That's SO 80s!
What a revoltin' development this is, to quote Chester A. Riley*.
Went to the outlet mall with the missus, to do some Christmas shopping. And, let's face it, you don't shop at outlet malls with the idea of upscale retail therapy. Your expectations are understandably low, right?
A crummy little music store was right in there, and the prices were not even all that great. Selection seemed worse. However, there was a pretty sizable section devoted to music DVDs.
I just restored our sorta home theatre system to health by replacing a DVD player that would not play dts, which, on our system, is the mode that sounds best. So I was looking over the music DVDs, since music is a great way to exploit the capabilities of a sound system. Life has to be something more than special effects.
And I found a pearl of great price. A dts DVD for $14 made by Peter Gabriel. Memories rushed back: he is, of course, a music video pioneer. He had produced music videos in the late 70s, for goodness sake, and some of the best videos ever were his.
He had produced this dts set in 2004, and remixed his stuff. Honestly, some of the remixes were not as good as the original stuff. However, "Sledgehammer" and "Big Time" were not adulterated much, except to use the dts capability to maximum advantage. I was happy as anything, and listening to them at some volume when...
My erudite, attractive, emotionally intelligent 17 year old daughter came into the room and said, witheringly, "That's SO 80s."
I felt deflated, chagrined and more than slightly foolish. Here, I was admiring great art, and even reliving a little of a great time in my life. She had not been born yet and her older brother was barely a year old when Peter Gabriel's "So" was released, along with these videos. It seemed like strikingly original music and video imagery.
We did not engage on the topic right then, largely because she has final exams this week and I did not want to distract her from the business at hand: excelling at her high school exams, getting a great GPA, getting into a great college, graduating, getting a lucrative job, and supporting her parents in a lavish style.
But man, nobody can bring you down like your own family can. Later, she said, "Well, I don't like the music of that era and besides, nothing happened in the 80s."
I resisted the temptation of reminding her that she was born in the 80s. A good strategy, since I was born in the 1950s and often felt that nothing happened in that decade, either. But it's still hard for me to believe that the 1980s and the 1950s were so similarly slack. What happened in the 1980s, you ask? Well...
Well...
Ronald Reagan was president. He was followed by George Bush, sr. A space shuttle blew up. Our trade deficit grew. The underpinnings of the Internet were built.
And...
And...
I hate it when your own children are right. As Chester A. Riley said, "..."
---
*And if you know who that is, you're one of us, I think mebbe.
Went to the outlet mall with the missus, to do some Christmas shopping. And, let's face it, you don't shop at outlet malls with the idea of upscale retail therapy. Your expectations are understandably low, right?
A crummy little music store was right in there, and the prices were not even all that great. Selection seemed worse. However, there was a pretty sizable section devoted to music DVDs.
I just restored our sorta home theatre system to health by replacing a DVD player that would not play dts, which, on our system, is the mode that sounds best. So I was looking over the music DVDs, since music is a great way to exploit the capabilities of a sound system. Life has to be something more than special effects.
And I found a pearl of great price. A dts DVD for $14 made by Peter Gabriel. Memories rushed back: he is, of course, a music video pioneer. He had produced music videos in the late 70s, for goodness sake, and some of the best videos ever were his.
He had produced this dts set in 2004, and remixed his stuff. Honestly, some of the remixes were not as good as the original stuff. However, "Sledgehammer" and "Big Time" were not adulterated much, except to use the dts capability to maximum advantage. I was happy as anything, and listening to them at some volume when...
My erudite, attractive, emotionally intelligent 17 year old daughter came into the room and said, witheringly, "That's SO 80s."
I felt deflated, chagrined and more than slightly foolish. Here, I was admiring great art, and even reliving a little of a great time in my life. She had not been born yet and her older brother was barely a year old when Peter Gabriel's "So" was released, along with these videos. It seemed like strikingly original music and video imagery.
We did not engage on the topic right then, largely because she has final exams this week and I did not want to distract her from the business at hand: excelling at her high school exams, getting a great GPA, getting into a great college, graduating, getting a lucrative job, and supporting her parents in a lavish style.
But man, nobody can bring you down like your own family can. Later, she said, "Well, I don't like the music of that era and besides, nothing happened in the 80s."
I resisted the temptation of reminding her that she was born in the 80s. A good strategy, since I was born in the 1950s and often felt that nothing happened in that decade, either. But it's still hard for me to believe that the 1980s and the 1950s were so similarly slack. What happened in the 1980s, you ask? Well...
Well...
Ronald Reagan was president. He was followed by George Bush, sr. A space shuttle blew up. Our trade deficit grew. The underpinnings of the Internet were built.
And...
And...
I hate it when your own children are right. As Chester A. Riley said, "..."
---
*And if you know who that is, you're one of us, I think mebbe.
posted by John Bernat @ 4:57 PM
2 comments
