On my mind, like a song on the radio

So, being an old-school kind of gay fella, I bought the new Madonna album, on the old-fashioned CD format, more or less for old times' sake. It's OK--it sounds very much like an early 90's Madonna album with hip-hop/electronica inflections. The catchiest song is the first single, "4 Minutes," which apparently hit #1 on Billboard, but since I almost never have a current top 40 station on my car radio (or Internet radio, for that matter), I rarely hear new hit music at all, and almost never hear new songs played to excess so that they get stuck in my head forever.

As I thought about that, driving around in the summer weather with Justin Timberlake chanting Madonna's name like a charm against faltering CD sales, I realized I miss not having new songs played to excess. I miss not being one of the masses who will be singing along with a new hit song all summer long, and having that song haunt me for years. Most pop songs bring a time back vividly for me, usually the time when that song was being blasted out of every radio and storefront speaker I passed. Blood Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel" brings back that magical summer of 1969 when I turned 13 and hit puberty; ZZ Top's "La Grange" was part of the soundtrack of my high school graduation; Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" conjures up my first boyfriend; Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" reminds me of the bleak winter days when I had just broken up with my first partner. I heard The Beach Boys' "Kokomo" every damn morning as I was driving to campus my first quarter of grad school. And so on.

I quit paying much attention to top 40 music a few years ago when I left teaching. To some degree, my students kept me up-to-date whether I wanted to be or not. Jay-Z's "99 Problems" is the last "current" song I associate with a specific time and place, my last semester of teaching, which was also the semester I spent a good chunk of time on crutches. Anyway, I no longer listen to top 40 music, though I do still keep up with some alternative or below-the-radar pop bands (and occasionally a song like "Hey There Delilah" will accidentally get into my head for a week or so). Despite how annoying the overplaying of songs on radio can be, I now kind of miss that sense of knowing the same songs that everyone else does because of radio oversaturation. The good thing is that MP3s and iPods have allowed me to remain in a bubble of music of my own choosing, from 60's Beatles to 90's REM; the sad thing is that I'll no longer walk down the street humming the same song that's in the air and that everyone else is humming. I'm giving Madonna & Justin a chance, but I don't "4 Minutes" will do the trick.