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This is going to sound like they just do make ‘em like that anymore, but they don’t.
As I regard one music video after the other, graciously placed on flat screens around the gym so I can rock my heavy lifting, I am plucked by the videos’ endless sea of sameness. Glossy, flat with no progression. They’re cool for a few minutes. Then I start to feel a tinge of flu. Sea sick.
It’s the sameness that I regarded ten years ago or so, about the last time I caught a video. It’s as if I closed my eyes and opened them and the stuff was still playing; each next song and staging a segment of the last. Shot after shot of hair-blown posses, street-tough in their ripped lycra and latex, doing some menacing rendition of the Charleston and gesticulating like they need to “go.” I have no idea who I am watching or what earned their crowded spot in fame. I find their whining and warbling irksome. In a bad way. Admittedly the incomprehensible appeal distracts me between sets. I don’t like what I see or hear, yet I keep turning my head, shaking it sometimes.
On the ride home, I contemplate those legendary contributors to music who talent was not measured by their gun-finger pointing. All they had or needed or what we will ever know them by – and we know them even if we heard them once – is their Sound. Timeless, indelible, distinctive. Passionate, sympathetic, evocative. They really don’t make them like they used to. Artists that is. The crashing roaring waves that brought us where we needs to be. They gave us assemblages which once heard we hunted down until we found them, they were that precious and rare. Are. Nancy Wilson’s Guess Who I Saw Today was one of those for me.
Here’s another; and I can’t help but wonder what would happen at the gym if they pumped this over the iron…
– Elizabeth Crist Hoberg is a single mother of three living in the DC area. She is a gym rat and a budding Romance novelist. She has short novels coming out in January and March 2011.
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