We are programmed by the times we live in, even though we may have done our own programming.  As a result, it can be hard to embrace cultural change.

I’ve been listening to a lot of 1980s music (early to mid-80s, actually) lately, the music of my teenage years.  In this era of channeled media, it’s not hard to find a stream of themed music or other content to meet many musical tastes.

The 1980s weren’t a particularly happy time for me (or a lot of then-teenagers, I suppose) but there is something about that decade’s music that grips me.  ”Haunts” is a better word.   My musical tastes were largely formed during those years and they won’t seem to go away.  I say formed rather than discovered because I was influenced by the music that my friends were listening, by the singles that got radio airplay, or by the music videos that were starting to proliferate across the airwaves.

For good or bad, the music of a different era transports you away from the present to different times.

I’m also bound to two different musical eras:

• The 1960s, especially the British Bands:  the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd; and, the patron saint of rock guitar, Jimi Hendrix.  Most of my first exposure to this music came from some mix tapes that a friend made for me.
• The early 1990s, especially the Seattle bands and grunge rockers:  Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana …  there was something about Smells Like Teen Spirit that actually gave me the chills when I heard it on the radio, even though Kurt Cobain probably came to hate it more than any other song he wrote.
• And then there’s the British band XTC (note:  website doesn’t appear to be working at the moment, so here’s the Wikipedia entry), possibly my all-time favorite band, active in at least three decades, but not belonging to any of them.

But, for me,  the 1980s still seem to override the other two eras (XTC was at its peak in the 1980s, so I guess that fits).  This is funny considering how often the 1980s in general are fodder for jokes.

Attitudes, behaviors, and tendencies are like musical preferences:  they tend to stick with you over the years.  I always used to say that the only people who can’t change are dead and I still think this is true.  I’m certainly not the same person I was back in the 1980s, but the boy that I was still plays an important role in the concerto that is my life.  Themes reoccur.  Changes can be made temporarily but then old patterns resurface.

A lot of what I do with this blog is to try to change my ways of thinking, expand myself through a digital platform and to exercise my creative muscles.  Through this work, I get a clearer picture about what I’m willing (or not willing) to do with my life.  It’s funny how this work serves to re-expose the inner core of a person instead of just adding to it.  Renewing acquaintance with old favorites and obsessions naturally happens when you look outward.

The question remains:  am I still stuck in the 80s?  Am I stuck on replay?  Not entirely, but more than I might have realized.

How about you?

Image by kevindooley

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• Just one thought for today

If you’ll pardon the fact that these lyrics are written from a man’s perspective, I think there’s some really good stuff here.

I’m biased, of course:  I think Andy Partridge is a song-writing god and that XTC created some of the best pop music ever.

I think this song is talking about human potential; what do you think?

Merely a Man (recorded by XTC on the album Oranges and Lemons; lyrics by Andy Partridge)

Higher.

I’m a king, yes, I’m a head of state.
But I’m the kitchen boy who’ll
wash your dirty plate.
I had no message and the message was,
We’re all Jesus, Buddha, and the Wizard of Oz.

I’m merely a man,
And I bring nothing but love for you.
I’m merely a man,
And I want nothing that you can’t do.

And you know it’s true.
That with logic and love we’ll be
lifting humanity higher.
Higher.

I’m all religious figures rolled into one,
Gaddafy Duck propelled from Jimmy
Swaggart’s tommy gun.
Don’t promise rainbows with some golden pot,
In fact what I can offer I know you’ve already got.

I’m merely a man,
And I bring nothing but love for you.
I’m merely a man,
And I want nothing that you can’t do.

And you know it’s true.
That with logic and love we’ll have power enough,
To raise consciousness up and for
lifting humanity higher.
Higher!

And you know it’s true.
We should chase superstition and
fear from our hearts,
If we’re going to survive and take
levels of sanity higher.
Kick it up… Higher.

I’m merely a man,
And I bring nothing but love for you.
I’m merely a man,
And I want nothing that you can’t do.

And you know it’s true.
That with logic and love we’ll have power enough,
To raise consciousness up and for
lifting humanity higher.

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Guest post at Lateral Action today
• The I Believe Lyrics Post which sums it all up

I used to listen to a lot of music in my teens and early 20s. I was a guitar rock fan and that’s what I would usually listen to. As time and circumstances changed I cut back on my music as I focused on career, education, and family. I’ve been able to start squeaking it back in my days thanks to streaming audio, my new iPod, and YouTube.

