Bee-Bop-A-Lula

So I was in A&W today, and the music they were playing was the old "popular standard" type stuff. It was a bit irritating at first, then I started realizing that it was part of the ambiance: old-fashioned diner, old-fashioned music. For just a moment I had a vision of what it might be like to live in a world where that music was contemporary - a kind of period film setting, where those songs were the ones you listened to every day, sang along with and waited to hear again.

Then it occurred to me that in a setting like that, you wouldn't necessarily hear the music every day. A&W started in 1910 - about a decade before gramophones, and in the early days of radio, when radios were used more for military communication than for in-home entertainment. In the days before WWI, people who wanted to hear music went to concerts or played it themselves.

When did music - recorded music, that is - start becoming part of our moment-to-moment lives the way it is now? After the Great War, when radio started becoming both more entertainment-based and more accessible...or during the 40s and 50s when a jukebox could be found in any diner? Or when Ed Sullivan began introducing the acts on TV and every girl over the age of ten had her Elvis albums?

I guess that's the comparison I've been looking for; the time when anybody could play their choice of music at anytime they wished to hear it. Record players. Then hi-fi, then boomboxes, CD players, and now Satellite Radio and Internet Jukeboxes.

I have to wonder what my grandmother would've said, back in 1955, if she could've seen how music would come to dominate our lives, and how constant our access to it would be. For example, as I'm typing this, I'm listening to Bob Dylan via the same computer on which I'm typing. With the aid of any one of several free- or paid-subscription programs, I can have any song I want to hear at my fingertips within moments - and then shuffle them all together! The song before 'Like A Rolling Stone' was by Pearl Jam; what the next one will be, I have no idea. Could be Marilyn Manson, could be Jewel. And in an hour or so, when it's time for me to go to work, I'll get in the car and choose between the local radio station (which plays almost as wide a variety as my own mix here) or any of the CDs in the 6-disc changer. When I get to work, at any given time I will have a choice of three songs to listen to: the music in the dining room, the "upbeat" music in the bar, or the local radio station again, which will be on in the kitchen.

Come to think of it, even the "popular standards" at today's A&W are piped in via a digital satellite system...but there was still an old-timey bubble-light jukebox in the dining room.