|
|
|
|
|
|
by api
4092 days ago
|
|
|
Might be true, but I can't help but be nostalgic for it. I get the sense that for millennials and younger music is just another kind of light entertainment, take it or leave it. Music for many gen-Xers including myself was practically religion. You loved it so much you built a chunk of your identity around it. You were moved by it. I guess I can't really be sure, but I don't get the feeling people care about music like that anymore. Of course it might have nothing to do with packaging. I routinely look for new music and I do find gems that move me the way the music of my youth did, but they seem really few and far between. So much of what I hear is so spineless and trite. Of course there is always a temporal selection effect in that only the best stuff of the past is remembered, but it does feel like I really have to dig hard for anything good these days. At the worst I wonder if the golden age of music as a popular art form is behind us. How many people follow sculpture or painting? There's plenty of work being done, but only aficionados of those forms follow it. Is that where music is headed? |
|
|
The music that spoke to me was what you would call "college radio" in the mid-80s and "alternative" in the late 80s and early 90s. But if you think about it that was a small niche market and not the mainstream until Nirvana broke through circa 1991. And even then that was a short lived revolution which gave way to the Spice Girls and Britney Spears.
But before you get too nostalgic the realty of that era is that most of the music that people listened to was light weight pop music. That was really the era of "adult easy listening" and hair metal bands, and yet we think of the music that holds up like say REM or something that pushed the limits.