Classic Rock Block with a Fuck-ton of Seger
If you go an entire hour listening to a classic rock station and you don’t hear Bob Seger check your pulse and ask someone what country you are in. In the United States there was an FCC regulation passed in 1983 that mandated Bob Seger music be played at least once an hour if a radio station plays music produced during or before 1980. This may answer many of your questions why you seem to hear Bob Seger all the time, because you do.
Bob Seger stumbled upon a golden formula for songwriting, especially for success if you are from the Midwest. Make songs about how great things were in the past.
Old Time Rock and Roll is a prime example. Seger doesn’t want to listen to your modern music. Take those old records off the self cuz he’ll sit and listen to them by himself. FUCK-YOU sez him. Seger never even gives examples of what he means be old time rock and roll. Beatles? Chuck Berry? Led Zeppelin? who knows? Just as long as it’s not the shit they’re playing right now.
Night Moves is another one. Sex was so much better when we were 14 years old. All the awkward fumbling, jizzing in your jeans once her thigh graces your crotch, not having sex for ten years after she tells everyone in school about your amateur love-making talents; good times. That would be the first thought I’d remember being covered in nubile San Diego groupies after the sell-out show, is how much better sex was when I was 14.
That makes the transition into Turn the Page, a song about how much is sucks being a rockstar. This was an incredibly bold move by Seger, and he achieved a rare feat that has backfired on many other artists who’ve tried before. Seger successfully convinced his audience that being a rockstar sucks. The Grunge movement never fully achieved this; the same people who were swayed by Turn the Page were not the same people who were swayed by Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Other rockstars who have complained have been thrown under their proverbial tour buses where Seger evoked the rare sympathy for his millionaire plight.
Seger hates the way things are in the present so much he even wrote a song about moving to Nepal. Does this man find no contentment? I don’t know if he was still living in Ann Arbor at the time of this song’s writing, but come on, Kathmandu? The only reason I can figure from the song why he wants to go to Kathmandu is for the mountains. We have mountains in this country, and stable, functioning governments. But I wanna go to Kathmandu, hang out with Sherpas and catch a Maoist rebel uprising. That’s what I’m gonna do.
But these are only four out of the 4,000 Bob Seger songs they play on the radio. Perhaps only AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, or Lynard Skynard have a comparable range of their catalouges played on the radio, but I think Seger beats them all. Though today’s artists still employ the tactic of songwriting about how much better things were in the past, I believe no modern artist or even an artist in the future will ever be able to achieve the audience Seger did complaining about how hard it was being a rockstar. For that, Seger remains a legand.
