Synapse to the Beat: Frank Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year"

The briefest of high school flashbacks: I and three other students are locked into a smallish room in the library. We're required to record our voices for some reason or another, and one of the students - John was his name - has a cassette tape for the purpose.

Thing is, it's not blank. We're to tape over the music that his mother had recorded on the tape for her own personal use.

It was Frank Sinatra, music as foreign to us as a Gamelan orchestra. I'd certainly never heard Frank Sinatra before, or if I had I wasn't especially aware or having done so. Background noise, I guess.

In that tiny room, desperate to seem hip, we were amused by the swelling strings of this growing-old classic. "When I was seventeen," Frank slowly intoned, "it was a very good year." He sounded pitifully uncool, with his deep morose voice, heavy with the bittersweet retrospect of a man growing old, something again completely alien to us kids. John snickered and pressed FFWD. I'm not sure if it was merely a morbid curiosity about the dreadful Frank Sinatra or an admonition not to tape over the Frank song that had us searching for its end on the cassette. But through sheer luck, when John pressed play, the tape had fast forwarded through the first verse and the first instrumental between-verse melody. "When I was twenty-one," Frank intoned immediately, in that same grave voice, "it was a very good year."

This was hilarious to us, an old man running down his life, seemingly year by year. Another fast-forward, and as luck would have it John timed it exactly so that, through sheer coincidence, he pressed play just as the third verse was starting. Third verse, third age: he was now on about when he was thirty-five.

Now that I'm a year older than Frank Sinatra's era of dalliances with blue-blooded girls (and have yet ot ride in a chauffeur-driven limousine), I admit I truly love the song. A bit wiser, maybe - better able to appreciate its wistful sense of not-quite-regretful nostalgia. But back then, far younger than seventeen, I couldn't have imagined anything more ridiculous and hilariously uncool that some old guy singing in an old-guys' genre about growing old.

Synapse to the Beat: Coven's "One Tin Soldier"

I wonder what high school and elementary school is like today.

I went to school in the 1980s, taught by teachers who came of age in the 1960s. They were idealists who couldn't get over the hippie dream, I guess. When contemporaries were 'selling out' and reaping in the cash in the greed-filled 1980s, they chose the more altruistic route. With their second-hand Hondas and threadbare corduroy slacks, they probably couldn't help being a bit resentful.

But in classes, they were able to be as radical as they wanted to be. Memories fade; I can't point to too many examples, but I know that I was schooled almost entirely by pacifist neo-Marxists. I was too young to know that, but it's infused me to a degree that I think a lot of 'conservative' tastemakers would find horribly offensive.

An interesting sidebar, though: in grade four or five, I can't remember which, we had a music teacher. Whatever path in life led her to employment in an elementary school I cannot know, but she was religious. This in istelf was a novely, but not one I took to too kindly. I can recall her playing Stryper for us (Christian poodle-rockers who wore bee costumes, I kid you not) and talking about Jesus. I and two of my friends, who would have been nine or ten at the time, went to the principal's office entirely of our own accord to complain that the teacher was proselytising in class. In retrospect I'm incredibly proud of that.

Anyway, I was less offended by songs like 'One Tin Soldier'. Quite the opposite: when we got to grade six or seven, i can't remember which, we had a music teacher who seemed intent on instilling hippie values in all of us. 'One Tin Soldier' seemed to take up an inordinate percentage of our class. As I recall it, she made us sing the song countless times. I actually loved the song (I was a kid; I didn't have the best critical faculties) and got no small amount of pleasure from singing it in class. But it's really quite radical a song: not just pacifistic in nature but also quite anti-religious as I see it ('Do it in the name of Heaven; you can justify it in the end') - a topic we might as well spend a minute looking at.

Although the song is Canadian and was recorded originally by a band called the original Caste (Ooh! Hinduism!), it's best known in a version by a band called Coven (Ooh! Wicca! - wait...) Coven, whose début album was called 'Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls' and included songs with titles such as 'Pact with Lucifer' and 'Satanic Mass'. Wikipedia also, though, says that the song is popular as a Christian camp song. Which makes little sense to me. But what do I know?

