As teenager coming of age in the late 1980s, my music of choice was the burgeoning rap sound coming out of New York and later, California. The soundtrack to those formative years of my life were filled with Big Daddy Kane, Eric B. & Rakim, MC Lyte, EPMD, L.L. Cool J, Run-DMC, Special Ed, 3rd Bass, Salt-N-Pepa, Public Enemy, and so many others.
Of course, this also means that many of these same artists occupy my play lists today! As with most humans, I’m pretty secure in my belief that the “best popular music” is the music that I enjoyed in my youth.
Not long ago, I was driving with my teenage son in our car and one of my favorite songs from that era came on the radio. I cranked the volume and went full dad mode, imploring him:
“Listen to that beat!” I said. “You can’t tell me that doesn’t make you want to move!”
He scrunched up his face, looked at me bouncing all over the driver’s seat and said with matter-of-fact disdain, “It sounds like it’s from the nineteen hundreds!”
I still laugh thinking of that exchange. Me trying to convince him that my “old timey sounding music,” was worthy of his ears. And him very confused as to how I thought that song – which I’m certain he believed was produced roughly during the same period as the founding of our country – was any good at all.
It’s not uncommon, though, for us to go down a similar path of decision-making in our advancement work. For instance:
- We need to develop a new direct mail message and we only think about what would be compelling for the people we know.
- We convince ourselves that using the phone for annual giving solicitations won’t work because no one we know uses the phone to talk.
- We spend a great deal of time and energy implementing paypal and venmo giving options through our webpage because that’s how the people we know pay for things.
Of course, using our own experiences and understandings of human behavior and motivations is a helpful starting place when we are engaging broad audiences.
But we are wise to keep in mind that what may sound like the “nineteen hundreds” to us, may very well be beautiful music to someone else’s ears.