Time is weird.
At the end of January, I wrote a column here titled “The 20-Year-Nostalgia Glitch.” If you haven’t read that one, you should. Anyway, in it I point out that up until the year 2000, our nostalgic TV shows and movies were almost always from 20 years before. So, Happy Days (the TV show) debuted in 1974, and it portrayed the 1950s. The theme song for Happy Days, at least the most famous version of it, was a hit by Bill Haley and His Comets in 1954, 20 years before the TV show. If there was going to be a nostalgic show about 2004, I suppose it would have to be an Usher song. I could not think of any songs from 2004, so I had to do an internet search. I knew almost zero of the top 100 songs from 2004. The point is, I went and watched a video of the #1 song from Usher in 2004, and if you didn’t tell me it was 2004, and if you told me it was 2024, I wouldn’t be able to tell.
I don’t know what I was listening to in 2004, but it was certainly not pop music. I saw the Super Bowl this year, and Usher was the halftime show, and I watched it and thought “Ok, so this guy is famous, I guess. Didn’t we used to bring out old-timer legends, like Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, or Prince?”
The other day my wife and I were talking about how almost all the songs in commercials now are old classics from the 70s, 80s, or 90s. We don’t watch any kind of broadcast TV much, but when we see it, it is quite noticeable that the go-to music for commercials comes from the last three decades of the last century.
I remember in the early 90s when Chevy started the Like a Rock commercials using the song from Bob Seger. At the time I thought “Man, they just ruined that song for me forever.” That song became so identifiable with the Chevy commercials, that whenever I’d hear it played on an oldies station, it just made me think of the Chevy commercials. Which is great for Chevy, and maybe great for Bob Seger’s wallet, but not great for the song and my affection for it.
The song meant a lot to me because it came out in 1986. The lyrics of the 2nd verse went like this:
I was eighteen
Didn’t have a care
Working for peanuts
Not a dime to spare
But I was lean and
Solid everywhere
Like a rock
Time is weird.
I was 19 in 1986. I remember hearing that song while driving in my car in Lubbock, Texas in 1986. I’d been through a lot of stuff and I was temporarily out of school and I was “working for peanuts, not a dime to spare,” just like the song said. It was me. What’s funny about time is that when I heard the song, I was the young man looking forward. I knew it was written by an older man looking back at his youth. Bob Seger was 41 years old in 1986. Presumably, he wrote the song in the years before that, so he was looking back 20 years to when he was 18. And I was hearing it and getting it, just over 18 years old, and I identified with the song, even though I wouldn’t be 41 and looking back at 18 until 2008…. When (I have learned) Usher was a pretty big thing, even though I didn’t know it.
Ok, it gets weirder. Another hit song in 1986 was the song Twenty Years Ago recorded by Kenny Rogers. He didn’t write it, but it became a hit in 1986. In that song, the writer is walking through his hometown, nostalgic, thinking about what life was like twenty years before. There is even a line about his “best friend Joe” who went to Vietnam and died “twenty years ago.”
It’s been a long time since I walked
Through this old town
But oh how the memories start to flow
And there’s the old movie house
They finally closed it down
You could find me there every Friday night
Twenty years ago
[Verse 2]
I worked the counter at the drugstore down the street
But nobody’s left there I would know
On Saturday mornings that’s where
All my friends would meet
You’d be surprised to know what a dime would buy
Twenty years ago
I heard that song at 19 years old and I identified with it, even though I wasn’t even born twenty years before it was written and recorded. I identified with the feeling of nostalgia, even though I had never experienced it yet.
The weird part is that I remember hearing those two songs in 1986 and thinking about time and how it passes and being fascinated by it. I remember driving in my car and hearing those songs and thinking “Someday, Lord willing, I’ll look back on this time and remember.”
I don’t know if I have a point in all this, other than to note that at some point “twenty years ago” stopped meaning what it used to mean. Our lives have changed from twenty years ago, but I don’t know that I’m tied to any music or any other cultural or social anchor points like I once was, even when I was 18 and looking forward. When I used to hear my parents or my grandmother say, “twenty years ago,” it was always a reference to something epic, notable, sometime from the “before times” when things were wholly different.
I guess the only way to end this commentary on time, since I’m not sure it has a point, is with the last bit of the song Twenty Years Ago:
All my memories from those days come gather round me
What I’d give if they could take me back in time
It almost seems like yesterday
Where do the good times go?
Life was so much easier twenty years ago
Oh, it almost seems like yesterday
Twenty years ago
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.