I’m up to here (for those who still don’t have Blogivision I’m raising my right hand high over the top of my cranium and swivelling it like a demented ostritch) with anniversaries.
Watching Breakfast TV the other day I was dumbstruck to learn that it was the something or other anniversary of the day on which Roy Orbison would have turned 73 (or some other age), had he lived. So to ‘celebrate’ this non-event, a tribute concert had been organised featuring a fair old phalanx of folk I’ve never before heard of, singing Roy’s hits.
Now, I’m a huge Roy Orbison fan, grew up singing ‘Dum dum dum dummy doo wah’ with my sister, and I can understand anniversaries on a personal level – birthdays, wedding anniversaries – which are basically an excuse for knees-up and a night of reminiscing.
These pre-meditated corporate anniversaries, however, they simply suck. The Orbison one didn’t even pretend to be celebrating something that happened on an anniversary year ending in 0 or 5. It was just any old year.
Let’s face facts. Anniversaries – even the best of them – are based on the bizarre notion that there’s something significant about the passage of one year, five years, ten years, a hundred years or whatever. It’s just not true. The calendar is simply a convenient way of measuring time based on the revolutions of the earth around the sun. Surely only astrologers can possibly believe that’s significant?
Let me repeat. I get the point of the little personal ones, even though they’re not based on anything resembling logic. Why should we celebrate the passage of a certain amount of time since an event took place? I have no idea, but I don’t object to it and, indeed, I take part in such celebrations with zest.
The problem with corporate anniversaries is that they’re nothing but thinly disguised marketing exercises. The whole greetings card lark is another example. Birthday cards, mothers’ day, fathers’ day, easter … none of that flimsy folded cardboard-shifting has anything to do with the spirit of the idea. In fact, it de-personalises the idea.
As a result of all this anniversary activity, the word ‘celebrate’ has taken on a darker meaning in the music biz. It means ‘let’s see if we can rake in a few bucks by playing on the sentimentalityof music fans.’ Whenever an artist dies, it’s only a matter of days before we’re asked to ‘celebrate’ that artist’s life (actually, his/her death) by buying a ‘tribute’ compilation – ie a hastily cobbled together bunch of tracks which, if we ever did actually care about that artist, we’d have owned for many years.
Once that marketing opportunity is out of the way, the path is clear to do it all over again ad infinitum in the guise of anniversary ‘tribute’ compilations.
TV, radio, newspapers and magazines all kowtow to this depressing deity. Is there any freelance writer alive who hasn’t felt bitter when the great idea he/she submitted to an editor got rejected because it didn’t have a peg? All too often the same idea would have been accepted if it fell on an anniversary. Why?
In these instances, editors have, to a certain extent, abdicated the responsibility for making decisions about the quality of the stories they publish. Instead, they simply accept the notion that things become more interesting if they’re tied to anniversaries and proceed from there – because it’s easier than thinking. Any old tosh will do, if it relates to something that happened five or ten or twenty years ago.
Why can’t we celebrate unniversaries?
If a story is good, it deserves to be told, with or without a peg. I really don’t give a toss if it’s twenty years since the blue Smarties were introduced or five years since the prawn cocktail went out of fashion. Mostly, I want to be told about the interesting new things that are happening, rather than wallow in nostalgia about stuff that wasn’t all that interesting in the first place. And, if I must occasionally wallow in nostalgia, I’d sooner it was nostalgia for something of interest in its own right, not just because some irrelevant number of years happens to have passed since it first took place.
Roy Orbison, I love you, but no more on an anniversary than at any other time. I’m happy to celebrate your unniversary any old time.
