[extropy-chat] infinite fun but finite tunes?

[spike]

Eliezer has assured us that there is an infinite amount of fun.  I have
never doubted that notion, but I had a disturbing thought while on a
business trip this week.  I was driving and going thru the radio channels,
when I heard one of those good old songs that gets stuck in one's head:
Stevie Wonder just called, to say, he loves you.  He just called to say how
much he cares.  He just called to say he loves you, and he means it from the
bottom of his heart.

OK that tune is stuck in your head now, right?  And you can't get rid of it,
right?  And you hate me for mentioning it?  {8^D  That is an example of a
viral tune: pleasant, something you might hear violinized and played in
elevators, nice enough that you don't even need the words, not particularly
profound are these lyrics anyway.

There are a lot of viral tunes.  Roy Orbison wrote a bunch of them (peace be
upon him), the Beatles wrote a buuunch of these tunes, and there are others,
many from the 60s, 50s and before.  One often finds oneself humming the
compelling melodies.

Here is the disturbing part: Stevie called to say he loves us somewhere
around 1984-ish.  But I cannot think of a single viral tune that was written
after that one.  Did we really run out of them over twenty years ago?  There
were other good tunes, but not really the simple, pleasant, hummable,
violinizeable tunes like that one and the others before it.  Is it just that
I do not listen to the right stations?  Is it possible to hum a rap... um...
performance?  Who is writing pleasant viral tunes today?  The newer stuff
seems more complex in rhythms and such but the melodies will never be played
as background music in an elevator perhaps.

Did we already write all the good songs?  Or did they just migrate over to
the country western stations?  Or what?

spike