NOT NECESSARILY EASY LISTENING

Now that I’ve got Apple Music (other music streaming services are of course available) I’ve been listening back to some of the albums I had on repeat when I was younger.

I got grief back then, for liking ‘easy listening’ but I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. You like what you like and the music snobs (in fact all the snobs) can just get over themselves. That’s all I have to say about that.

Anyway, it’s given me an opportunity to listen to some old faves, such as The Beautiful South, George Michael, Bon Jovi, The Lighthouse Family, The Bluetones, and a few other smooth listens from the 90s. I’ve been asking Siri to play them all.

Man alive. I’ve discovered something amazing - amazing about the way we listen to music, that I wasn’t expecting. In fact, I’ve started to wonder if everyone goes through this, or whether it’s just me, experiencing the passage of time. Here’s what I’ve realised…

Back then, I wasn’t really listening to the lyrics.

I mean I was - after all, I used to sing along to most of them, and the words have been imprinted on a dusty part of my memory that didn’t let me down, even twenty five years later. What I’m saying is that for some reason, I just wasn’t really listening. Sure, I’d have had a vague idea what George Michael’s Star People was all about, but some of the subtleties in the lyrics, I would not have had a clue about - the satirical punch to celebrity status, the twisting agony of surviving among them, the irony, the bravery of one of the most famous singers in the world singing that! No idea.

Then there’s I Need a Little Time by the Beautiful South: I liked that song a lot, but I don’t think I would have been able to pick out that the two voices were telling the story of a marriage breaking up. I probably never even thought it. Imagine that! It's right there.

Here I am with a lot more years between the ears then, listening to things that sailed over my head as a young man. How can that happen? Does it happen to everybody? How is it that songs can be so layered that they carry meanings that only make sense when you’ve lived a little? Or was I just very dense about all that when I was slotting CDs into my portable stereo? Or was I totally focused on the way the music was making me feel?

Also, if this can happen with such easy listening tracks, I feel a bit sorry for all my contemporaries who stuck to screaming metal or anodyne pop. Some of those themes would have been both dreadful and invisible to them as they surfed through the sugary beats of Steps or the crunching guitars of Metallica. Listening back now and asking what it was all about and what possessed them to belt that out at the bedroom wall… could be cringeworthy.

Or, has the way we listen to music as society changed? In this age of searching for meaning and purpose, of identity through social media and existential anxiety, is it possible that we’ve wired our digital brains to search for meaning in a way that just wasn’t there back then?

It’s possible I suppose. But then, it’s also possible that I’ve floated that idea as a diversion tactic from the rather more obvious truth that I’m just older and more grown-up, and the human-themes that were always there in the music of my youth have been unlocked to me by my experience - and now actually mean something I had entirely no way of understanding then. Passage of time eh.  It would be alright if you could move down it at your own pace.

Sigh.