Kids Wanna Rock!

Today I found a mix CD stuck in the knot of a telephone pole. I was on my way home from the library and there it was, this CD in a jewel case jutting out of the pole like a badly hidden Easter egg. It wanted to be found. The CD jewel case had no cover, but on the CDR someone had written "#7 Kids Wanna Rock!" in black Sharpie. This set my expectations low--probably some bored teenage girl had burned about a dozen CDs (perhaps mine was #7), hoping place them at random locations around Albany to somehow touch the lives of other people; I suspect this because it's the sort of thing I would have done as a teenage girl, were CD burners around atr the time. Or perhaps someone was given the CD and found not worth keeping, so they stuck it in a telephone pole. "I can always throw the CD away and use the jewel case," I thought. Part of me wished the CD would offer amazing music, maybe some highly obscure 4-track recordings that an unknown prodigy was making in his or her basement. But no, the CD sounds exactly like a mix titled "Kids Wanna Rock!" should sound. There are a lot of cruddy new R&B songs at the CD's beginning, overproduced dance tracks with canned beats and girl singers doing that "ohhh-woo-woo bayybehhh" thing. I figured the whole CD would play out with more of the same until Track 6, which began with a familiar bass line and twangy guitar snippets--Alannah Myle's "Black Velvet"! That song was popular when I was in 8th grade, and I actually think it holds up pretty well today; it's a fine example of a country-tinged song that is, at its heart, pure Top 40 pop. The next song on the mix was Tone Loc's "Funky Cold Medina"--another 8th grade hit. Ahh, the late '80s. I wonder if, for someone who's in their early teens now, a song like "Black Velvet" is the equivalent of me putting some Stevwe Miller Band song on a mix tape...there was also a really crummy rock song (the eponymous "Kids Wanna Rock") that I thought was crappy new Aerosmith, but after a little Googling it turned out to be Bryan Adams. I know nothing about music, I realized. There are maybe three new bands that I like, and all of them have members in their early '30s. Maybe I should make a mix CD and stick copies in telephone poles across the San Francisco Bay...but I doubt that would accomplish much. CDs found in such places are from people like skitzophrenic conspiracy theorists (I found one such CD on a shelf while putting books away at my old library job--"Jews control the country by dominating the media!" kind of lunacy). Maybe I'll stick "#7 Kids Wanna Rock" in another telephone pole--I don't want to hang on to it much longer--but I'll have to listen to "Black Velvet" a few more times first.