New-Old Music?

Being older, there are things which happen that surprise me because it's so at odds with the attitudes I grew up with. Like listening to old music. When I was a kid, that meant Frank Sinatra, and no kid of my age would've been caught dead listening to him.

So imagine my surprise when I heard in a Tim Horton shop two post-nineteen nineties born kids talking about their favorite band. Who was the band? The Beatles!

How did this music survive for fifty years to speak to these kids?

I wondered about it for a while and thought of all the influences that younger people have grown up with. Mostly bad-guy TV shows like Sopranos or Hip-Hop and Rap, all the negative gangster influences that have had kids walking around with their pants waist down around their knees, the prison-chic style so many seem to like. Or the cholo-fashion of t-shirt and baggy pants with crotch lower than the knees.

But most of all, the take-whatever-you-won't-get-caught taking that a lot of youngsters have. It seems that the younger people are finding that kicking someone's ass is not a solution, just an impulse and as they find that gangsta creed does not work in a civilized society, they want to find something that will.

So instead of the violence and people hating negativity of hip-hop, they've found the simple message of the Beatles, live for love, keep love, get love anyway you can, to be what they want to hear now.

I guess it means that people, though they may be led astray, always know what they need deep inside, they need to be people and to be seen as human and to love.

So I guess it's a good thing those people recorded all those songs, so that later generations can find something to open their hearts.