The Song Remains The Same
Familiarity breeds contempt and stuff
Among the many important and necessary beliefs I adhere to is this: there are only a finite number of times you can listen to any given song.
The thing that makes this an Unassailable Fact is: it’s a different number for any given song and any given person. For some, it’s one and done (whatever that “Werewolves of London”/”Sweet Home Alabama” dogshit ripoff Kid Rock did). Others are still in my semi-regular rotation after decades (“Only the Lonely” by the Motels and the Cure’s “A Night Like This” are two of my slightly less embarrassing examples)*. You, on the other hand, may be sick of those latter examples and love Kid Rock, in which case you have my pity and/or scorn.
The funny thing is, I never really thought about getting “sick” of songs until years of so-called classic rock radio warped my brain. Back in the 1900s, y’see, we’d buy albums or cassettes, listen to them obsessively, then more or less move on when something new came out. Sure, you could revisit the old stuff, but that would involve ejecting a cassette! Plus, there was always new music to sample. And to be fair, that’s still the case.
But we were always meant to go after new releases. Artists often dropped (as the kids say) new material every year or so, because the intention was that we’d snap up the latest offering, listen to that for a while, then move on. Drop, snap, listen, move, repeat.
The advent of classic rock screwed that up. As usual, I blame the Baby Boomers. Not only did we now stations dedicated to rehashing songs from 10, 20, or even 30 years ago, but it wasn’t even a representative sample. Listen to “The Eagle” for three days in a row and you’d be pretty much guaranteed to hear “Take It Easy,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Smoke on the Water” 20 times apiece.
This “play the hits” mentality appealed to our lizard brain, and is probably a key reason Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) is the 5th best selling album of all time. After all, why waste money on a whole album if you’re just going to hear the best songs on the radio?
As audiences aged and music from the ‘80s (horrors!) and ‘90s started making the rotation, the inertia became even worse. You could easily be forgiven for thinking Pearl Jam’s output consisted solely of “Jeremy” and “Even Flow,” for example. The success of the format indicated a lot of people were perfectly happy to keep listening to the same old crap. Still, people started getting tired of a lot of that material. I maxed out on “Jeremy” after probably 10 listens, for example. Good thing my CD player had a skip button.
Other songs/artists are similarly all over the place. I got sick of the Steve Miller Band’s entire catalog in junior high, but can still listen to the Clash’s London Calling wire to wire. I’ve mostly burned out on the Beatles, but still love the second half of side 2 of Abbey Road (“Mean Mr. Mustard”/”Polythene Pam”/“She Came In Through the Bathroom Window”/“Golden Slumbers”/“Carry That Weight”). “Grey Cell Green” by Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and “Black Metallic” by Catherine Wheel both dropped in 1991, but are still in rotation. Meanwhile, I haven’t fired up anything from Nevermind in at least 10 years.
The near contemporaneous rise of satellite radio and downloadable music reinforced this ability to fixate (and my theory, not coincidentally). Not only could one pick and choose the very songs they wanted to hear over and over, there were entire stations focused solely on very specific genre parameters. Do you like so-called “‘80s Music?” Buddy, on SiriusXM alone you can get: ‘80s on 8, Classic Rewind, 1st Wave, Hair Nation, Rock the Bells, Prime Country, and Robert Smith knows what else.
On one hand, it’s been great to have access to songs lost to time and/or the Great Roommate LP Theft of 1994 (don’t ask). On another — and this may new to my inability to do anything in moderation — you run a very real risk of, let’s call it “oversaturation.” Example #1: the Spotify algorithm spat out “Coming Up Close” by ‘Til Tuesday***, a song I legitimately hadn’t heard since high school. I freaking love that song, and hearing it again for first time in almost 40 years was almost vertigo inducing. Naturally, I played it 20 times in a row.
Example #2 (and not to make it sound like I’m merely a nostalgia farmer): James McMurtry released an album called The Horses and the Hounds in 2021. The opening track, “Canola Fields,” really struck a chord (not only because McMurtry is a sneak great guitar player and the song feature two great solos, a la “Comfortably Numb”). Once again, I couldn’t help hitting the “back” button multiple times to indulge myself.
Thing is, these actions dilute the former thrill of hearing a song as it was “meant” to be heard: randomly popping up on a radio station or MTV after 11pm. Immediate access to songs embedded in our basal ganglia lessens their impact. I’ve tried to get better about this; adding such songs to my pathetically unorganized, 2,500-song “Liked Songs” list and letting them bubble up organically. Knowing myself, I’ve also created a subset playlist of about 100 songs I won’t actually fast forward.
I’m comfortable with my failures, thanks.
*And also one of the reasons Spotify pegs my “listening age” at 65.
**For those questioning my macho cred, I suppose I should have used the identical example of “Them Bones” by Alice in Chains.