really like The Cranberries, Blind Melon, Smashing Pumpkins and the rest of the fruit- and vegetable-inspired groups. And, believe it or not, I think hip-hop and rap music might actually get people interested in poetry and the importance of words again.
Stop by. Play any kind of music you want, but only if you can beat me to the CD player.
Dennis Hinkamp is a USU employee in the Extension office. Comments can be sent to dennish@ext.usu.edu.