{"id":934,"date":"2009-10-29T23:59:54","date_gmt":"2009-10-30T04:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/?p=934"},"modified":"2009-10-30T00:14:54","modified_gmt":"2009-10-30T05:14:54","slug":"living-in-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/living-in-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Living in The Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

The only thing more annoying than listening to old people bitch about how the past was so much better is catching yourself doing the same thing.\u00c2\u00a0 “Today’s music sucks and they don’t make movies like they used to and people are so much nastier now and kids dress like slobs and waaaaaa\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6.<\/p>\n

There are quite a few things that suck worse now than they did in the past, but nearly all of them are the fault of the government.\u00c2\u00a0 (The economy, reductions of freedoms and civil rights, more regulation, more deadly cops, etc.)\u00c2\u00a0 Nearly everything else has improved.\u00c2\u00a0 But our memories are selective.\u00c2\u00a0 We remember the good things from the past and forget the dreck.<\/p>\n

If you doubt that, try this experiment.\u00c2\u00a0 Pick a year from your teens or twenties.\u00c2\u00a0 (If you’re in your teens or twenties this experiment won’t work.\u00c2\u00a0 Bookmark this page and come back in 2019.)\u00c2\u00a0 Google “Billboard Top 100 for {that year}.”\u00c2\u00a0 You’ll find great tunes you still listen to and others you remember fondly, but you’ll also be reminded of nauseatingly horrible crap you forgot about.<\/p>\n

I just did it for 1972<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s some great stuff there:<\/p>\n

American Pie<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Don McClean
\nNights in White Satin<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Moody Blues
\nLean on Me<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Bill Withers\u00c2\u00a0 (I don’t think I’ve ever heard a bad version of that song.)
\nLong Cool Woman in a Black Dress<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Hollies
\nPappa Was a Rolling Stone<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Temptations
\nSaturday in The Park<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Chicago
\nLayla <\/strong>\u00e2\u20ac\u201c Derek and the Domonos
\nTumbling Dice<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Rolling Stones
\nDr. My Eyes<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Jackson Brown
\nRock and Roll Pt 2<\/strong>\u00e2\u20ac\u201c Gary Glitter
\nHold Your Head Up<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Argent<\/p>\n

This is just a sample; there’s other good music on the list.\u00c2\u00a0 But it also contains lots of nauseatingly bad crap.<\/p>\n

Alone Again (Naturally)<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Glibert O’Sulivan\u00c2\u00a0 (#3, no less)
\nA Horse With No Name<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c America\u00c2\u00a0 (Unfortunately, this still gets a lot of airplay, which runs counter to my point, but I can’t resist mentioning how badly it sucks.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re in the desert, schmuck, with nothing to do, and it’s your <\/em>horse.\u00c2\u00a0 Just name the damn thing!\u00c2\u00a0 And whoever wrote “for there ain’t no one for to give you no pain” should have their poetic license revoked for life.)
\nClair <\/strong>\u00e2\u20ac\u201c Gilbert O’Sulivan again
\nBetcha By Golly Wow<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Styleistics
\nDaddy Don’t You Walk So Fast<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Wayne Newton.\u00c2\u00a0 (Puke inducing.)
\nPrecious and Few<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Climax (Any song or product with the word “precious” in it is guaranteed to suck.)
\nI’d Love You To Want Me<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Lobo
\nGo All The Way<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Raspberries<\/p>\n

That’s also just a sample; there are quite a few other gag inducing tunes on the list.<\/p>\n

I grew listening to The Who, The Beatles, The Stones, Jefferson Airplane, The Mama’s & The Papa’s, Simon & Garfunkel, Led Zeppelin and the like.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve survived the test of time, and their music is still everywhere.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 But there was an enormous amount of crap from then that’s rightly (and thankfully) forgotten.\u00c2\u00a0 A hundred years from now, when people are still listening to the great music from that era they’ll have no idea “Yummy Yummy Yummy I Got Love In My Tummy” and “We Joy, We Had Fun, We Had Seasons In The Sun” was somewhere in the mix.\u00c2\u00a0 You can also be certain that some old fart (who hasn’t been born yet) will be complaining that the music of his youth was so much better than the crap those damn kids are listening to now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The only thing more annoying than listening to old people bitch about how the past was so much better is catching yourself doing the same thing.\u00c2\u00a0 “Today’s music sucks and they don’t make movies like they used to and people are so much nastier now and kids dress like slobs and waaaaaa\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6. There are quite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":936,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions\/936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}