Saturday, April 5, 2014

Where Have All the Flower[-Child Song]s Gone?

Post #2, and I'm already going to take a detour away from visual media and focus on music. Silly me, right? The fact is, though, I haven't watched much on TV or video lately, but I have been listening to music while filling out job applications and grading. In particular, I've had 60s radio playing in my car and on my satellite.

It's a weird experience listening to nationally broadcasted radio as opposed to local. I live in a highly conservative area (I, on the other hand, would probably fit in better in Portland, Oregon, or the like), which undoubtedly has an influence on which 60s songs are played on the oldies' stations. As such, I'm finding that there is a whole swath of music from the counterculture movement that I had never heard before, despite growing up listening to almost nothing but oldies (my parents are older, having graduated high school in the 1950s, which influenced which music I heard). In fact, most of the music that I've since learned has influenced serious rock musicians from that period was never played around here.

Within the past two-to-three years, I've heard for the first time:

  • "One Tin Soldier" by The Original Caste
    • I still can't believe I'd never heard this one. I had it on repeat for about three months at one point after finding it.
  • "Easy to Be Hard" by Three Dog Night
    • Well, of course... I mean, it talks about social injustice, and we can't talk about that too freely, lest we be labeled communists. *eye roll*
  • Jefferson Airplane's music
  • "Blackbird" by the Beatles
  • "A Change is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke
  • "My Generation," "I Can See For Miles," and most of the songs by The Who
  • "It's My Life" by the Animals
  • "Go Where You Wanna Go" by The Mamas and the Papas
  • Donovan--pretty much all of his music

    and a lot more. I'd probably have a list two pages long if I took some time to note each one as I heard it over a week or two.
I guess anit-war, anti-economic-disparity, and pro-feminist music doesn't appeal to the majority of Oldies fans in southwest Missouri... *cue another eye roll*

I'm seriously disappointed, though, that I'd never heard these songs before, especially since many of them have become contenders for my favorite song lists. 

The other side of this re-immersion into the music of the Sixties is finding out just how many of the songs I've been singing along to for nearly 30 years are really, really douchey songs. I mean, I listen to the lyrics now, and I can't believe how awful the songs are lyrically. Creeptastic, even. That, however, will be another post, as I'm going to work on tracking which ones I hear this weekend. It may be a long post, at that, as I'll probably slip into my feminist-rant mode. ;)

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