Rate Your Music score: 3.04 out of 5!
Ever spend decades trying to identify an old song you used to hear?
AM radio in our area in the early 1980s was in an MOR malaise. When a local AM station finally switched to a new format of current rock, my parents refused to add it to the presets on the car radio for months. I listened to this station on the way to and from school in 5th grade, but that was a pretty short distance, and my parents usually controlled the radio the rest of the time.
This means much of the music I heard on the car radio was geared to a grownup fan base. I wouldn't say this music was always bad. Some of it is at least listenable, and most of it reached the pop chart. But this softer music just wasn't what I was usually interested in when I was young.
Music evokes memories. For 40 years, I had the opening of a song stuck in my head that I couldn't identify. I associated it with all of the zillion stations that played music for the oldsters - and, by extension, their angry lectures that were so common then. How I longed for those days! At least that was better than putting up with The Today Show lately.
Just recently, with the help of YouTube, I figured out this unidentified song was a lost hit by Al Jarreau - back when he used only his last name. It turns out that it was popular right when the MOR madness was starting to let up for a few years. It never went away completely, of course, but it was less of a factor through the mid-1980s.
This wasn't the only oldie that took a long time for me to identify. I identified "Romeo's Tune" by Steve Forbert about 10 years after it was popular. I know there was a 1960s-era song that used a melody that's strikingly similar to a longtime opening theme to National Geographic specials, but I can't identify it. A YouTube commenter called the National Geographic theme "the music of intelligence", because those specials were indeed much smarter than the crap that fills the TV airwaves now.
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