In the past decade film scores have begun to attract similar scholarly attention. Most American cities have a couple of oldies radio stations. Numbingly repeated ads on late-night TV urge us to buy anthologies of the greatest hits from the fifties to the eighties. It is easy to dismiss oldies as the ephemera of the Me Generation. Oldies are forever linked to their actual historical setting, naming the moment of our fortunate fall into identity and conveying a palpable sense of place and time.
Oldies are our inner classics.
They shape the soundtrack of our lives around indelible emotional moments that remain as vivid as a presidential assassination or an earthquake. Oldies, because they are products of mass media, connect the lives of millions, often defining a generation's lifestyle and politics. The Early Years, 1903-1940 by Gary Giddins, reviewed by James Marcus. In fact, the oldie aesthetic explains the persistent appeal of a lot of classical music, particularly opera, as well as of popular songs. Though we associate the classical category with instrumental music, its prestige is a recent phenomenon, barely a hundred years old and fading fast.