Anyway, it strikes me as a pretty controversial song, one that certain people might find offensive, might consider propaganda. It wasn't the only one. There were other pacifist songs, ecologist songs, songs I can't quite remember. I do remember the same teacher introducing us to Bruce Cockburn's 'If I Had a Rocket Launcher' - and that, in retrospect, is a pretty radical thing for a teacher to do: to play for 12-year-olds a song that says, 'If I had a rocket launcher, some son-of-a-bitch would die'.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining. I'm actually thankful that somehow my educators were able to carry on 'indoctrinating' us without anyone, seemingly, stopping them. I'd like to think it created a generation of progressives.

But according to polls, 31.5% of people aged 25-44 support the Conservatives, scarcely below the overall nationwide number of 35.4%.

So like everything else the children of the 60s did, it hardly mattered in the long run.

Synapse to the Beat: Radiohead's "OK Computer"

I don't want to do the grumpy-old-man-bitches-about-today's-music thing. It is true that the majority of the music I listen to on any given day was recorded before the year 2000, but I'd like to think that reflects more on my than it does on the music that's out there today. To a certain extent, I think people have a finite amount of 'music that moves them' available to them, and after a certain point, what moves other people just ceases to move you. But that reflects little on what's out there and a lot on you yourself.

Except this. I was reading something about OK Computer, and I noticed a rather mundane fact that struck me: it was released in 1997. Yeah, so what, right? Well, it's 2011 right now, and that means this album was released 14 years ago. Now here's where it gets a bit funky: sure, the world has changed in the past 14 years. Music has changed. There are new things out there, different things out there. Importantly, how we consume music is completely different - the 'digital revolution' has changed the behaviours involved in music consumption in a way that in 1997, when there was an internet after there was MP3 technology, remember, we couldn't have predicted.

But... consider the world now and the world into which OK Computer was born. Now, go 14 years before that: 1983, and Duran Duran and Michael Jackson. MTV, synths, those horribly OTT eighties drums and saxophones every-bloody-where. Madonna is traipsing about with her bra on over her clothing and Cyndi Lauper is wearing bright plastic 'spangle' bracelets.

The world of 1983 seems hopelessly 'retro' today, but it did in 1997, too. We listened to 1983 music with ironic distance in 1997, amazed at how different everything had become. Those were great days, but they were very different days. There's no way to confuse 1983 and 1997; they were two entirely different beasts.

Now repeat the exercise and go back 14 years before that: 1969, the year of Woodstock. Long-haired hippies, denim, peace-and-love and Charles Manson. Jimi Hendrix was alive and the Beatles were still together. This is a world I know nothing about (I was born in 1975) and it's a world that has always seemed as far away as William Shakespeare or Christopher Columbus to me.

Now that's just my perspective, of course, one that people even just a half-generation older than me would laugh at. But the point remains: 1969 was nothing like 1983. If you could teleport a 1969 hippie to 1983 and play the radio for him, he'd find it completely alien. And probably hate it.

14 years before that and you've got 'year zero': 1955. The year of Elvismania, of "Rock Around the Clock". The year accepted as the 'birth of rock and roll', whether or not you buy that particular fiction. 'Sock hops' and Beaver Cleaver, Little Richard and soda shops. Again, light years away.

Isn't this the speed at which popular cutire, including music, is supposed to progress? I know I'm not a teenager now so I don't really 'get' it, and I'd love to think that there are still revolutions happening out there today, ones that maybe I'm unaware of but that in time will be seen as as game-changing as Elvis in 1955, Hendrix in '69, Michael Jackson in '83 and, yes, Radiohead in 1997. But it's tough to avoid the conclusion that momentum has somehow been lost, that somehow progress in music is 'slowing down'. Is there nothing left to do? Has everything already been done? I can't believe that. But where are today's revolutionaries?