YouTube is a funny thing. On one hand it indexes a lot of new or recent content. New short videos, films, TV show episodes: there’s a staggeringly big mixture of both professional and user generated content that lives at YouTube. Fresh new material is created daily to satisfy artistic urges, commercial needs, and consumer desires.

And yet… there’s an awful lot of OLD material on YouTube. The material comes from the same kinds and genres of content, but there’s no expiry date on what gets stored there. As long as the content was on film or video of some kind, there’s a good chance that it will wind up on YouTube. I’ll bet that you can find a copy of the vast majority of music videos that were ever made on YouTube. You can also find tons of live performance clips by either original artists or cover bands for many, many popular songs.

Guitar rock isn’t just about instrument envy

Given that I’m often a dead ringer for Clark Kent (minus either suit, of course), you might not expect me to be the kind of guy who likes loud guitar rock. I didn’t expect me to like guitars either, but at some point during my adolescence I heard some power chords and guitar solos and it clicked somehow. It lead me to play guitar (acoustic, unfortunately) and electric bass for years, not to mention all of the air guitar.

To me, hard driving rock has a very physical aspect to it: arm swinging (think of Pete Townshend’s classic windmill move), propulsive strumming, or rapid-fire fretboard fingering provides one half of the equation. The sound – pure, distorted, or layered with effects – is the other half. Just think of the otherworldly sounds that guys like Jimi Hendrix coaxed out of their amplifiers and you’re left with an image of some kind of overworldly being that’s part conjuror, part snake-charmer.

So, guitar music can be pretty physical. And that’s excluding the people that used to smash guitars and light them on fire.

Emotion (pre-emo)

In addition to the physical experience, popular music serves as a kind of emotional bookmarking that trumps Delicious any day of the week. Music and emotional events link together permanently. When something significant happens to us (good times, bad times; kisses, hugs, and more; fights and breakups), we’ll always remember the music that played at that moment. In turn, the music brings back the memories of those times, good and bad, each time that we hear the song or melody in question.

No social bookmark could work as well as that, or any better.

Then and now – ch-ch-ch-ch changes

TV shows, movies, and music videos are time capsule entries from the days that they were produced. Fashions, slang, contemporary references, body language and attitudes can sometimes be deciphered through the pop cultural materials of those moments in time.

If you want to contrast two different moments in time, try looking at performances of the same song years apart, preferably by the same band.

I’m going to use the example of Canadian band Honeymoon Suite, which formed in 1982 and still tours and records today.

New Girl Now was this band’s first single. If you didn’t hear it on the radio or see the music video (which is quite likely if you didn’t live in Canada in the early 80s), you might have heard part of this song on a Miami Vice episode (one of their other songs, Bad Attitude, was featured in the last episode of Miami Vice and they also performed the title track from the Lethal Weapon soundtrack).

Here’s the video:

It would be easy to write these guys off as a heavy metal light hair band with a few catchy riffs. The video attempts to sell us on the cool, girl magnet qualities of the lead singer and the guitar prowess of the lead guitarist. It’s a bit contrived, manufactured, and doesn’t hold a candle to the best works of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or… many other great musical acts.

Nonetheless, this song reminds me of that awkward time when I was transitioning out of adolescence into full-fledged teenagerness and starting high school. The riffs had enough power to make me feel… good, I guess. It’s a bookmark.

Now, let’s contrast this with the same band and the same song performed over 24 years later.

(skip ahead to about 0:40 to hear the start of the song)

So, what changed? A number of things:

• No fancy costumes, makeup or hairdos here. These guys are wearing jeans and casual clothes.
• The lead singer has lost a bit of vocal range, but he still gets it right. He’s gained some pounds, some lines, and he seems a bit weary, but you can tell he’s having fun. He’s playing rhythm guitar, helping to anchor the band and the sound, and he’s driving things along.
• Most of the band members are looking older with less hair, but they’re still rocking out.
• The lead guitarist, who has a bit of that young Peter Frampton quality to him, still looks amazingly young. He’s mugging for the camera and playing Joe Rockstar, but he’s still got his chops. The guitar solo is virtually note for note from the 1983 version.

I’d argue that this band is better than the one that recorded the single in 1983. Granted, the music they’re playing doesn’t require extensive chops or skills, but they work very well together. They’ve still got it.

