Generation To Generation

The Importance Of Your Favorite Music

As we grow up, we inadvertently create the soundtracks of our lives. It isn't noticeable while it happens, but one day you look back and listen, and there it is. The most wonderful, awful, and sometimes seemingly unimportant moments, are attached as memories to all this wonderful music. Sometimes, a song will come on and trigger a memory, and you are feeling the way you felt back then, before you even know why. I'm pretty sure this is as true for me as it is for most people.
So tonight I was listening to some music on my iPod, and a few songs came on that I would definitely identify as being music from the soundtrack of my life. The I realized that the music was made long before my time. Some of this music, I discovered myself, for certain, but right now I am referring to the music passed on to me to listen to, and live to, by my parents. It occurs to me now, as a parent, how much it means to me that we share some of the same soundtrack, and we always will.

"Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes." -Bill Cosby

If The Music Defines The Generation, What Else Is It Responsible For?

The times are always 'a changin'' and so are the sounds that accompany each era. From blind optimism to political uprising, music has been a vehicle for messages from one tortured time to the next.
With every new hero/heroin or pop culture icon, a little cult forms in the listening public, and those believers hold onto the message of their chosen one like it's gospel.
To paraphrase, Joseph Campbell, (an American mythologist, lecturer and writer, most noted for his study of comparitive religion and mythology), said that the youth of today, are in need of a new religion. He said that the mythologies of the past are not reaching young people nowadays and so they seek their own sub-cultural societies, gangs, cults, etc. This, I believe has been the case for quite a long time.

If this is so, then we need to be listening to the soundtrack of their new belief structures, and moreover my point entirely, is that as parents we need to be passing on the best music from our generation and the great ones before us that were passed on to us. We need, to keep it real.
So many of the people that I knew throughout my youth, had zero knowledge of any music that wasn't in the top 40 in their life time. I can recall playing mixed tapes (yes tapes) as a teenager, and other teens I worked with asking me if the Led Zeppelin song I was playing was new, cause they thought it was pretty good. Yeah.. its 'pretty good' I'd said. What a travesty. I set them straight, but what a close call!! They could almost as easily moved on through life, become bankers, and never known who Led Zeppelin was. Enough said.

See the rest of this article with all (or lots of anyway) ''my music'' and more. Check it out at

http://www.squidoo.com/workshop/the-importance-of-passing-on-the-best-music-generation-to-generation