dwasifar's daily gripe

For a week or so I’ve been listening to the 1950s radio channel on XM. I don’t listen to this a whole lot, but once in a while I’ll do something like this out of nostalgia. It never lasts very long because no matter how deep your 1950s playlist goes, you’ll eventually come to the end of it and start repeating; there will be no more 1950s music. Anyway, the other day they were playing some typical pop-song weepies – Oh, I lost her and my heart is broken, poor sad me, that sort of thing – and in the middle of this group of disposable pop songs they played “Telstar” by the Tornados.

Now, forget for the moment that “Telstar” was released in 1962 and doesn’t belong on the 1950s channel at all.  The song was released to commemorate, or capitalize on, the launch of the first communications satellites – Telstar 1 and Telstar 2, both in 1962.  It’s an instrumental, so there are no lyrics to analyze, but the feel of the song is positive, cheery, you might even say optimistic.

We absolutely don’t have this kind of thing any more.  There are no pop songs celebrating advances in technology.  In 1962, the space age captured the world’s imagination, so much that a happy dynamic piece of music named after a satellite went to #1 on the charts.  Today, technological advances are viewed with either suspicion or apathy.  Can you imagine a popular song named, say, “iPhone,” just to make you feel happy about how cool it is to be able to carry a tiny computer in your pocket and connect to the combined knowledge of the whole human race with it?  If you think about it, we have tech advances almost every week that are as cool or cooler than Telstar was.  The internet is a communications revolution that dwarfs Telstar by huge orders of magnitude, yet we don’t really think about it.  We take that in stride now, and people are blase or suspicious about science and technology.  Even the currently most popular branch of science, environmental science, doesn’t generate the kind of unbridled positivism that used to come along with space-age stuff.  Its positivism, such little as exists, is more about the joy of not changing things, or changing them back.  A song about eco-science would be full of stuffy warnings, preachy, like 1960s anti-war folk songs or civil rights ballads.  Not to say it might not still be a good song with a useful message, but not full of optimism like “Telstar.”  More like Sting.

I’m often filled with a sense of wonder and excitement about how much we can routinely do today that was simply not possible when I was a child, and how much more will be possible five, ten, twenty years from now.  From that viewpoint, it’s a great time to be alive; technology and science and knowledge are advancing at breakneck speed and it’s exhilarating to watch it, to live in this era.  I don’t understand why we all don’t stop and marvel daily at the changes and advances all around us.  Life in the 21st century is amazing.  Look around and try to see it; maybe you can get the same feeling that everyone had in 1962 when they pushed “Telstar” to the top of the top forty.  It’s a great feeling.  We should miss it in its absence.