Back in the late ‘50s and early '60s, if you wanted to pick the music you heard on a drive, you bought an in-car record player. Well, those were expensive, so most people just sang like poor yodelers plucked from the old country.
Of course we've come a long way, to new singles dropping on YouTube and syncing albums off of Spotify, but that hasn't stopped a great number of people lamenting this progress.
While we were talking up the Chevy Spark's lust for hipster cred, we got into an interesting discussion of how we all listen to music in the car. If you're a marketing executive and you've stumbled onto this page, go read through all of the replies to the article in Kinja; you'll learn something.
Things devolved from there, as they usually do.
Xander Crews, Proud of BOXER
Back in my day, we would download songs from the internet and put them on these plastic discs by burning them. Then we would load them into a machine that would spin the disc and it would make music. We would have to walk real slow too otherwise the music would stop intermittently if we ran or jumped.
pauljones
Dude, in my day, we listened to music from plastic cassette-like devices that had tape reels in them, and we couldn't even skip songs!
Xander Crews, Proud of BOXER
Dude, back when I was a kid, we couldn't even take music on the go. We had to SIT DOWN to listen to music. It was a disc of polyvinyl chloride with grooves in it and we spun it around and used a needle to pick up magnetic signals that were turned into music.
pauljones
Pfft. Back in my day, we had to wait for Beethoven to mathematically figure out which piano key he was pressing before we got to hear any music. One key at a time.
Bruce Springsteen, Madonna,
Way before Nirvana,
There was U2, and Blondie,
and music still on MTV...
Xander Crews, Proud of BOXER
OH YEAH.
Way back when in my day, we had to go to church to listen to a bunch of bald guys moaning like the town prostitute/witch in a damp and drafty building packed with smelly villagers. The worst part is you couldn't hear jack because you couldn't afford to sit in the front (damned indulgences).
pauljones
Oh really? Count yourself lucky! In my day, we had to bang rocks together to make sound! It also had the side-effect of creating sparks that started fires and burned everything down.
And we burned it all down!
WE WERE THE ORIGINAL ROCKSTARS, BABY!!! WOOO!!!!!
Xander Crews, Proud of BOXER
Oh yeah? Back in my day we only had one sound that encompassed every frequency possible. It's called the Big Bang. You probably never heard it.
If you need me, I'll be riding my fixie to Brooklyn ironically listening to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" on my "My First Sony" tapedeck.
Photo Credit: RCA via Flickr