On Pop Music

I entered pop music to the strains of "Billy, Don't Be a Hero" and "The Night Chicago Died."

To me those two songs epitomize all that is pop music: the intense sense of time (the summer I was eight) and place (a station wagon en route to day camp) that a song can generate, usually in just a few seconds, and the fact that the same song, even the same few seconds, causes the same reaction, albeit with different specifics, for countless other people (all this, of course, is predicated upon repetition).

My "Bette Davis Eyes" is winter in Nantucket, straining to catch the signal from Hyannis, eating Wheatena and vanilla ice cream because we wanted something sweet and we were cold and had no car and it was too late to hitch into town to the A&P.

My "Tainted Love" is 3 a.m. in my first-year-of-college best friend's dorm room, arguing about whether it really was the best song ever written or he just thought that because he was stoned.

My "Hey Ya" and "Milkshake" are driving through fields in Red State, feeling a little old.

I'm not quite sure about the role of oldies stations in the perpetuation of pop music. On the one hand, the oldies station enables those moments of instant access to another time and space, replicating the original repetition. In the car the other day I heard "Cats in the Cradle" which is night in my new room with my first transistor radio. On the other hand, the constant presence of those moments via the oldies station reworks repetition, evaporating the particularity of the past, and thus running the risk of erasing the very thing that constitutes their pleasure.