When good music is SO good

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.