RoCkInG The Boat!

		Wednesday, April 01, 2009
		Hey! Ho! Let's Go! From Our "You Know The Times Have Really Changed When..." Dept.: This morning, as I was doing a bit of pre-work grocery shopping at the Wallingford QFC, a very familiar song came over the speakers: The Ramones' 1976 punk anthem "Blitzkrieg Bop". And it wasn't some mixed down Muzak version either, but the actual song, playing at about two-thirds volume over the loudspeakers in a mainstream urban neighborhood grocery store at 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. I smiled at first, because it just seemed like such an odd, goofy choice for shopping music, and for a moment I wondered if some store employee had put it on as a joke, it being April 1st and all. But, looking around, nobody else seemed to particularly notice. Well, except for one of the guys stocking in the produce section, whom I overheard asking one of his buddies, "Is this ZZ Top?" Ouch! Later however, I came to a rather sobering realization: my generation has now apparently officially supplanted my parent's as "the middle-aged people whose Favorite Music Of Their Youth now gets played in grocery stores". I was even more taken aback by the realization that "Blitzkrieg Bop" is more than 30 years old, and that in fact I know and regularly work with people who weren't even born when the song first came out. So, I guess I should expect to regularly hear other music from my formative years being pumped under-volume through shopping malls and retail stores for the next decade or two. Yeah, shopping to The Sex Pistols or Romeo Void or The Stranglers (or to go to the other generational musical extreme: Donna Summer, Sister Sledge, and The Village People), knowing the marketers are specifically targeting Yours Truly is going to make the experience soooooo much more pleasant from here on out. Although, on the other hand, Talking Heads as shopping music does sort of seem like a natural, no matter what age you are. Sigh! I just hope they don't add any sappy violins... Labels: Aging, Music, QFC, Shopping, The Ramones Posted byCOMTE on 9:18 AM

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