Sounds like . . .

OK, I was thinking about the blog, and thinking that my sad little birthday post might have ruined the party. Like when you see a movie, and there’s a house party, and everybody’s dancing, and people are swinging from the chandeliers and talking loudly and what not, and then that one guy (you know the guy) says something highly inappropriate and you hear the sound of the arm of a record player being ripped across the record, and everybody stops and stares at the offending person. And then you have dead silence as everybody judges.

But then I thought, hey, I bet these young whippersnappers these days aren’t even familiar with that noise. I’ve had vinyl all my life, even though I don’t really use it that much. I know the sound, though. That sound that means eighties movies and faux pas. It’s a universal signifier for the social difficulty. Or at least, it used to be. I hear it in commercials still. (I think it’s Twix commericials, right before they implore you to “chew it over with a Twix”) Do the young ‘uns know what that sound is? Are there enough DJ’s still scratching to keep it alive? Will it continue to be an influence until our generation passes and then quickly fade away like the sound at the party?

I guess sounds die. I had never really thought about it before. There are surely an infinite number of things that made their own unique sounds that we will never hear; sounds that are lost to antiquity. A sound seems like a stable and constant thing. There are variations in even repeated sounds, but the idea that you could lose the sound of something forever is a sad one. Languages are an obvious loss. Losing the sound of a people’s language is tragic. The loss of the sound of a musical instrument seems terrible too. Even losing the sounds produced by machinery made by man seem to be a great loss. So do your part, introduce the youth in your life to that sound.

I can see me explaining that to my kids. “ . . . and that’s when you know what you said is SO NOT COOL. You’ll hear the sound, and then everyone will stop everything and stare.”