The gym I joined, like many such establishments, uses music with a good solid beat to set a pace. Usually it’s nothing but a way to keep rhythm for me, but the other day they had an “oldies” cd on. I have a problem with “oldies”. Usually, when I learned them, they weren’t old. Music ages faster than humans, right?
One of the songs on that cd was Simon and Garfunkel’s version of Wake Up, Little Suzie. I haven’t been able to get it to stop running in my head since, so I started actually thinking about it. I have to wonder if it even makes sense to a kid from the current crop of teenagers. Not the words, they’re really pretty inane, but the assumptions behind them. That you could fall asleep watching a movie and not be found, because it was a drive-in and you and your date were in a car or that staying out until 4:00 a.m. once was nearly as dreadful an act as murder.
I remember going to drive-ins as a kid, but even by the time I hit high school they were fading, and now they’ve all but vanished. What do the kids in high-school now know from drive-in movies? The whole thing is like that. “Reputation” doesn’t mean the same thing now. There’s no hard, bright line, with “nice girls” on one side and “tramps” on the other, and a girl who stays out one night is not forever labelled a tramp. Now it’s fairly common for kids to stay out until dawn on prom night. Then? I think if my date and I had tried it, we’d both have been grounded until we left for college. That was 1975. The song came out in 1957. When S & G recorded it in 1982 the assumptions still made sense. Now it’s a song with a cool beat, but I’ll bet the words don’t make sense at all. And overall, I think that’s a good thing.
If they ever make you exercise to “It’s A Small World, After All!” charge them with violating the Geneva Conventions.
Nah. I’ll save that for the “Smurf Theme Song”. Lucky neither of the named abominations has enough of a beat to dance to.