Dec. 20: Everything old is new again

 It is comforting to see that young people today like the same music that their boomer and Gen X grandparents enjoyed. Take a stroll through your average high school and you'll see kids with T-shirts extolling the likes of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Guns N Roses. They know that something happened to popular music around the turn of the century - that songwriting stopped being an organic in-studio process of self-expression and started being a factory-produced collection of computerized synth-beats. Kids got tired of the phoniness of top 40 radio. Craving real music, they went back to the past, and they found it there.

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The phonograph dates back to the late 1800s. For more than a century, it - along with its descendants - was the most popular way people would listen to music. By the 1940s, the phonograph became known as the record player. Those things got workouts in the 1950s when rock and roll was all the rage. And with the advent of LPs, musicians had another artistic outlet with which to share their worldview. They could continue to do so with the music itself, but now, with an album cover, they had a full canvas in which to impress and reel in their audience.

As with everything, progress marches on. Eight-track tape players came on the market in the 1960s. They were popular because you could take them with you and play them in car stereos. As the name implies, each tape had eight tracks, generally divided into four programs of two songs apiece. You didn't have to rewind these tapes because they played on an endless loop. My family had plenty of eight-track tapes, which we would play in the car on road trips. Our favourites were the ones by Roger Whittaker, John Denver, and the Irish Rovers.

Eight-tracks were phased out by compact cassettes, which were phased out by compact discs, which were phased out by mp3s and digital music, which is where we are today. I know people who have thousands of songs on their devices and not one cassette tape or compact disc in their home. Such is the way of the world today.

But not everyone is like that.

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I was in a store the other day and they were selling records. Honest to goodness records. They had one by the Rolling Stones. They had one by Pink Floyd. They were shrink wrapped so I couldn't flip through them and inhale that intoxicating scent of vinyl, but they were records nonetheless. Everything old is new again.

I have, of course, been aware of the resurgence of vinyl for quite some time. Amanda Marshall issued her latest album, Heavy Lifting, on vinyl and, I note, brand new record players can, again, be purchased in high-end stores.

I doubt I will ever buy another LP. The older I get, the more I want to downsize. More stuff I do not need. Still, I'm happy that nostalgia is not dead and that, for some of us, the old ways are better.