1968, Part II

According to research performed on metadata from the Spotify music streaming service and recently reported in the New York Times, the music most frequently listened to by men of widely different ages turns out to be the music that was released when they were age 14 (13 for girls).  They analyzed the data for the number of times a given listener played a given song, the year that song was first released, and the age of the listener, and then calculated how old the listener was when the song was released.  

With remarkable precision, the frequency of play peaked for male listeners for music that was released when they were 14 years old (13 for girls).  Therefore the data shows that people in their 50s listen primarily to 70s music, people in their 30s listen primarily to 90s music, teens listen primarily to contemporary hip-hop and pop, and so on.  

The researchers conclude that the age of 14 (13 for girls) coincides more-or-less with the completion of puberty.   Therefore, the music that was popular then was what one most likely would have been hearing during the first flush of desire, the first erotic response, the first heartbreak, and getting over the first heartbreak.  Our neurons appear to become hard-wired to associate those particular sounds with those important experiences, and we carry those neural associations around with us for the rest of our lives.

This doesn't apply to me, I figured.  I recognize that I'm an oddity, a statistical outlier, but I'm 64 years old and listen mostly to music, on Spotify and elsewhere, that was released post-millennium. In my humble opinion, the greatest decade of popular music probably occurred between 2005 and 2015 (for what it's worth, the best jazz was probably recorded in the decade between 1965 and 1975).  What's more, I outgrew the juvenile bubble-gum pop I listened to at 14 by the time I graduated high school.  I wouldn't dream of listening today to my favorite songs from 14-years-old.

Or so I thought, until I did the math.  I turned 14 in 1968, when I was in the 8th grade and in that private prep school that Franklin Graham also attended.  By 1968, the counterculture had already taken over, and Janis and Jimi, Morrison and the Airplane, had already replaced the British Invasion of the earlier 60s for me, and The Beatles' 1968's white album sounded nothing like the Yeah Yeah Yeah Beatles of 1964 (ditto the Rolling Stones' 1968 Beggars Banquet album).

To be perfectly honest here, folks, I have to admit for having something of a soft spot for the music of 1968 and 1969.  Back then, caught up in the revolutionary counterculture of those heady times, I thought the music of the time was profound and important, and much of it still sounds that way to me now.

Looking back at my 1968 yearbook, I asked myself what records can I remember that smirking young man in the picture above buying during the eighth grade?  I remember him buying Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Volume I (taken mostly from Highway 61 Revisited and Blond on Blond, both of which are on my iPod today, mixed in with more modern songs).  I remember buying Jimi Hendrix' Are You Experienced? (a 1966 release, but one I didn't discover until 1968).  I remember Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing At Baxter's and, yes, the white album and Beggars Banquet.  Maybe all this is considered dad-rock now, but even writing the titles today feels like I'm describing some sort of pantheon of musical achievement.

But I don't listen to late-60s classic rock exclusively or even predominantly.  Most other albums on my iPod are from 2016 and 2017, with a few "older" LPs from 2005-2015 by Animal Collective, Godspeed!, and Thee Oh Sees.  Why did I not fall into the same rut as most other people, and only listen to music from a certain pubescent stage of my life?

Here's a theory - the unifying "message" of all that dad-rock I listed above was that music was new and fresh and urgent and revolutionary.  Could the take-away to my 14-year-old mind be that I had to keep the music new and original, to not get complacent, and to constantly break through old thresholds and barriers to hear what's being played now?  To be certain, I did manage to stay up with the rock music of the time, refreshing my acid-rock record collection of the 60s with David Bowie and prog rock and krautrock in the 70s, then punk rock and new wave in the 80s,  alternative rock in the 90s, and then indie post-millennium, with lots and lots of side diversions into free jazz and the avant-garde, various genre and subgenres of electronic music, and even flirtations with country and Texas swing.  

Did my neural circuits get wired at puberty such that the thrill of the discovery of the musically new and different still causes release of the endorphins and neurotransmitters associated with first love, first heartbreak, and young desire?