Nick Hornby on pop music ubiquity
It's the sheer ubiquity of pop music that presents such an obstacle to older fans. When I was fifteen, it was satisfyingly hard to hear the music I loved. It wasn't played in supermarkets or on airplanes; it wasn't blasted out of passing cars; there wasn't a TV station devoted to it. In the U.K., in those pre-promo days, the one rock-oriented BBC program was so short of visuals that it had to be content with playing album tracks over vintage cartoons. To listen to Led Zeppelin in 1972 I had to be in my bedroom, and I liked it that way. If you are fifteen now, what must it be like for the music you love to be dogging your every step?
- Nick Hornby, Songbook