1960: music for the year I was born (and why I hate it)

[mellicious]

My plan for #musicadvent (I'm using the hashtag because that name came from Twitter) was to start with the first year I can remember at all, which is 1963. If you didn't see any of this last year, the idea here is to pick one song a day, a different year each day. Last year it started in 1989 and worked up to the present, year by year. It turns out that the person who came up with the idea last year had a similar idea to mine for this year - or possibly that's what they were actually doing in the first place, if they're young. (Added: actually she may have gotten the idea from me, at least there's a tweet I missed at the time that makes it sounds like it. I wasn't sure.) In any case, this year the rule is to start with the year you were born and then work onward from there. Because I'm not good at following rules and because I was born in 1960 but the music of the early '60s mostly bores me (and also because I largely came up with this idea in order to have an excuse to talk a lot about the music of the 80s, and starting earlier would mess up that plan), I've decided I'm going to come up with something for 1960 today - I have no idea what, right now - and then tomorrow I'm going back to my original plan of starting with 1963. (The plan for the LJ/Holidailies part of this also includes plans to talk about what I remember about those years and such, and since I don't remember 1960-1962 at all, that wouldn't work for that, either.)

OK, I have looked at the Billboard list from 1960, and I'm going to go with the #1 song here, because it illustrates oh-so-well why I'm skipping ahead: it was "Theme from A Summer Place" by Percy Faith. I went and listened to 15 seconds or so of it, and I swear my blood pressure started going up. I'm going to link to a YouTube video in case you don't know the song offhand, but I can't even bear to embed it.

If you're younger, you may not understand why I hate this song with quite such a fiery passion. Well, of course it pretty much objectively sucks, too, but that's only part of the reason. I grew up on a steady diet of The Percy Faith Orchestra and Mantovani and all that kind of thing (which nowadays is not even anything you hear on elevators, but it's pretty much where the term elevator music comes from). My dad, especially, loved that stuff. My mother had slightly cooler tastes, for her era - by which I mean she liked Elvis, at least - but she didn't care about it enough to try to overrule my dad. The only radio station my dad would listen to was KODA, which even nowadays is "Sunny 99.1" and still annoys the crap out of me, although it doesn't play Mantovani any more, of course. (Actually it's one of those stations that switches over to 24-hour Christmas music sometime in November, and you know how annoying those are.)

You notice I was all neutral about it in the first paragraph and I just said it was boring, and then I actually listened to one of those songs and I was like omgplznoooooo in about two seconds. So much for neutrality. Anyway, you get the idea, I think. Like many things in childhood, I had this shit crammed down my throat, and even in middle age I can still get worked up about it. So I think that's enough said, right?

Comments

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

"I was born a poor black child. Then I heard my first Mantovani record, and I knew I had to be white." -Steve Martin

[karen-d.livejournal.com]

(Hey, my LJ id still works; who knew?)

I don't remember either of my parents listening to much music in the 60s; maybe I should tune into the 60s station on Sirius for a while and see if any bells are rung.

I don't think...

[6p00e54fc893bb8833 [typepad.com] (from livejournal.com)]

...most of us are particularly aware of music - at least as individual songs - when we're very young, and many people don't develop actual musical preferences until they're in their teens or twenties anyway.

Translation: focusing on the music that was relevant to you as a young adult seems much more sensible than picking random songs from a time when you didn't really get to pick your own music in the first place.

Happy Holidailies.

Re: I don't think...

[mellificent.livejournal.com]

Well, I was a musical little kid, anyway, and I have lots of opinions on later music from the 60s, so I'm happy to talk about all of that. Once we get to British Invasion territory I have many things to say about the music of that era, although of course a lot of these ideas came later on in life - sorting out my opinions then and my opinions later is one of the things I'm going to talk about here.