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Thinking I do with words - Music is ageless, and immediately old

On the wilds of the internet, I saw someone get incensed that the kids these days called Phil Collins’ hit In the Air Tonight ‘old music.’ They did not believe it was old music.
Devin

On the wilds of the internet, I saw someone get incensed that the kids these days called Phil Collins’ hit In the Air Tonight ‘old music.’ They did not believe it was old music. It was still relevant and meaningful, and clearly counts as something modern and fresh.

In the Air Tonight was released in 1981, making it 39 years old. That makes it older than me, at a minimum, and in the realm of popular music, it definitely counts as quite old.

Which isn’t a bad thing, since people are still listening to the song and its famous drum break. I don’t think I’d say that the song is timeless, it’s definitely of a certain time, and that time is the early ‘80s, but that makes it distinctive and unique, and that’s a good thing. Besides, it’s not like every hit from that era is still in regular rotation, though I fear any song I mention as a joke in this sentence would immediately get someone to say “that song’s great!”

Still, that person getting incensed at the linear nature of time made me think about the way music exists now, because we’re in a strange era where a song will have a short shelf life and an infinitely long one.

As a kid, it always seemed like as soon as something dropped off the charts it was immediately shuffled off to the “oldies” station, which would play any song from the 1950s to the 1980s - and yes, they would have played Phil Collins, so it was old even in the early ‘90s. That was where music went to die, and constantly changing trends meant that there was always something new to focus on.

Now, there’s even more new music to focus on, especially as more people have access to decent quality microphones and professional sound editing software. But, at the same time, we don’t have the same tendency to just shuffle everything away.

Everything is easily accessed at all times, so if you decide you want to remember the great power ballads, or whatever genre you can imagine, it’s a very easy jump to do that, just find your music service of choice and select away. Then, somewhere, artificial intelligence will whirr away in the background, guessing what music you would feel like listening to, potentially turning you towards new music and new-to-you music.

The result is that discovery is a lot easier, and it’s possible to dip into genres and styles that otherwise wouldn’t have been available easily before. Take the explosion of Korean pop music in the west - better known as Kpop - which would have been impossible decades earlier as radio programmers would just assume everyone wants to hear music where they understand the words.

Of course, there’s plenty of pop music where it would be significantly improved with all understanding of the language removed, but I digress.

The result is that it’s incredibly easy to get locked in little bubbles, or to broaden your tastes to the point where you almost have choice paralysis when you decide to listen to a song. It’s easier than ever to make new music, harder than ever to get noticed.

But it’s still the case that a song from 40 years ago remains old. The difference is that being an old song doesn’t matter at all to anyone, anymore.