Over and over again ...

These days I have the radio turned off and is silence at home because I worry that the sound of the voice of the sociopath in the Oval Office will trigger a PTSD event in me.  The fascist has killed even the simple pleasure of everyday life that listening to NPR was.

Damn those 63 million voters!

One of the segments in the NPR news programs that always educated me without fail was when they talked about contemporary popular music.  I need such an education because for years now I have been clueless about what the young people now listen to.

For instance, a year or so ago, back in the good old days when we met in person, a student referred to a Beyoncé song during a class discussion.  The rest of the class eagerly jumped into the conversation.  I, the dinosaur in the room, asked them what the song was and, well, you should have been there to have enjoyed the responses from students ;)

As we get older, most of us stop listening to new music.

Most of us stop responding to new music because we know better. You can read that sentence and its last word any way you want; it’s still going to apply. But even if we don’t know better, per se, we still know just as good, and so we know enough to understand that it’s been done before, whatever this is we’re listening to. 

Whether it is from the old country, or here in the adopted home, the old songs are the ones that I respond to the most.  Some are songs from even before I was born.

And the older I get, I seem to want to listen to the same old songs over and over.  There are some CDs and LPs that I have not even touched--other than to dust them.  Ella gets lots of play time, but practically nothing for most of the rest.

So, why do we listen to our old favorites over and over again?  "Because repeated sounds work magic in our brains"

It is all a long-winded way of saying that you can't teach an old dog new tricks.  Wait, do dogs listen to music, and do they have preferences?