The inevitable comparisons

Remembering the past and how you felt back then brings inevitable comparisons to the present. Twenty-four years seems like an increasingly long time in this age of Web 2.0. Some of you probably weren’t even alive back then. The Internet had very limited uses at the universities of the world. PCs and Apple computers were just starting to appear in the marketplace. Cellphones were almost unheard of in those days. And so on.

If I compare myself from 1983 to today, I’m more like the lead singer than the guitarist. I’m bigger, heavier, and older. I don’t have all of the same skills and chops that I did back then, but I’m a lot more experienced. I’ve got some wrinkles, a bit of tinnitus, and I probably need more sleep now than I did back then. Old worries are replaced with new worries, while I have far more confidence in some situations that I would have back then.

Sometimes I cringe at the thought of my awkward younger self. Other times I wonder where the heck my youth has gone. Regardless, I value the opportunity to compare both versions.

So what does this have to do with social media?

Michael Martine reminded us last week to think about our legacy, both online and offline. Blogs, videos, podcasts, and other forms of social media are like digital scrapbooks and archives that could be around a long time. Maybe ten, twenty, thirty years ago, we’ll be able to look back and see what we saw, thought, and felt in 2008. We’ll have the opportunity to compare ourselves, then and now, to see what’s different.

We’re building our own time capsules whenever we interact with social media. YouTube is just one example of how we continually build and preserve the past with Web technology.

Memories can have a domino effect, especially when shared. One memory can trigger another memory and so on, even between different people. Repositories like YouTube represent slices of a collective consciousness than can be tagged, commented on endlessly, and repurposed.

This might not seem to have a lot to do with social media, even after all of this exposition. However, by sharing these thoughts with you, this blog takes one step into the realm of social media.

Do you have a similar memory, thought, or story? Then why don’t you take a similar step forward and share your thoughts? That’s the social right there.

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Stuck on replay
• Shameless local filmmaker plugola time

In modern pop music, you have a common array of instruments that work together to produce a song. You have keyboards and lead guitar to help provide both melodies and filler for empty spaces of sound. You have drums, percussion and rhythm guitar which help lay and maintain the beat.

And then there’s the bass.

It’s not a bass guitar, by the way: it’s a bass. Spelled like the fish, sounds like “base”.

What a weird instrument.

The bass is supposed to be a part of the rhythm section of a band, providing a sonic tie between guitars/keyboards and drums and percussion.

A little bit groove, a little bit thud.

So what does this have to do with social media?

Good question, but it does bring to mind the fact that I’ve rediscovered the GoGos after almost two decades and I’m silently grooving to them on my couch. How am I listening to them?

YouTube. It’s one of the biggest social media sites out there, probably the largest collection of video files that is freely available to the general public. There are original musics videos and live videos from thousands of musical acts. Then there’s the quite possibly illegal live performance videos that appear. The quality sucks for a lot of them, both audio and video, but they do offer different ways to experience this music.

Sometimes that bass riff in We’ve Got The Beat is exactly as per the original recording, sometimes it shifts and plays around depending on the gig and the tempo. That’s all about the musician.

You can get some incredibly creative user-made videos set to these songs. Sometimes they are cover versions played by other bands. Other times, someone creates a deck of completely different images and synchs them up to the beat. There’s a pretty cool mash up on YouTube where someone took a scene from The Breakfast Club and used the GoGos song instead of what was in the movie (or maybe that’s the original song from the movie – I honestly don’t remember). There’s another which uses footage from the movie Grease.

And there’s this goofy but fun version, too.

All legalities aside, it’s pretty freaking awesome that we can take sound and video files and mix them together, share ‘em with the world, get feedback, and spawn a lot of new cool stuff.

I spend a lot of time writing about Twitter, FriendFeed, blogging, and such.

I’ve done virtually nothing with audio or video on the Web. And it’s become such a huge part of social media, something that is vibrant, pulsating, and throbbing like that grooving bassline in We’ve Got The Beat. This rocking undercurrent of sound is fun, it pulls you in and makes you want to pump your fist. Or dance. Or both.

Just like a good conversation and trading of ideas in social media can pull you into its groove and tickle your intellect and make your brainwaves want to dance.

Man, it looks like fun.

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Take the conn dear reader – strut your stuff!
• The birth of a nation – I mean a blog
• Thoughts from Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer
• Maybe Every Thought Aggregates
• A simple theory on why social media is losing its mojo