Digital Audio Tape, My Butt! When I Was a Kid, We Had Compact Disks, and I Don't Recall No-One Complaining

Huh.

Listening to a Live365.com online radio station has actually learned me sump'm.

The station in question be "Stuck in the '50s," to which I hooked up thinking it would be doo-wop and bubblegum. Nope. It's the stuff that doo-wop and bubblegum were reacting against, the stuff that 40s big-band jazz became in the 50s. Nat King Cole and such-like.

Two reactions:

1. This stuff is what you listened to on the hi-fi at home, after the kids had gone to bed, with a martini in one hand and a smoke in the other.

2. It's either classic secular Christmas music only not about Christmas, or Disney-movie music that's not from a Disney movie. Sometimes it's both.

Now, even with a mere three or four hours of exposure to this stuff, I comprehend the fuss (pro and con) over Elvis. I mean, listening to 40s jazz, Elvis doesn't seem all that much of a stretch. But this stuff...if they had "retro" or "neo" in the 50s, this would be retro- or neo- Victorian "Sentimental Age" songsmithy. Elvis really was a departure. And, interestingly, I can hear, in some of Elvis' songs, the influence of this adult music. Not a primary influence, but it's still there.