I'm so old!

[elfs]

So, Yamaraashi-chan got to the end of Guitar Hero, and she asked me, "Dad, what's so important about Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd? They asked me, like, five times if I was really sure I wanted to play it. What's the big deal?"

I mean, how do you explain the cultural significance of Free Bird to a ten year old? The wikipedia page doesn't even begin to cover it.

Comments

[boiwondering.livejournal.com]

Speaking both as a survivor of the Seventies and as a semi-professional rock musician who has, in actual fact, endured drunken shouts of "Free Bird!" from the audience... it's impossible. I think you have to have lived through the historical period in question to understand the omnipresence of that horrible, horrible song*. There aren't any musical artists currently working whose songs have reached the same hideous level of cross-cultural currency, and I don't think that's likely to change; as much as I may like Good Charlotte's current single, I somehow doubt drunken audiences thirty years hence will be shouting "Play 'Dance Floor Anthem!'" at live bands.

The point is, we're old, and it's Before Her Time.

And I'm sorry.

* Please note, I don't mean the song itself is particularly bad or good; like "Stairway to Heaven", it exists in an artistic and cultural realm which criticism, honest or otherwise, cannot penetrate. I'm referring here to its cultural cachet, which consists (rightly or not) mainly of being a punchline.

How would I explain this...

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

It's one giant nine-and-a-half-minute-long electric guitar solo. They didn't have that kind of song on the radio, before Skynyrd.

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

Its complexity in Expert Mode is, of course, only a tenth of the fingerbreaker that it would be on a real guitar... but it's still pretty wicked.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

The longest one-note guitar solo this side of Neil Young, that's what is so important about it.

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

you know, I don't think I've *ever* heard Free Bird before...

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

*flicks her lighter*

[kenshardik]

I loves me some Zeppelin and some Rolling Stones, but man, I hate Skynard.

[jenk]

Where you there the night Gaia Consort was playing a small show (Chris, Sue, Heather) and Chris wasn't sure what to play next?

And someone called out "Freebird"?

And I called out "March of Cambreadth"?

...

[woggie.livejournal.com]

I had to look up the lyrics to figure out which one Freebird was. It remains one of my all-time most loathed songs because the tune itself (apart from the guitar solo) is so tedious and whiny. The only song which tops it for sheer mind-numbing boredom is Inna-gadda-davida.

On the other hand, the Freebird guitar solo was actually kinda nifty, and led me to bands like Pink Floyd, so I have a certain debt to the song there.