So how do you feel about people who say anything past the year 2000 is a piece of **** like me?
No seriously, how do you feel about people who hate on anything past 2000?
You know, I considered adding a segment on this and decided to leave it out, but given the request I may write it up as a response to you and add it in after all.
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People who have the attitude that "all music nowadays sucks" or "music past *insert date here* is all terrible" piss me off a lot. As a whole,
anybody who makes generalizations in music pisses me off. You cannot define music by the date it was released, and you certainly can't define it by what arbitrary genre distinction it receives.
The first half of that is that people like to pretend that old music is so much more awesome and meaningful than music today, which is only about sex and drugs, unlike music from back when.
For starters, music back when is not as amazing as people like to pretend it is. I'm not generalizing old music at all, because there's certainly some great older music -- I do listen to old music mixed in with my newer music -- but you can find just as much of a lack of meaning in music from older days if you stop looking at it through rose-tinted glasses.
I don't think I even need to pull out examples to make the point that there is a ton of music from the '60s and '70s about drugs. Also, I'm subjected to a ****ton of crappy '80s music on the radio at work, and I don't see anything great about a song that just talks about wearing your sunglasses at night.
Also, there's "Y.M.C.A.," which everyone and their grandmother knows and dances along to. I'm not really sure how factual this is because I've seen/heard mixed reports on the matter, but there's some evidence to suggest that it's about gay men getting together at the YMCA for sex, and even if that's not what it was
written about, it certainly gained that meaning for some. Which makes it all the more funny that all of these grandmothers are dancing along to it.
There's other songs that fall into the "old and popular but not really all that meaningful" category, like "December 1963 (Oh, What A Night)", and I could go on trying to find examples of it, but I think you get the point; there's just as much bad old music as good old music.
To get back to my point about generalizing music, to give a cutoff date for good music is absolutely ridiculous,
especially with the way music has evolved. There is more music than ever out there today, and to say that no music past the year 2000 is good is absolutely ludicrous. It's the same thing with people generalizing genres; there's far too many songs inside a genre and not enough clear-cut definitions of each genre to say that you dislike an
entire genre. I keep telling my friend that about country music, and yet she refuses to believe that there's even a single country song that she could like.
I mean, it doesn't help that nobody even knows what country music really is anyway. I certainly didn't fully understand what country music is until I actually started listening to it myself. I first started listening to Taylor Swift (add that to the list of female pop singers people will hate me for liking) and her music seemed pretty country to me, until I listened to real country and realized that...it's country-pop, and leaning more to the side of pop than country. Then I saw people commenting on the "Country Road" version of "Born This Way" that Lady Gaga released, which I'm still unclear on as to whether it was
supposed to be country or not, saying that Lady Gaga is the only one that makes country sound good and she was more country than Taylor Swift with one song, not realizing that
neither of the two are actual country. But I digress. I don't see the point in making much of a distinction between genres anyway, just listen to what you like.
I mean, people can say whatever they want about music, but old music is no better than new music. Sure, there was no autotune back in the '60s, but not everything nowadays uses it either. If you want to close yourself off to music you may potentially enjoy by generalizing, that's up to you, but I don't see how anyone has to gain from that. And just like the hipster mentality, I hate the fact that I should feel bad for listening to new music (even though, again, I have plenty of older music as well).
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Adding that to the OP, and for the sake of having the title be more accurate and making it seem less like a repetition of the other blog, I'm changing the title as well.
