Kennedy: Hold on 'Automatic,' is older stuff really better?

photo Mark Kennedy

Every time my family piles into the Toyota, my wife thumbs around on her iPhone and cues up the song "Automatic" by country music star Miranda Lambert.

She plays it so often I have begun to memorize the lyrics, which are dripping with nostalgia for simpler -- presumably happier -- times.

If you don't know the song, the hook is:

"It all just seemed so good the way we had it,

Back before everything became ... automatic."

The hit song, co-written by Lambert and Nashville songwriter Natalie Hemby, is obviously meant to pull at the heartstrings of baby boomers and Gen Xers by evoking such beloved old-fashioned objects as cassette tapes, Polaroid cameras, pay phones and handwritten letters.

Any songwriter who can build a song around words that rhyme with "automatic" deserves mad props. The hook of "Automatic" is almost -- but not quite -- as good as my all-time favorite song line embedded in a Lyle Lovett tune: "Honey, put down that flyswatter and pour me some ice water."

If there is a more pitch-perfect song lyric than that, I'd like to hear it.

I read in the newspaper that "Automatic" took "Song of the Year" honors at the Academy of Country Music Awards last Sunday. It set me to thinking about baby boomer nostalgia and how it is destined to be a cultural force in the next couple of decades as the generation of Americans born after World War II begins to retire and acquires more free time to romanticize the past.

I guess it's inevitable that people will have warm, fuzzy emotions about the old days, and that those memories will become attached to objects. But if you really think about some of the old-fashioned things that people hold dear, you can only wonder if all this sentiment is justified. It also makes you wonder if, 50 years from now, our kids and grandkids will get all weepy about the good-old days of iPads and Instagram.

Just because something is old doesn't "automatically" -- pardon the pun -- make it better.

Here, let's break down the some of the cherished mid-century references in "Automatic," and see if they hold up to scrutiny.

* Cassette tapes. Yes, let's by all means go back to a non-searchable, analog system for storing music. And wasn't it delightful when those tapes broke and coiled up like Silly String? And that lovely hiss that accompanied all your cassette-tape recordings was a real bonus, too, right? Simple question: Sony Walkman vs. iPod? You make the call.

* Pay phones. Yes, wasn't it a joy to feed coins into a public phone inside a putrefying, Plexiglas closet? And making long-distance calls was a breeze, right? As long as you didn't need to talk for more than three minutes and had a roll of quarters in your pocket.

* Line-dried laundry. OK, I'll admit that one of life's simple pleasures is the fresh smell of a sun-dried pillowcase. But would you really want to give up your modern clothes dryer for the privilege of drying your underwear on a clothes line on a rainy day in February?

* Rand McNally Road Atlas. Yes, yes, let's please ditch modern automotive navigation systems for a paperback book as big as Nevada. Just last week I was lost over in Marion County and simply spoke into my iPhone: "Take me home, Siri." Problem solved. If I could have just had a conversation with that dog-eared map book in the glove compartment, would that have been so much better?

* Column-mounted shifters on automobiles. Oh goody, lets trade today's bulletproof automatic transmissions for clunky, clutch-operated manual transmissions with just three speeds. Of all of the questionable objects of sentiment in Lambert's "Automatic," this is possibly the silliest.

* Handwritten letters. There's plenty of reward in taking out a piece of stationery and penning a letter to someone important to you. Even licking a stamp and mailing a envelope have their charms. But texting a friend or loved one, if you think about it, is actually just a real-time interactive letter. You can make a case that we are entering a golden age of written communications. The fact that we write by thumbing a digital keyboard instead of putting pen to paper is really immaterial. Texts can be pithy, elegant, even poetic. It's a brain thing, y'all.

* Polaroid photographs. Lambert rhapsodizes about taking pictures -- "the kind you have to shake." We assume she means Polaroids, which people used to dry by waving around as if they were cooling a slice of toast. If you'll remember, those old Polaroid photographs faded worse than a new pair of jeans. Now, we snap high-resolution photos on our smartphones that we can view immediately, and which will potentially remain in pristine, digital condition in the "cloud" forever.

I don't mean to be a spoil sport. And yes, "Automatic" is just a catchy song on the radio, not a generational anthem. Still, I hate to see us get sappy over the wrong stuff. Everything old is not, by definition, better.

We don't have to diminish the present to appreciate the past. We baby boomers and Generation Xers will marginalize ourselves more and more if we insist on hugging phone booths and caressing cassettes.

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.

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