Every generation thinks that the stuff it grew up on is better than the shit we have now. It happens with everything. Movies, TV, sports, society in general…you name it, somebody will inevitably complain about it. Maybe it has to do with the things I tend to personally pay attention to, but there’s nowhere I notice this more than when it comes to music. Rock, punk, jazz, blues, big band…all of it has been described as noise or devil music or racket or lame or square or any number of not so friendly terms meant to represent the ruination of a once great art form. So when I started bitching about new music which believe it or not first happened when I was in high school, even though in my heart I knew I was right and everybody else was an idiot, I also figured it was just me getting old before my time.
Or maybe it isn’t. I’m definitely getting old before my time in some ways, I’ve known that forever. but maybe everyone else is, in fact, an idiot where this issue is concerned.
You may not agree with everything buddy says here (there are plenty of songs that have absolutely stood the test of time that took a while to grow on me), but it’s hard to argue most of this. Almost everything (even the stuff I think is good) has a certain sameness to it now. A lot of it is way too loud. And don’t even try telling me that there’s no such thing as a millennial whoop, the fancy term for the oooing and aaaaing and woooing and woeing that slides into every song where the hooks sung with words used to go.
The words which, as has rightly been pointed out in the video and elsewhere, are getting dumber. That’s not me arguing that us older folks didn’t have our share of stupid songs, it’s just pointing out that they used to be called novelty records whereas now they’re just called records.
I know we’re never going to agree on this even though science is telling us to. We can’t even agree on climate change, for Christ’s sake! But when the day comes that you can’t tell an Uptown Funk from a Blurred Lines from a Hotline Bling and you’re wondering what the hell happened, you can’t say you weren’t warned.