wedding music satellite
Aug. 21st, 2003 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupHere'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.)
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-21 01:26 pm (UTC)Not like I'm getting married anytime soon, but dude, I 100% agree with this post.
When I am king...
Date: 2003-08-21 01:44 pm (UTC)Re: When I am king...
Date: 2003-08-21 02:00 pm (UTC)(My great-uncle was once the mayor of Lyons or Lyon, CO and when he died, Klansmen came to his funeral in full regalia. This was on my white side, mind--the Viet side is, I think, pretty Klan-free.)
Re: When I am king...
Date: 2003-08-21 03:02 pm (UTC)I think a lot of white people have Klansmen somewhere in their families, actually.
Re: When I am king...
Date: 2003-08-21 04:44 pm (UTC)They'll all start making out with each other, which is NOT the point of a wedding reception.
I beg to differ.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with playing Al Green love songs no mater who you are. If you start playing the gospel stuff though, I'd worry.
Re: When I am king...
Date: 2003-08-22 06:43 am (UTC)I'm not saying that making out with each other isn't an admirable goal of a wedding reception. It's that everyone ELSE seems to regard the reception as an occasion for pure, unrelieved torture. Well, that's not their stated intention, but that's the effect.
If you start playing the gospel stuff though, I'd worry.
Good point!
no subject
Date: 2003-08-21 02:02 pm (UTC)Dude, this is frickin' ingenious. :-)
no subject
Date: 2003-08-21 02:52 pm (UTC)(Thanks!)
no subject
Date: 2003-08-21 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-22 06:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-22 01:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-25 07:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-25 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-21 04:55 pm (UTC)But maybe it has already been implemented though! I have to say, the current behavior of wedding DJs is suspicious -- coincidentally playing the same music across the country. Maybe they have already set up their wedding satellites. It could be like that Simpsons's episode where Homer uncovers the teamster scam.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-22 06:59 am (UTC)Brilliant!
Date: 2003-08-24 12:00 am (UTC)Re: Brilliant!
Date: 2003-08-24 06:27 pm (UTC)(S., didn't I tell you about this years ago? I think I have been munching on this one at least since my own wedding.)
the wasteland of the 1990s, from your San Diego connection
Date: 2003-09-01 11:58 pm (UTC)And you're right -- the cliched songs make things too predictable. BUT: I think the popularity of 1980s and 1970s music stems from practical considerations. Have you ever tried to dance to the music of the 1990s? So much of it was, as one friend of mine puts it, "music to slit your wrists to." And it has no beat. The only danceable music of the last 10 years has been that nasty bubble gum N'Sync crap of the generation younger than us.
Or do I (and other GenX'ers) think this only because we are fated to like the music popular when we were teenagers? A car enthusiast once said to me, "Guys always want the car that was popular when they were 16 years old." Maybe music is the same way. But then again maybe music really did became undanceable after 1990.
Re: the wasteland of the 1990s, from your San Diego connection
Date: 2003-09-02 06:33 am (UTC)I do seem to generally perceive, though, that even crappy white pop of the Smash Mouth or Spin Doctors variety is at least somewhat danceable. And there's been a whole '80s revival in music going on. You and I might not find the stuff today particularly danceable, but I believe that doesn't stop these here yung 'uns.
However, my point is that even for our generation, there's a lot of "danceable" 1980s music that never gets played at this type of event. It's always the same basic repertoire. Like "Burning Down the House" instead of any other Talking Heads or David Byrne song. David Byrne is a lot better than "Burning Down the House." Why only that one? Why such a limited creativity, a canned consciousness?
If guys like the cars that are popular when they are 16 years old, does that mean we are fated to collect Dodge K Cars and the early Ford Taurus? Of course not. So why the stick-in-the-mud-ness of musical tastes?