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wedding music satellite
Aug. 21st, 2003 04:10 pmHere's one that's guaranteed to offend.
So, remember when we were growing up we made fun of baby boomers who were so attached to their music and endlessly played it on "oldies"/"classic"/"greatest hits" stations? Homer Simpson declaring that rock music had reached its perfection in 1973?
And yet, invariably, I go to a gathering of people approximately my own age, and I am instantly transported in a time machine back to about 1990 or so (at the latest; maybe more like 1985). An endless round of bar and bat mitzvah parties, homecoming dances, social group mixers, prom, U of Chicago Sleepout, etc., and always the exact same music, the exact same set of songs. Lowest-common-denominator 1980s pop.
It was excusable in 1990 when people didn't know any better. But it's been 15 or 20 years now, and I go to a wedding, and it's the same damn stuff. People of our generation cannot bear to listen to anything else on occasions like this.* My friend Richie has a CD collection that at last glimpse had something like a thousand titles. He has Luna and the Violent Femmes and Beck and all that stuff. And yet when he basically DJ'ed his own wedding reception (his friend played songs off his iBook and CDs Richie had burned for the evening), it was all stuff you could get by turning on classic hits radio.
Which reminds me of this brainwave I had a few years ago. All weddings these days have the same music, and it's all stuff you have heard your entire life. DJs usually cost a lot of money. So why not cut out the middle man and broadcast a DJ-9000 Wedding Music Satellite 24 hours a day? It would endlessly loop the same songs in about a 5 hour cycle -- long enough for most receptions. Maybe a second feed would be 7 hours, and a third for 3 hours. And it would play the songs that are at every wedding reception, to wit:
Celebration (I can no longer hear this song without flashing back to wedding receptions)
It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
Come On Eileen
YMCA
Take On Me
I'll Stop the World and Melt with You
I Will Survive
Time After Time
(Party Like It's) 1999
Dancing Queen
The Hustle OR The Electric Slide
Tainted Love
Etc. You know what I mean? Sure you do, and you can tell me the ones that I forgot, although you weren't there. In some sense, I don't have to remember. They are sitting there as immovable objects in our collective Gen-X generational memory. Yeesh.
Now the Wedding Reception Satellite would merely be a way for me to make a great deal of money. It occurs to me that a better service to humanity would be to suggest other songs that could be substituted for these songs, just so that wedding receptions of people born between 1965 and 1980 were not such damn cliches. Not that I am a complete ogre (Richie's remark was, "If it were up to you, we'd all be jerking around spasmodically to Stereolab"). Au contraire. The reason these songs are around is because they are perceived as "danceable," but it is not as though there aren't ready and danceable substitutes at hand. For example, instead of the dreadfully overplayed "It's the End of the World as We Know It," which made me determined to hate R.E.M. for a good five years, why not "Radio Free Europe"? (Whatever. You know what I mean.) Now, you try! I bet that collectively we can think of dozens of decent, underplayed, danceable songs, even from the god damn early nineteen eighties.
Then we can try foisiting it on an unsuspecting world. And soon, too, I hope, because I have this horrible feeling that "Take On Me" will be piped into the rooms at the convalescent home I end up in, and there will be no escape.
* (This is all only until Mr. Steen finally gets around to marrying that filly o'his and reinvents the whole wedding reception genre. No pressure or anything.)
So, remember when we were growing up we made fun of baby boomers who were so attached to their music and endlessly played it on "oldies"/"classic"/"greatest hits" stations? Homer Simpson declaring that rock music had reached its perfection in 1973?
And yet, invariably, I go to a gathering of people approximately my own age, and I am instantly transported in a time machine back to about 1990 or so (at the latest; maybe more like 1985). An endless round of bar and bat mitzvah parties, homecoming dances, social group mixers, prom, U of Chicago Sleepout, etc., and always the exact same music, the exact same set of songs. Lowest-common-denominator 1980s pop.
It was excusable in 1990 when people didn't know any better. But it's been 15 or 20 years now, and I go to a wedding, and it's the same damn stuff. People of our generation cannot bear to listen to anything else on occasions like this.* My friend Richie has a CD collection that at last glimpse had something like a thousand titles. He has Luna and the Violent Femmes and Beck and all that stuff. And yet when he basically DJ'ed his own wedding reception (his friend played songs off his iBook and CDs Richie had burned for the evening), it was all stuff you could get by turning on classic hits radio.
Which reminds me of this brainwave I had a few years ago. All weddings these days have the same music, and it's all stuff you have heard your entire life. DJs usually cost a lot of money. So why not cut out the middle man and broadcast a DJ-9000 Wedding Music Satellite 24 hours a day? It would endlessly loop the same songs in about a 5 hour cycle -- long enough for most receptions. Maybe a second feed would be 7 hours, and a third for 3 hours. And it would play the songs that are at every wedding reception, to wit:
Celebration (I can no longer hear this song without flashing back to wedding receptions)
It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
Come On Eileen
YMCA
Take On Me
I'll Stop the World and Melt with You
I Will Survive
Time After Time
(Party Like It's) 1999
Dancing Queen
The Hustle OR The Electric Slide
Tainted Love
Etc. You know what I mean? Sure you do, and you can tell me the ones that I forgot, although you weren't there. In some sense, I don't have to remember. They are sitting there as immovable objects in our collective Gen-X generational memory. Yeesh.
Now the Wedding Reception Satellite would merely be a way for me to make a great deal of money. It occurs to me that a better service to humanity would be to suggest other songs that could be substituted for these songs, just so that wedding receptions of people born between 1965 and 1980 were not such damn cliches. Not that I am a complete ogre (Richie's remark was, "If it were up to you, we'd all be jerking around spasmodically to Stereolab"). Au contraire. The reason these songs are around is because they are perceived as "danceable," but it is not as though there aren't ready and danceable substitutes at hand. For example, instead of the dreadfully overplayed "It's the End of the World as We Know It," which made me determined to hate R.E.M. for a good five years, why not "Radio Free Europe"? (Whatever. You know what I mean.) Now, you try! I bet that collectively we can think of dozens of decent, underplayed, danceable songs, even from the god damn early nineteen eighties.
Then we can try foisiting it on an unsuspecting world. And soon, too, I hope, because I have this horrible feeling that "Take On Me" will be piped into the rooms at the convalescent home I end up in, and there will be no escape.
* (This is all only until Mr. Steen finally gets around to marrying that filly o'his and reinvents the whole wedding reception genre. No pressure or anything.)
