During April and May of 2020, as everything was shut down, I was tagged in the “20 album” challenge on Facebook. With so much time on my hands, the challenge morphed into “my life in 20 albums.” Last week I was on a radio show discussing my selections.
A couple of things stood out to me as I took this trip down memory lane. One, a lot of my memories have to do with libraries. Two, it was very challenging, even as a librarian, to hunt down a band with the name “X” prior to the internet. Three, it is amazing to me how I remember not just the lyrics but every scratch on the albums I listened to growing up.
Discussing the experience of the 20 album challenge on air, I further recalled how my attitude toward social media deteriorated over the course of those two months, as Facebook began censoring Covid-related posts, causing me to get into online kerfuffles over the censorship. At several points I almost closed my account altogether.
Another thing that was brought home to me through reviving this project was the diversity of the media I consumed as a child of the 70s and 80s. The music I listened to cut across race, sex, class, and sexual orientation. As far as television, my friends and I grew up watching Fat Albert as children and later The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, What’s Happenin’, and Good Times, but the rise of cable TV in the mid-80s and 90s, and the resultant market segmentation, may have gradually reduced the exposure of audiences to such diversity of programming. Music, even with the rise of streaming, did not silo in the same way.
Music has a unique ability to dissolve barriers. After these past few difficult years I recommend people dust off their own albums and corresponding memories.
Top photo: Sly and the Family Stone (1968 publicity photo).jpg/ Wikimedia Commons
Buckle in, it's two hours.