She's been getting pretty good at guessing which decade we're listening to based on one or two songs, which tells you that either each decade really does have a sound, or that the programmers for the various stations certainly have a preferred sound for their respective decades.
She's even taken a stab at characterizing the sound for me - but only got as far as "The 50's sounds like the music is being played in a barn", "The 70's is all happy and active", and "The 90's sounds like it's in a music class and they're still practicing." (I really pushed her to describe the other decades as well because I thought that would make for a really cool post, but she got bored and started to talk about penises and vaginas instead - as she is wont to do).
Of course, as we were listening she was also curious about whether she was alive then, I was alive then, her big sisters were alive then, Grampa was alive then, etc. (She also asked me last week, by the way, if Grampa and Gramma were alive for Ancient Egypt. I told her yes. And then she told me that she doesn't like Egypt because they're all slaves and she doesn't like slaves. At which point I turned the conversation back to penises and vaginas.)
Anyhoo...at one point on 70's on 7 Kasey Casem's American Top 40 from some time in 1970 was playing (the 6 year old no longer in the car with me), and between songs Kasey explained how the top 40 list is based on record sales from 100 stores from across the country.
Whoa. Talk about a stark reminder of how things used to be.
Of course there was a sound back then - because there were stores and radio stations and people like Casey Kasem who made sure there was a sound based on what they stocked in store, what they played, and what they told people to listen to. And there weren't other ways to access music, except going to concerts or making it yourself.
The same, of course, was going on in television and the movies. A very finite set of delivery channels that everybody accessed together, which meant watching the same things at the same time - together - and being able to talk about it the very next day because a) you had seen it, or b) you would basically never be able to see it. Which meant NOT MISSING IT in the first place.
Entertainment was a collective thing. We watched together and listened together and experienced together - all at the same time, in unison. Coke could "teach the world to sing", literally, by placing a great ad in precisely the right places at precisely the right times.
Now look at us. It's no accident that starting with 90's on 9 and Pop2K on 10, there isn't really a defining sound. Nor are there generational TV shows anymore. Or if there are, we won't all have finished watching them until ten years after the decade is over. (I forget who I was talking to a few days ago, but this person was raving about how great Breaking Bad is/was, as if it just went off the air this past weekend).
Sure, there is content that goes viral still, grabbing an audience despite the diffuse noise all around it, and usually doing so for clusters of demographically homogeneous sub-audiences or "communities" with which it strikes a chord. And there are still movie events that come along, sending large numbers of people out to see the same thing in theatre all at pretty much the same time. But even those community-crossing film events hit mainly the moviegoers (a cross-cutting community) and not the rest of us who are stuck at home with kids or unable or unwilling to go out for some other reason. And more and more, even those events are looking like they'll go straight to an online content provider like Netflix sometimes, or they're getting stolen and watched online before leaving theatres...
But how often is there real convergence for everybody on something they all care about all at the same time? Something that transcends diverse communities? I MISS THAT. I think we all do.
Did you see how Toronto, its surrounding neighbourhoods, and the rest of Canada (or so we're told) came together for the Blue Jays? Wasn't that amazing? Didn't it feel like something we really, really needed?
Did you see how the recent Federal election got people all talking about the same things all at the same time? No matter how you feel about the outcome, wasn't that amazing?
I strongly believe we need unifying moments more than ever. And unifying themes. And unifying purposes. Whether they emerge from entertainment, or sport, or politics or events in the news - they help define us and our time. We'll always have our separate communities of interest, but our bigger, foundational communities need reinforcing from time to time as well: our neighbourhoods; our cities; our countries. And not in ways that prop up those communities by excluding others - because that works too. The events and themes and purposes I'm talking about connect communities to other communities, as well, in a shared experience that brings everybody together.
We are becoming ever more connected like cells in a network. We have access to an ever increasing amount of content. We have a tremendous amount of personal control over what we consume. The choices about how and where we direct our attention seem endless. Our natural course seems to be to gratify our individual wants because we can. Yet we can't forget about the containers that need to be in place to hold everything together; the networks we need to hold the networks together; or the gravity we need to keep us in orbit around the same things.
Sure, the container might have been too confining before; the gravity may have weighed us down too much. And now we have networks in place and communities of interest that allow us to explore things with others who are like us: Lots of freedom; loads of access; tons of control. But let's not lose sight of the value and importance and reality of our bigger communities. Our collective identities that should - from time to time - take precedent over our individual and sub-community interests.
If you listen for a while to 60's on 6, you'll hear not just a common sound, but a consistent and common purpose. Love. Harmony. Fixing the world. Hokey, right? Quaint, right? Naive, right? It's so unfamiliar now to hear such a coherent and shared focus from a generation. And so easy to laugh it off.
But I wonder...Will my 6 year old's generation rally together to save the world? Or will they have individual and diffuse existences without a shared purpose that defines them? What could they do if they collectively decided to fix something? How much could they accomplish, that no previous generation was able to, precisely because they have the freedom and access and control and authority and smarts that no previous generation had? Could you imagine what they could do if they can find the will and set their minds - collectively - to accomplish something really big for their city, their country, or the world? And can you imagine the damage they could do if they rally around the wrong things?
I don't have any suggestions beyond sharing these rambling thoughts and doing my best with my 6 year old. Maybe her daughter one day will hear about something really magical that happened to fix everything and ask her if she was alive for that. And maybe her answer will be that not only was she alive for it, she (and everyone else) made it happen together. Because they decided to and because they could.
Wouldn't that be amazing?
Amazing indeed.
ReplyDeleteI've been saying for years that we're going through an inversion of what used to be private or shared with only those closest to us (images of ourselves, our thoughts, our sex lives) and what used to be a shared or communal experience (shopping, entertainment, even the ability to see what books are out there by looking at the covers of what other people are reading on public transit). I think the potential for world-changing change is there. The Black Lives Matter and Silent No More and 99% movements show what 's possible. I think the giddiness of being able to share anything and everything will wear off, and some sort of consensus over what's worthwhile will re-emerge.
An amazing thing is happening now, though. People who don't conform to "normal" are able to form communities where they used to be isolated. It's most obvious in what's happening with gender identity, but it goes for any minority...once you don't feel alone, it's easier to speak up for yourself and advocate for yourself.
The challenge is going to be for us to reach consensus on what is good for us collectively and what isn't.