The province-owned liquor store I work in has planned playlists that they swap out every “period”, the segments of the year when featured products and sales change. Most playlists are pretty hit and miss, to my tastes. But this one? Oh, man, is it ever hitting.
The current playlist is almost entirely classic rock and 80s music. It’s something of a salve after a few years(!) of working for hours a day amid music that largely just isn’t my thing. Pink Pony Club was on at least two back-to-back playlists recently, and if I never hear that ridiculously overplayed — and let’s face it, genuinely mediocre — song again, my life will be a tiny bit better.
Now listen, I understand this is a bit Old Man Yells At Cloud sounding. ‘Damn kids these days and their so-called “music”.’ Which isn’t a new thing for older people to do, of course, by what turns out to be literally thousands of years. As Alan Cross pointed out in a few of his excellent shows on musical tastes changing, there are records of people complaining about how bad current music trends are, and how much better music used to be, dating back to ancient Greece.
But this isn’t just me and my tastes. All the staff members I’ve asked are much happier with what’s being played right now. The manager, too. He agreed with me that this should be what we play all the time, And that’s the impression I’m getting even from staff not of my generation (The Who reference half-indended), who I could literally be the father of. So it’s not just a middle aged guy getting curmudgeonly-thing.
This great playlist also had an unexpected spin-off benefit of me adding a good song to my own personal playlists. I’ve changed streaming services a few times over recent decades. And because different companies sometimes have rights to songs that other companies don’t, or just happen to not carry certain versions of songs you’ve saved, the transferring of playlists from one service to the next will have the unfortunate result of some songs falling off. Do that a few times, and suddenly you’ll find yourself without songs that you know for sure you’d included ages ago.
In this case, it was a song I knew was by Pretenders, but I couldn’t readily identify. So just this morning, I went through the Pretenders songs that I currently have access to. It took some hunting around for it — it turned out to be Kid, not one of their big radio hits — but in the meantime, I added a bunch of Pretenders songs that had been lost in playlist transfers, along with some I hadn’t added previously but are more to my tastes now. I also added a number of them to my bass guitar playlist, to hopefully piece together how to play along to. Wins all around.
Here’s hoping at least some of this currently LCBO playlist sticks around for a while through upcoming periods.
Meanwhile, to drive home this old, cloud-yelling man’s point, please turn up your speakers to max and click on this song:
That song is 46 years old, and I defy you to tell me it doesn’t kick the living hell out of Pink Pony Club and a lot of other overplayed stuff these days. It blows the goddamn doors off.
“Old music was better” may be a cliché for the last three thousand years. But sometimes it’s still right.
Lol! Well, you defied us, so on your own head be it!
I remember Kid the first time round although only by name. I’m playing it now to refresh my memory…
… and now I’m playing Pink Pony Club, which I know well enough but just to be sure…
I had to stop Kid half-way through. Chrissie Hynde is fantastic, as always, but those Rawk!! guitars. Geez. I hated that sound then and forty years seriously hasn’t done it any favors. Pink Pony Club is nowhere near my favorite Chappel Roan tune and I do agree she’s been over-exposed but I’d still far rather have that coming out of the speakers anywhere I had to work than Kid. Now, if it was the Pretenders’ cover of Stop Your Sobbing, that would be a different matter altogether.
I’ll be 67 in a couple of months and I’ve been a huge music fan since I was about twelve years old and I completely refute the idea that popular music has in any way gotten worse. It’s as stuffed to bursting with mesmerizingly brilliant gems as it ever was and the baseline quality is much the same. I’m not going to say it’s better but my personal all-time lists look a lot different now than they used to…
There is, of course, plenty of proper scientific research that proves most people fix their musical tastes at a quite specific period – between mid-adolescence and late-20s I think it is. There are neurological reasons for it and behavioral ones I believe – long time since I read up on it, so I forget the details. You do have to work a bit to overcome that but it’s very, very worth it.
I was going to offer a link to Pink Pony Club as well so readers could do an in-line head-to-head, but I figured they could find it readily enough. 🙂
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about both that song’s quality, and the listen-ability to the guitar in the likes of Kid (how about The Wait, though? I mean, come ON…)
I realized after the fact, in the spirit of what you’re pointing out, that I’d started off with “Hey, this new playlist at work is great” and it somehow devolved to “… and also, modern music isn’t as good as older music”. Which wasn’t, I should clarify, intended to be how the post was meant to go. The good music bit just turned into something like I’d Rather Hear This Than That, which (given the currently heavy classic rock/80s mix) kind of turned into an older music is better-type angle, which then made me hone in on a particular un-favourite of late. I confess it rather got away from me in that respect.
To clarify, as you say, there absolutely IS good music made today. Just as there was last year and last decade, and back ad nauseum. There’s also bad current music. As there was last year and last decade, etc. It’s undoubtedly the overplayed-ness of Pink Pony Club that has me put it in the proerbial dog house. I recall Nirvana’s cover of The Man Who Sold The World was overplayed at least as much at its peak popularity (we’d hear it on the radio at my job then at least once an hour during our 8-10 hour shifts), and even with it being very well done by a talented band I still like, I had lost my taste for it for years. But given the hearing it several times a shift is how Pink Pony Club was introduced to me, I’m not sure if my opinion of it will change.
For what it’s worth and to drive home the point, I actively listen to Discover playlists on Apple Music and Bandcamp, exclusively to hear new stuff I haven’t heard from bands I like, and to hear stuff from bands I’d never heard of. And I don’t like a lot of it, but there are definitely some diamonds to be found when I dig enough.
If I may ask, what modern bands are you finding particularly good? Not intended to put you on the spot, but I’m always listening to whatever I can and adding what I like to my various streaming playlists.