Henrietta Hay's Column

Like most people of my generation, I can take popular music or leave it alone. Mostly I prefer to leave it alone. It seems to consist of sound and fury going nowhere. But my local expert on teen-age matters got a new CD player for Christmas and played some of his favorite songs for me. He even sent some of the lyrics home with me to read. Maybe there is more to this modern music than I had suspected.

The contrast between today's pop and that of my youth is great. I listened to the ballads of Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby. Today's angry rappers and heavy metal "singers" turn the decibels up sky-high and scream lyrics that are sexually explicit and degrading to women and men and animals and just about everything else.

But then I read my teen expert's album notes and discovered something. Although I can't understand them and neither can the kids, not all the rock lyrics are X-rated. Some of them are sensitive and loving and even funny. What a surprise! I suspect that all along there has been an underlying level of pop music with a theme that spans the generations. There have always been and still are songs about love tenderness and connecting with the one you love -- or not connecting in the case of Country & Western.

In my efforts to explore modern pop music about which I know very little, I asked a group of women, mostly baby boomers, having a coffee break one afternoon what they think of today's rock music. Most of them have teenagers, but they said they really didn't pay very much attention to what their kids are listening to, beyond telling them to turn it down. Instead, almost immediately they were off reminiscing about their own youth, listening to KOMA out of Oklahoma City while they dragged their own particular Main Street and reminding each other of the songs they sang and listened to. I tried to get the conversation back to today's music, but they were lost back in the sixties. That's when it really hit me. Each generation has its own musical identity.

By an odd coincidence, that very evening on the Larry King TV show, he asked Debbie Reynolds what she thinks of rock music and she said the same thing. She made a polite face and said, "Every generation has its sound." Mine had. I can sit here in front of my word processor and remember the melody and all the lyrics of "When it's springtime in the Rockies," which I haven't heard for fifty years.

Before the days of radio, there was really no pop music, as we know it. Everybody listened to the same songs, which were the ones the people around us happened to be singing. Since the coming of radio we have gone through a number of pop musical forms. We had the music of the Big Bands. Then Elvis came along with rock'n'roll, which horrified the parents then and still does, especially when they hear hard rock, whatever that is. There have been the songs from the big musicals, which have always been popular. We had mostly folk music in the sixties, including the protest songs. I'm told that here in Mesa County we really have two kinds of pop music. With apologies to the Blues Brothers, we got Country and we got Western. But beneath them all there have always been romantic songs and singers.

Pop music is the music of youth. Whatever we listen to in those romantic years of our teens and twenties is what we remember all the rest of our lives. It defines who we are. We listen to it and sing it and dance to it. And then we get jobs, and we get married and have children and do the things adults do, and we tend to lose track of the new pop music that our kids are listening to. After while we say, "Ugh, that sounds terrible. Turn it down - or off!"

But we remember "our songs". In later years, hearing a long-forgotten melody brings visual images. My friend the philosopher, who is a baby boomer, has filled me on what's been happening musically since I tuned out. Let her listen to a Beach Boys album and she's back cruising Main Street in the sixties. Give me a few bars of "Good Night Sweetheart" and I'm nineteen again, at a sorority dance with the lights low (no strobes). I wonder what my expert on teen-age matters will remember fifty years from now. Whatever it is, he won't know the words.