The Archive

The generation game

I went with Dad to visit my Godfather in hospital last night.

This involved about five or six hours of driving to get there and back. Five or six hours with two generations, in one small enclosed space and one CD player.

He opened the hostilities with a range of 70s beige. This was music that had had every ounce of life drained out of it, the Slimcea bread of sound. I suspect each disc had ‘caution, may cause drowsiness’ written somewhere on the cover, and I’m certain that nobody should have been driving or operating heavy machinery when it was playing.

Don’t believe me? How about if I said that when Chris Rea came on with Road to Hell, it was a relief to have something bouncy and upbeat playing.

So when we stopped at a service station, it was time to fight back. I purchased ‘Urban Essentials’ inflicting a range of rap and R ‘n’ B on my unsuspecting father.

The best part of it was, so many of those songs sample bits out of songs from Dad’s day, every other song would begin and he’d smile and nod and begin to bob to the beat, then Jay Z or someone would start shouting and he’d wrinkle his nose and press ‘skip track’.

Brilliant.

posted by Peter The Great @ 12:58 PM