(empo-tymshft) Time keeps on slippin'...slippin'...slippin'...

No, this is not a follow-up. But I guess it could be.

When my daughter was very young - this would have been around 1995 or so - I derived a strange enjoyment from telling her how old particular songs were. Perhaps a Hues Corporation song would come up, and I'd say, "That song was a hit 20 years ago."

Around that same time my wife, her brother (now deceased), his wife, and I would drive around and listen to "Disco Saturday Night" - a radio show which would play hits from around 20 years ago.

Well, time has marched on, and now the songs that were new at that time have now gotten old themselves.

This hit me on my drive home Monday evening, as I was listening to the radio. Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child O'Mine" came on the radio. I still think of that as a relatively new song, not an old one like "Rock the Boat" or whatever. Yes, I know that the band's members have changed (no, they haven't broken up), but I still think of the song as relatively new.

And then it hit me - that song is nearly a quarter century old.

As I reflected on this, I remembered something else. One of my first blog posts was devoted to several Madonna songs, including my favorite, "Frozen." (Two years after writing that post, I irritated one of our exchange students by playing the song over and over.) And then it hit me - THAT song is twelve years old already.

Newer and newer music keeps on popping up, and the older music just gets older and older. You see this most clearly in the playlists of oldies stations. Back when I first moved to southern California - oldies stations played songs from the 1950s. Now you can rarely hear those songs on the radio any more, and oldies stations have now included 1970s songs in their playlists. Someday some old geezer will be sitting on the porch at the nursing home, saying, "Yeah, I remember slam dancing to Nirvana."

The one benefit of this whole affair is that since much of the music over the last 100 years has been preserved via recording, there is now a large amount of music which can be heard. This very blog has posted music that is nearly 80 years old.

The question is, now that all of this music is available to us for our listening pleasure, what are we going to do with it?