Music From Youth Evokes Memories

When I surf through my music radio stations here in Gainesville, almost always in my car, it is the norm to encounter music from twenty-five years and older on them.  Whether I'm on 92.5, 98.5, 99.5. or 100.9, I'm more likely to hear a song like Gerry Rafferty's 1978 Baker Street or the Doobie Brothers' 1975 Black Water than I am to hear something more recent...like from this century.  That's not how I would have predicted it back then.  It's really quite astounding, when you think about it.  I thought that many of the hits, when I was listening to them back then, had only transitory "fame value"...yet they're being played nowadays as if the intervening decades had never happened. Not that I'm complaining, for it's been quite some time since I've been particularly interested in what constitutes contemporary popular music on the radio...

I have a theory about why these old hits are still so popular.  It is in how people will associate different songs from their past with memories of times and events they were experiencing when those songs were popular.  For example, I believe it was in 1970 that my sister Anita went to a concert of the pop group The Association.  I was in the car when we picked her up from the concert site to take her home...now, whenever I hear a song of theirs, I'm taken back to that evening drive at that particular place.  Sometimes the connections can get to be a bit strange: for example, the 1977 Manfred Mann hit Blinded By the Light (originally written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen) brings back memories of Nova Elementary School back in 1968.  I asked myself why this was so...and then it hit me.  Toward the end of this song...which I incidentally liked a lot...the piano breaks down into a freaky rendition of Chopsticks...and Chopsticks was played on one of the Bell Science movies we watched endlessly back in the sixth grade in '68.  Or how about Gail Garnett's We'll Sing in the Sunshine or Chad and Jeremy's Summer Song, both from 1964?  With these I'm transported back to sitting on my back porch with my mom and sister...as if I were still seven years old...

Nowadays, even if I do take a liking to a current song on the radio, I am less likely to associate it with life events.  However, since I do carry an MP3 player around and often listen to it while running, I've associated this activity with the music I'm listening to.  So musical acts like Regina Spektor, Radiohead, Gorillaz, Kasabian, Spoon, Beck, and Sufjan Stevens now evoke memories of different times and locations I have been out running during the last six years or so.  But the strongest associations still come with those songs I listened to in my youth and early adulthood.  They are like keys to old, buried memories...