True North

One of the pleasures of growing older is to discover something new in experiences you previously thought you had wrung dry of meaning.

[Dennis the Peasant voice]Although, I'm only 41, I'm not old![/Dennis the Peasant voice] I just continue moving to the right on the timeline of history.

One example from when I was younger. When I was a wee lad, I'd always marvel that from afar a lake would be a beautiful blue, but when you got up to the water's edge, the water would be tinged green with plant growth. I couldn't understand what happened to the color until I was older and I realized that the lake was blue because it was reflecting the sky above. I saw a connection between Up There and Down Here that had always been there, but had eluded me till I was ready to understand it. I think that was one of the early factors that sparked my interest in science, this search for the hidden that isn't really hidden, rather it's just sitting there waiting for you to see it.

I was fifteen when MTV started in 1981, the perfect age to be wowed by that marriage of music and the visual. (For you young'uns, MTV actually played music videos back then.) Music videos permeated the culture. Heck, in an episode that first aired in November 1986, Alf made a rock video to impress Lynn. (And who didn't want to impress Lynn back then?)

The first video played on MTV, the one that started it all, was Video Killed The Radio Star, by The Buggles. At the time, I grasped that the song was about change, about television replacing radio, but I could only hear the electronically altered voice, and I could only see the goofy glasses, the sparkly costumes and wacky clothes, the story with the girl and the scientists. One just didn't see such things on the mean streets of North Dakota.

As I've come back to the song now, though, I see something else. I see that the song is about a person, a person whose life has rode out from under them.

This video is a live performance of the song from 2004. All those involved in the original song and video are here. And so, I see the people involved, people with lives the same as me. (One of the backup singers, Debi Doss, the cute blonde, went on to a career in photography, and has a daughter.)

I appreciate their musical talents, the minds that can craft that driving bass line and wonderful backing vocals floating above everything. I appreciate the sensitivity that can craft a line like "I met your children, what did you tell them?"

Isn't that life? We don't know where we are till we look back at where we've been.

(cross-posted at Truth v. the Machine)