Tag Archives: retro

On Repeat

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I have an eclectic taste in music. From Zeppelin to Taylor Swift, Black Eyed Peas to AC/DC, Eminem to Vivaldi, Kitaro to the Violent Femmes… I don’t care who the artist is. I hear a song that hits me the right way and I’m hooked. When a song strikes a chord with me (literally and figuratively) I get a bit obsessed.

Right now that song is Last Man Standing by Livingston.

I’m listening to it now… on repeat while I write this. 

‘On repeat’ used to be so much harder. Now I just click the repeat icon twice on my iPhone and the song plays until I change the setting. 

I can remember lying down on the floor in the living room next to my parent’s record player and getting up after the song played so that I could lift the record player arm and gently put it back to the start of the song again, and again, and again. And when I say I remember doing this, I’m not exaggerating. Despite the memories going back 40-45 years I can still remember the songs I did this with: Queen’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, The Carpenters ‘Top of the World’, Lipps ‘Funkytown’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘All of My Love’, and Pink Floyd’s ’Mother’… I wasn’t joking when I said my tastes were eclectic. 

Later I improved my ‘on repeat’ skills with a Radio Shack tape recorder.

I can remember having an entire 45 minute tape side with nothing except Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ and The J. Geils Band’s ‘Freeze Frame’. The songs don’t just alternate, they were in the order that I was able to record them from a pop rock am radio station. It was an art form simultaneously hitting the play and record button on the tape machine just when the DJ stopped talking, and still maximizing the song’s intro that he was talking over. 

My recent obsessions before my current one were Taylor Swift’s ‘Maroon’, Colin Hay from Men at Work singing an acoustic version of ‘Overkill’, Sean Brown’s ‘Higher Baby’, David Wilcox’s ‘Breakfast at the Circus’, Mia Morris’ ‘Gone My Way’, and Michaela Slinger’s ‘Petty Things’. 

I have no idea what song or even what genre will tickle my musical fancy next, but until then, I’ll be choosing between these most recent choices ‘on repeat’.

Recycled and Reused

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Recently on social media I’ve seen a lot of ideas reused and reshared. Jokes from my childhood are showing up like they are new. Platitudes are being repeated. And stories are being redone. This isn’t new, but it’s a growing pattern. Look at how many movies are being redone as a perfect example. The same story with new characters.

It’s not just about bringing back the classics. Rather it’s about the constant demand for new content. There just aren’t enough ideas to feed the content machines so riffing off of past content becomes an easier option.

A perfect example is that I’ve seen a couple different reasons of this video recently.

I first saw this go viral 12 years ago and here it is making the rounds again. But it’s not this version, it’s completely redone. Old ideas recycled with new content. There is going to be a lot more of this old content redelivered in the coming years, because the algorithm for engagement is all about putting new content out there fast and often… and new ideas are harder to come up with compared to something that already had success. The old is new again.