Oldies Music Quotes

Do you like eighties music, Nurse Willowes?” “Can we discuss the oldies another time?” “What? What? The oldies? I’ve already had a man kicking in my ribs, and now you pull out my heart.” “Hey!

A Day Away We often think that our affairs, great or small, must be tended continuously and in detail, or our world will disintegrate, and we will lose our places in the universe. That is not true, or if it is true, then our situations were so temporary that they would have collapsed anyway. Once a year or so I give myself a day away. On the eve of my day of absence, I begin to unwrap the bonds which hold me in harness. I inform housemates, my family and close friends that I will not be reachable for twenty-four hours; then I disengage the telephone. I turn the radio dial to an all-music station, preferably one which plays the soothing golden oldies. I sit for at least an hour in a very hot tub; then I lay out my clothes in preparation for my morning escape, and knowing that nothing will disturb me, I sleep the sleep of the just. On the morning I wake naturally, for I will have set no clock, nor informed my body timepiece when it should alarm. I dress in comfortable shoes and casual clothes and leave my house going no place. If I am living in a city, I wander streets, window-shop, or gaze at buildings. I enter and leave public parks, libraries, the lobbies of skyscrapers, and movie houses. I stay in no place for very long. On the getaway day I try for amnesia. I do not want to know my name, where I live, or how many dire responsibilities rest on my shoulders. I detest encountering even the closest friend, for then I am reminded of who I am, and the circumstances of my life, which I want to forget for a while. Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, lovers, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops. If we step away for a time, we are not, as many may think and some will accuse, being irresponsible, but rather we are preparing ourselves to more ably perform our duties and discharge our obligations. When I return home, I am always surprised to find some questions I sought to evade had been answered and some entanglements I had hoped to flee had become unraveled in my absence. A day away acts as a spring tonic. It can dispel rancor, transform indecision, and renew the spirit.

For many of the people in my immediate vicinity, it was clear that the Beatles (to say nothing of McCartney’s solo career) ceased to be a going concern once the Summer of Love commenced. Anything in the set list that was even mildly psychedelic—“The Fool on the Hill,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”—went over like Timothy Leary at the 1968 Republican National Convention. Apparently, there are still people for whom Sgt. Pepper is a radical—perhaps too radical—musical experiment. This wasn’t a classic-rock-radio crowd, it was an oldies-radio crowd. I, too, was hoping to hear my favorite Beatles hits. But I also secretly wished that McCartney would play “Temporary Secretary,” one of the battiest tracks from one of his battiest solo albums, 1980’s McCartney II. I believe that “Temporary Secretary” is a legitimately great song, even if it is totally bonkers. “Temporary Secretary” sounds like a businessman discussing his staffing practices while also imitating a car alarm. It’s genius! But the main reason I wanted to hear “Temporary Secretary” is because I knew that it would confound all of the boomers in the house who stopped following Paul McCartney’s career after he wrote “Michelle.

By contrast, not a single respondent at the fixed end of the worldview distribution identified either rap or hip-hop as his or her favorite, to say nothing of K-pop or EDM. Instead, the fixed especially love country, oldies, and old country. Country music turned out to be a very polarizing genre. A significant number of the fluid said that they like all music except country.

The Peggot aunts must have seized the equipment because the music was oldies, Michael Jackson and Prince.

The magical encounter with the Beethoven quartet, the Bach suite, the Brahms symphony, in which your whole being is gripped by melodic and harmonic ideas and taken on a journey through the imaginary space of music - that experience which lies at the heart of our civilisation and which is an incomparable source of joy and consolation to all those who know it - is no longer a universal resource. It has become a private eccentricity, something that a dwindling body of oldies cling to, but which is regarded by many of the young as irrelevant. Increasingly young ears cannot reach out to this enchanted world, and therefore turn away from it. The loss is theirs, but you cannot explain that to them, any more than you can explain the beauty of colours to someone who is congenitally blind.

The truly great songs, the ones that age and golden-oldies radio stations cannot wither, are about our romantic feelings. And this is not because songwriters have anything to add to the subject; it’s just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself.

When I go on these tragic calls, I'll usually either sit in silence or find some upbeat music on the radio to distract me from the void. It can be anything: Pop music. Oldies. Katy Perry.

I walked out of a chic downtown Manhattan restaurant not long ago, with friends, before we’d ordered, because the music was so loud we were reduced to making hand signals. Four gestures I remember making (the extent of my sign language) were: “thumbs down,” “knife across throat,” “this is bullshit,” and “let’s get out of here.” The cacophony, increasingly, is the point. It’s a way to keep out the oldies, of which now, I suppose, we were. When I’m trapped in a restaurant that’s playing shitty songs at defenestrating volume, I think longingly of the house rules at St. John, Fergus Henderson’s restaurant in London: “No art. No music.” To crib a line from the poet William Matthews, the jukebox plays Marcel Marceau.