Music is not dead, nor will it ever be. I don’t know how it is in your neck of the woods, but here there has been a lot of talk about how hard the music industry has been hit by the pandemic. And I get it, no concerts mean a great loss of income for musicians.
Today is the day the music died – the day when Richie Valens, Buddy Holly, and The Big Bopper died in a plane crash. The day the music died.
Can you imagine life without music? I can’t. I don’t play any instruments, and I couldn’t carry a tune to save my life, but I’m listening to music every day.
I grew up on Bruce Springsteen, Queen, U2, Dire Straits, Creedence Clearwater Revival, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy, and a dash of ELO and Rolling Stones – so you know where I’m coming from. Mum liked Abba, but since Dad didn’t it wasn’t played often. I can sing along pretty well, though.
After that came a period of:
I still know the lyrics by heart. When I started to learn English, I sat with the LP up in my room and translated the lyrics to the entire Heart of Stone album.
The next musical milestone was Roxette. My first ‘big’ concert was their Joyride tour. Very cool back then.
Bigger, Better, Faster, More! I had such a crush on Linda Perry. I still know the lyrics to every song on that album, I think.
As I grow older, I was drowning in male groups. There was a lot of Aerosmith, Nirvana, Metallica, Kiss, Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses, Black Sabbath and so on. It went on for years and years, one white male rockband after the other until I got a little angry.
Don’t get me wrong, rock is my genre along with some singer-songwriters, some blues, the occasional folksy tune, some heavy metal – pretty much everything except what you hear on the radio. But if you don’t listen to a lot of pop and you don’t actively search for something other than what’s fed to you, you won’t end up with a lot of women.
So, I turned up the volume and played Tracy Chapman’s Talkin’ About a Revolution for the entire house – whether they wanted to hear it or not. Janis Joplin and Aretha Franklin had the walls shaking in my room. I played Shakespear Sister, Anouk, Skunk Anansie, Alanis Morisette, The Cranberries, K’s Choice, some Sheryl Crow if I felt like it, and several others.
Today it’s so easy to find music. All you need is Spotify or YouTube and you have more songs than you’ll ever have the time to listen to at your fingertips.
Picking favourites is impossible because it all depends on what mood you’re in. My kids know how to headbang to Motörhead and dance along with me in the kitchen when we listen to:
They’re used to me singing along to Rival Son’s Electric Man, The Bros. Landreth, Silvertide, Black Stone Cherry and so on. But I make damn sure to play:
Any many many more because no one will ever tell my girls that:
And now I’ve filled this post with so many embeds that it will never load and I haven’t even included half of the songs I’d scrawled down before I started putting this post together LOL . Carmen Vandenberg is my latest crush – the woman can soo play guitarr, and if you like Bones UK you should watch this video.
So will the pandemic kill music? No, it might change how we consume it, at least for a while, but there are always ways to enjoy music. And if we can’t figure them out, the young musicians coming to take over will. Like these two teens playing on the streets of Dublin.
Ofelia Grand 