Jukebox Zero

 What was I doing in my childhood that I missed out on all the great hit musics of my generation? Granted, I didn't grow up in the Golden Era of music (polls seem to indicate most think it's the 1970's or '80's, with the 90's signaling a shift from rock and roll and the grunge rock in the late 80's to R&B and pop music. My knowledge of pop music seems comically trivial compared to my peers, as I really only remember the biggest, catchiest hits like Britney Spears "Hit Me Baby One More Time" because kids at Saturday Chinese school kept chanting it at each other, or vaguely remembering that everyone wanted to be Eminem in 7th grade and this mysterious character named Slim Shady. Nobody in my circle of friends or classmates talked about the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana, Billy Joel, Bon Jovi, etc., etc. Was I in the most music-culturally deaf school/community in the world? I remember knowing a bunch of band/orchestra hits because I was in the orchestra, so "John Williams" and "Hans Zimmer" were household names for me as well as classical composers Mozart, Beethoven, Tsaichovsky.... but I just never picked up CD's or hung out with friends who listened for hours to music; we just focused more on video games, sports, WWE wrestling, and other juvenile pursuits. My heroes were sports stars, not rock stars, and my parents were way too new to America to ditch their Chinese music stars to switch to alternative rock and join the Woodstock generation. So I had nothing; the first pop CD I ever bought was Pink's "I'm Not Dead" Album in 2006. My freshman college roommate listened to a fairly diverse set of music like the Mommas and the Papas, but he was more into movies and becoming a comedian, so healthy portions of stand-up comedy by Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy were on the play menu every night. In my spare time as a kid, I usually stuck my nose in a book, did my homework (why did I do that???) or listened to Cubs sports radio, and rushed out every morning to get the Chicago Tribune......only to flip to the sports section way too early. 

My lack of backgournd led to a big gap in knowledge for me, unfortunatley, and it shows when I watch Jeopardy. Whereas 28-game winner Amy Schneider is quickly climbing the history books (10 games away from tying the Amodio Rodeo!) and making a conscious effort to pick pop music categories first, I cringe and promptly blank at the $200 question (supposedly the easiest question), "California Girls" in 1985, the year he left Van Halen. Who's that, I wonder.... California Girls sounds like a Katy Perry hit, while I know there's an Eddie Van Halen but it can't be that obvious and this isn't "Dumb Answers" category where the answer is usually in the question itself. Only until "David Lee Roth" is revealed do I realize I've heard the name (and seen him on the Joe Rogan podcast) but totally missed out on that time in music history when Van Halen was at the top of their game with "Jump" and "Eruption." 

Now that I'm going back into music history, I'm learning that so many of the hits that I vaguely remember playing at bars, restaurants, and football stadiums all have names attached to them and familiar artists, (or sometimes one-hit wonders), and I'm starting to actually recognize some of them and placing names to the songs, as opposed to just admiring the rhythm or the melody of songs when they came on and just moving on, like I used to do. "Jukebox Hero" by Foreigner, for example, is a distinct melody that's been hammered into my head since I was a teenager, but I just recently looked the song up and found a bunch of other Foreigner hits like "I Want to Know What Love is...." I've of course adopted Lionel Ritchie's hit song catchphrase "Hello....Is it me you're looking for" whenever MJ walks into the room, which I'm sure was a thing back in the day, only like 40 years ago. How do other people remember all the titles and bands and members of the bands? I guess it's one of those things you have to FEEL, not just memorize. It's a lot easier to have lived through that music era and felt those songs in your bones then to try to go back retrospectively and organize them like I'm doing now. That said, it's better late than never, as I can go back to any decade I want and play all the best hits of that era and it's like a flood of recognizable hits just flooding into my brain cells, almost overwhelming my ears with cultural references and clips of songs I've heard in other places or names of musicians I heard other people discussing in passing so naturally they felt like common idioms or household names. I didn't know "John Paul Jones" wasn't just the guy who fought in the War of 1812 against the British but a famous musician for Led Zeppelin.....Wait there's 2 legendary blind African American singers who had hit after hit, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder? Why was Otis Redding really sitting on the dock of the bay? 

MJ and I recently went to a doo-wop concert by a group who had played in the musical "Jersey Boys," the story about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (I had always associated Four Seasons with Vivaldi's composition for orchesra) and they played a bunch of throwback songs that they assumed everyone knew.........I didn't. And one of the performers mentioned he was so proud that his mom dated Smokey Robinson; I had to look up Smokey Robinson. Still learning! Hopefully I'll one day go from being a foreigner to music, a Jukebox Zero, and transform myself into a Jukebox Hero.