Recently at a Jacksonville Suns minor league baseball game, my kids noticed that each time a home-team player went to bat; a snippet of a song was played. It got them talking about what their theme music would be and it got me thinking how much music is intertwined in our lives. It’s in commercials, television shows, movies, heck – even our cell phone ring tones. In the immortal words of the Miami Sound Machine – “the rhythm is gonna get you!” Like it or not.
The President arrives to the strains of “Hail to the Chief,” the Queen reins to “God Save the Queen,” and the Pope addresses his followers after the “Papal Anthem.” These heads of state inherited a theme song along with their powerful positions. Sadly, real life doesn’t come with a built-in soundtrack. As cool as it would be to have the first few measures of “Eye of the Tiger” play every time you enter a room; it’s probably not going to happen. But there are a few rare moments that music does accompany our real life. All brides know that as soon as the first notes of Wagner’s “Bridal March” are played that every eye in the church will be on her. We all sing the same song on our birthday, usually without fear of any copyright infringement we might be committing. Internally we all have had the theme from Rocky play inside our head on those days when we need extra motivation, have heard those two simple notes from Jaws when things seem slightly ominous, and a single moaning mental bugle has blown “Taps” when we have a personal epic fail! Plato said “Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.” So take heart! Even though the rest of the world can’t hear Justin Timberlake singing “Sexy Back” while you’re walking down the street, you can, and that’s all that matters!
Commercial jingles jangle inside our minds; exactly as they are designed to do. Even non-music lovers have their favorites to love and hate. Classic jingles such as Alka Seltzer’s “Plop Plop Fizz Fizz”, Oscar Mayer’s “The Bologna Song”, and McDonald’s “Big Mac” chant are now part of our unique American culture. Some tunes are simply irritating such as “Viva Viagra” and the Meow Mix’s “Meow Meow Meow Meow” wail. Pop icon Barry Manilow got his start writing jingles. You can thank him for Band Aid’s “I Am Stuck On Band Aid’s”, McDonald’s “You Deserve A Break Today”, and Dr. Pepper’s “Be A Pepper”. The St. Louis Cardinals use the tune from Budweiser’s “King of Beers” as their team song. Whether you like the ad’s tune or not, it usually gets your attention and although you may not necessarily remember what it’s trying to sell you, you usually remember the song. . Music not only sells, it sticks, way past the shelf-life of the product it was written for and into our everyday lives.
Name this TV show-
You take the good, you take the bad,
You take them both and there you have….
Yep, the “Facts of Life”! One of my all-time favorite television shows growing up. Along with “The Love Boat”, “Magnum P.I”, and “Different Strokes”. And they all have something in common – memorable theme songs. The music we listened to on the radio growing up, the albums we bought, and the television show themes we heard all played a part in the symphony of our lives. One of the odd things about music is that you don’t have to be a true music lover for it to have an effect on you personally. It’s just there in the background making memories for us. Just hearing a familiar tune can sometimes spark images of good and even bad times. Music marks the timeline of our lives. But why is it that just a few notes of “Ice Ice Baby” instantly gives me a mental Polaroid of my brother in red parachute pants riding his BMX bike down the street? In 2009, the University of California proved through a brain-scan study that music serves as a soundtrack for memories that play like a movie inside our heads. Just a few notes of a song you loved in high school can instantly bring you back to a particular person or place and all of sudden you are experiencing that moment all over again. That definitely explains why I can’t hear the 1985 hit “No One Is To Blame” without wanting to physically fight someone, but that is for a different blog. Tolstoy said “music is the shorthand of emotion.” That’s a very powerful and very short sentence, unlike his epic novels. I have a feeling Leo liked to listen to very melancholy melodies.
To borrow a bit from my good friends at America’s Cotton Producers, music is the fabric of our lives. It helps to weave bits of love and celebration and fun and pain and heartache into our frontal cortex and stores it there, just waiting for us to rediscover. Music is the exclamation point to what we need to know which is probably why it’s used to tell us things and sell us things. But most importantly, music helps us to remember who we were and who we are. So although we don’t actually get our own theme song like those lucky baseball players we do get our own unique internal playlist. Just remember to not hit the replay button too much and keep on downloading new hits. And if you ever run into Howard Jones, let him know I’d like to have a few words with him!