What is that noise coming from your room?

To anyone who has been raised in the Western NY area one thing is certain – wherever you go you will always have to identify yourself as someone who is not from NYC. Subsequently you will always battle this bias that the world has about New Yorkers and their attitudes. You won’t find those attitudes out here on the western frontier, and we certainly don’t talk the way they do in NYC – think more of a nasally twang – that’s us. We live in the forgotten part of NYS (and let’s not turn this in to some discussion about what Senator Clinton has not done for this part of the state, okay?).

Vincent Gallo, who some of you may or may not know, began his life in Buffalo before becoming a model for Calvin Klein and then an actor, a director, and the seller of his own sperm on eBay. There is one other certainty if you are from this area, and Vincent Gallo explored parts of this in his film “Buffalo 66”, and that is that 70’s music rules the airwaves and provides a back-story for all of our lives. This music is so entrenched in our culture here that the format for Rochester and Buffalo’s top radio stations is Classic Rock. I’ve discussed my love of 70’s music in a previous post, so I don’t want to go into that to a great extent, but I will reiterate that on long car trips when it is my turn to drive, we listen to what I want to listen to. This might often be Yes, or The Who, or Genesis, or even a Classic Rock Greatest Hits CD. Or it could be Tori Amos, Sarah MacLachlan, Rascal Flatts, or Toby Keith. The bottom line is that my children have been exposed to all types of music, and have even on occasion listened to 70’s music on their own (DN1 loves “A Trick of the Tail” from Genesis). They do, however, prefer their own type of music, whether it is Screamo, Hard Core, Industrial or whatever other genre they are listening to.

Now I have been reading a book entitled Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time by J. Richard Gott. I must qualify this and say that I am in no way a geek; this book is for the non-scientific math illiterates like me, and is written in layman’s terms with analogies comparing time travel to slicing bread. Yeah, time travel = food, I’m with you now. In this book Gott postulates that time travel is indeed probable and that we can travel to the past, because if the world is a three dimensional model, then time is the fourth dimension and we can find a way to travel in and around this fourth dimension. It’s all very scientific and much too in depth for this blog. Suffice it to say that we can travel through time, and I know this to be a fact.

When we moved here in August, three of my four children who moved with me entered into the fourth dimension and we traveled back in time, only to find that we are still in the present. Confusing? Let me explain. DN1 will upon occasion listen to what I am listening to. She’s a girl with good taste. She’s my hero. SN2 thinks that the music I listen to is crap. DN2 – well, she thinks the lead singer from My Chemical Romance is hot – and at the same time she wants the CD they advertise on TV with the song about Susie having a cow on her head. She’s 7, you know, so she’s all over the place. But a strange phenomenon occurred back in September; SN2 began asking me about certain bands, like AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the Doors, while still listening to As I Lay Dying, On Broken Wings, Further is Forever, and Thirty Seconds to Mars, amongst other bands.

Imagine my surprise when just last night I heard music coming from his room and I was able to immediately identify it. How did I know? Because back in 1977 when I was in 8th grade everyone, and I mean everyone, had “Frampton Comes Alive”. Yes, the dulcet tones of Peter Frampton were coming from across the hall. Amazing. I never thought I’d hear that coming from his room.

Now you know and I know that it is the influence of other kid’s that is directing his taste in music, and that these kids have learned about this music from their parents. I can rationalize that just as much as anyone else, but what I can’t quite puzzle out is how after having lived in different locations far away from Western NY, one returns and is immediately sucked into this 70’s music vortex. We are caught in something here and even when you move away, you’re never away from it, and then once you’re back, you’re stuck. And it has little to do with the radio stations either, it is a phenomenon perpetuated by the parents who pass it on to their children who then pass it on to their children, and the parents can’t leave it either. Perhaps I’m over thinking this too much, but it is hilarious to think that when we got in the car last night at 10:00 to drive SN2’s girlfriend home and a song came on the radio, the three of them (SN2, girlfriend and friend) shouted out trying to guess who it was. It was The Who. They didn’t get it. But they will.