The Way Back Machine

I don’t think there is any human creation as powerful as music. Paintings are OK, if you aren’t caught up on the style as many art scholars are. Books are, to quote a phrase, words that stay, which means that they’re only as good as the wordsmith, spoken or otherwise. Music, on the other hand has some kind of intrinsic power irrespective of composition or even composer. You don’t have to like a song to be affected by it so somehow, music is elemental in a way that I am absolutely unqualified to explain.

I signed up with MOG.com today because I received an email that they had released a client for the iOS and Android platforms. I had been using Pandora, but unlike Pandora, entering a song, artist or album into the MOG search engine will bring back that exact result. There’s no seeding in MOG; what you ask for is what you get, and because I’m not a voracious audiophile, when I do want to listen to something it’s usually something specific.

For some reason, I really wanted to listen to 80’s music. Being a “child of the 80’s” through no fault of my own, this is “my music”. Back then as before then, we were limited to radio play (mainly because I was too young to buy cassettes on my own, and we didn’t have cable or MTV when I was younger), so we had to take what was given to us over the airwaves. Today, I didn’t want to listen to what other people consider to be the “songs of the 80’s”, I wanted the real songs that I remembered, so I found a great site that listed the Billboard top 100 by year. I then spent the time building a playlist in MOG for the year 1984.

Even as I was looking over the list, searching MOG’s 8 million tracks to translate those words into sound, I was hit with a wall of emotional and visual memories even without actually listening to the song. Just by reading the titles and then having my mind automatically start playing the music and reciting the lyrics that I somehow remember from 20 years ago, more and more thoughts and feelings suddenly popped up: someplace I was at when I heard this song, or my own state at the same time. Because all I had was radio, and radio is notoriously repetitious, each and every song was beaten into me until it became part of my DNA, and brought with it snapshots of the foundation of my modern day person.

It’s dangerous, though, and I’m trying to decide whether or not to keep this playlist. Just as the constant exposure back then burned these songs into my memory, along with the place and feelings and activities, listening to them now is a double edged sword: I can vividly recall things from my past that are triggered with each song, but with each modern listen, I fear that those memories will be overwritten, kind of like how we used to do with the limited supply of cassettes that were used to record these very songs off the radio. I don’t know if it’s an inverse relationship or not: 100 listens then and 0 now means I retain memories in emotional clarity, while 100 listens now supersedes any memory of those days at all. I want to listen to remember, but I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll forget.