Oldies Music???

I have clear memories from when I was young, of turning on the radio, and flipping the dial across the band of New York City radio stations. Amidst the field of classic rock, and dance music, and talk radio, there was WCBS FM, the "oldies" station.

And all the music they played certainly fit the moniker - doo-wop songs, early rockabilly, a sprinkling of girl groups from the infancy of soul music, and other records where you hear the antiquity right there in the recording. Certainly not the polished sound of the day's pop or riff-rock tunes blaring from the competitors. That was oldies music. Clearly.

Every ten years or so, I would check in on WCBS as I moved past them on the radio spectrum, and would eventually hear Motown, hippie-rock, and disco added into the rotation of what "oldies" music was defined as.

More recently, WCBS has made its playlist a mix of 70s & 80s music. Wait. 80s music was becoming the oldies section? When did that happen? This was the soundtrack of my youth. Was I slowly sliding into the WCBS demographic?

Then, yesterday, it happened. While driving in the car on the way to a Dueling Pianos show up in Pennsylvania, I hit SCAN on the radio, and made my way across the NYC radio horizon, until WCBS came up. And there, serenading me from the Oldies Station of New York City was Mariah Carey's DREAMLOVER. A song from 1993.

You remember that one, right? Mariah Carey as farmgirl, cavorting through the fields of green whilst squeaking out impossible high notes...

Did the impenetrable wall of the 1990s get cracked open by the bastions of OLDIES MUSIC? And what would this mean for our little piano bar world?

Would our celebrated SECRET 80s SONG contest finally have to leap forward into the era of the millenial? Would songs from the 50s and 60s simply disappear from the collective memory, as they have from radio playlists?

I could feel my arteries hardening and my cataracts blossoming as I pondered what it means to join the ranks of the fuddy-duddies who wax nostalgic about the good ole days when music was music, and bemoaned the young whippersnappers for the noise they called popular song.

It's hard enough for me to think of Rick Astley and Belinda Carlisle as oldies music, but this addition of 1990's pop might have finally put the final nail in my illusions of hanging onto my youth.

Pour me a prune juice, I'm off to the piano bar.

#oldiesmusic #mariahcarey #dreamlover #rickastley #belindacarlisle