I also always say that we’ll live to see Toronto’s Hockey Hall of Fame closed down and refitted as a shrine to soccer…
Ed Driscoll observes that with hindsight “1979 was a unique quiet highpoint for rock”. He has a point. But I wonder for how long he’ll get to enjoy it. I think it was Jay Currie who observed, after the closure of a once popular theatre in Vancouver a few years ago, that a diminishing market for Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan and even Shakespeare was hardly surprising given that the city’s main source of demographic energy was Chinese.
Likewise, as Kathy Shaidle often says, if Islam is the major supplier of new Canadians, “Hockey Night In Canada” will one day be as unpopular as Oscar Wilde in Vancouver.
And, in an ever more Hispanic America, I’d be surprised if there was much money rock even on the oldies stations a generation hence.
Orwell said that he who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future*. Including the jukebox and the radio playlist.
