I'm feeling Low (feat. T-Pain)
But I am also not Sorry For Party Rocking
Recently, my mom asked me to burn a CD for her. What a throwback, I know. Gone are the days when my high school friends and I spent hours curating the perfect track lists for each other, writing “Alexa’s CD” in purple sharpie on the discs and exchanging them in class the next day. Now we send each other Spotify playlist links, and the music is beautiful and utterly devoid of the many quirks that come with illegal Youtube downloads.
My mother does not know how to use Spotify or Bluetooth and absolutely refuses to learn. So a CD it is.
She gave me a specific track list: ACDC, Journey, Duran Duran, Blondie, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. (Also Anne Hathaway’s I Dreamed a Dream, but that’s neither here nor there.) A perfect time capsule of my mom’s teens and twenties, set to guitar and drums, dressed in black leather and hairspray.
The time of real music, before all the youths ruined art, culture in general, and the economy.
Just take the chorus of Bowling for Soup’s 1985:
Nothin' has been alright
Since Bruce Springsteen, Madonna
Way before Nirvana
There was U2 and Blondie
And music still on MTV1
Her two kids in high school
They tell her that she's uncool
'Cause she's still preoccupied
With 19, 19
1985
The lack of appreciation for Nirvana is, frankly, insulting.
I bought the songs for my mom on iTunes (she forbade me to download them through nefarious means). I burned the CD. I dusted off my hands and congratulated myself on a very technologically advanced job well done.
I went about my life, secure in my own musical taste and in my place in the present. I made a new playlist named “disco, dude.” I made another themed around New York, because I couldn’t possibly ride the subway without a main character soundtrack accompaniment.
Then, one night I went out. Well, I was preparing to go out. I take great pleasure in these preparations: the shower, the shower beer, the outfit curation, the slow and steady makeup application.
The soundtrack.
A playlist curated for over 5 years. 18 hours and 37 minutes of…
Right Round, by the iconic Flo Rida. My First Kiss, by 3OH!3, featuring Ke$ha. Whatcha Say (Jasooon Deruuulo). Shots, LMFAO. One, Two Step, Ciara and Missy Elliot. Like A G6. Oops!…I Did It Again (Free Britney!). Everytime We Touch. Cooler Than Me. Yeah!
During the chorus of Akon and David Guetta’s Sexy Bitch, mid-gyration, I asked myself a question.
Will I be singing along to this when I’m 50?
You can imagine the quarter-life crisis that descended upon me in that moment.
We’re all just listening to the same music from our teens and twenties, over and over, until we die. As terrifying as that cycle is, personally, it’s also comforting; it’s a cycle that connects my mom to her generation, that connects me to mine, and both of us to each other and to everyone else who loves music. Like, not to get too deep, but music is eternal, you know? Aerosmith and NSYNC can keep us all company in old age.
Like my mother and her precious 1980s before me, I would emphatically argue that the early 2010s gave us the best flavor of music to ever grace our ears.
So the answer is obviously yes: I will sing along to Sexy Bitch when I’m 50, and 75, and 92. And gyrate as long as I can.
My most treasured memories of MTV, personally, involve Jersey Shore. And I wouldn’t trade that for the world.