Music, aging and 101 reasons for a Black Celebration

I have many CD’s. If I had to listen to them all, one after the other, it’d probably take me months to listen to any of them twice. I can see why some old people get stuck in their musical ways – they just have so much of their own familiar music to listen to there’s no space for anything else to enter their consciousness.

So, in good oldie fashion I hauled out a CD I loved as a teenager (before we had CD’s of course). Depeche Mode’s 101.

I’d only half-listened to it since I got it on CD, but now, stuck in traffic, I listened to it again for the first time since childhood. And was blown away. The lyrics seemed trite, though I still knew many of them by-heart (interesting saying that, by heart, not by head). But the live energy of the album is fantastic, 65 000 people screaming hysterically for a night of Black Celebration.

I remember buying their album Singles 81-85. I think it was the first album I ever bought, and I only bought it because a friend recommended the group. I’d never heard them before. Luckily I loved it and was hooked. Listening to them now brought on a strange nostalgia, enhanced by my first trip back Capri-side since I moved to Oranjezicht.

It’s been a long time since any new music has matched the emotional impact albums such as 101 had on me when I first heard it. Perhaps Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads was the most recent. I hope it will happen again, or else the inflexibility of old age has really caught up with me.

1 comment

  1. I agree. I would love to discover new music but nothing I hear has that visceral impact in me. Can’t figure out why. The last thing I heard and loved was Swans, and that was 12 years ago.

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