Posts like these are hilarious to me, because the underlying sentiment is exactly the same as that spouted by “old people” of your own generation - you know, the ones who were unimpressed by Elvis in the '50s, the Beatles in the '60s, or Pink Floyd in the '70s. “I’ve only heard the five or ten songs they always play on <whatever equivalent of Top 40 radio floats your boat> and they all sounded the same after one listen. Music today sucks!”
:smack:
Here’s the real deal.
Popular music has never, never been more varied than it is today.
RealityChuck: You like prog-ish rock with lots of noodling? There’s tons of bands out there for you - Mars Volta, Muse, Coheed and Cambria. Hell, Rush and Dream Theater are both still around and making music right now.
JohnDiFool: You want listenable, something that hits the right spot down at a visceral level and kicks ass? I give you Passion Pit and The New Pornographers, two bands that produce music of such exuberant, uninhibited joyfulness that you can’t help but sing along.
MTCicero: You’re sick of ironic navel-gazing and a lack of “real emotion”? Give The Hold Steady or Mountain Goats a try. I see you’ve already mentioned The White Stripes, which aren’t exactly a band only loved by classic rock fans. If being “cool and relevant” requires one to sound like Stephen Malkmus (who, incidentally, has written some pretty fucking earnest songs), then Jack White wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the charts. Instead, he’s one of the most successful musicians of the past fifteen years.
Part of the problem in this thread is that at no point has “classic rock” been defined. We’re seeing people say that “classic rock” is 80s rock, or than “classic rock” is the prog rock of the 70s, or that “classic rock” is the Beatles. Does that mean that anything older than X years is “classic rock”? Because I hate to break it to you, but that means that the day is rapidly approaching when 90s rock and even 00s rock will be “classic rock.”
It’s human nature to be particularly enamored of the style of music being made during one’s formative years. Not just the genre, but also the production style, the common beats, the time signatures, the prevalent chord progressions, the vocal styles, the instruments used, etc. It’s natural because those are the years when we are first discovering what we like, and when we have both the time and energy to really delve into the music of the time. Once people grow up, though, and no longer have the time to endlessly browse through the record store/ radio stations/ iTunes store/ Pandora, as well as run into the growing difficulty of staying abreast of modern technology. Eventually, it’s just not feasible for most people to stay as “plugged in” as they did in their teenage years. And sadly, as evidenced by this thread, many such adults, rather than recognizing and accepting their own obsolescence (NOT intended as a slight, to be clear), they instead reach the conclusion that the limited modern music they remain exposed to is representative of ALL modern music. And therefore modern music sucks.
Fifty years ago, this meant that adults who grew up on Elvis sneered at these pretty boys from Britain who sang in three-part harmony and wore their hair long in the front. Thirty years ago, this meant that fans of those same pretty boys sneered at heavy metal in all its overwrought hypermasculinity and pretension. Ten years ago, the adults who had been metalheads in their youth sneered at hip hop, calling it “nonmusical” and “unartistic,” despite the fact that rappers like Public Enemy or OutKast wove lyrical tapestries that spoke of their generation’s deepest values and issues with a sophistication that made the best words Ozzy Osbourne ever wrote look like a five year old’s first attempt at rhyming.
I’m not saying that modern music fans are better than “classic rock” fans, whomever they may be. I hope to hell that my generation doesn’t some day sit around grousing about how music was so much better when Pearl Jam and Nirvana ruled the airwaves, or when Radiohead crashed the file sharing services with “Kid A,” or when the Decemberists released their seminal prog-folk records… but I know we will. Because it’s human nature. But I do hope that we’ll have finally learned not to be so damned obnoxious about our Old Person Elitism.
A side note to address the inevitable reply of “But I was born in the 80s and I love 70s rock!” Some of us might veer out of our “birth” decades, but inevitably this means looking backwards, because obviously it’s impossible for someone to spend time absorbing the music of the future, which hasn’t even been written yet. So you get 90s kids who love 70s prog, 00s kids who love 60s guitar rock, and we will surely have some 2020s kids who rediscover the dour pleasure of grunge. But the important bit is that you’re still internalizing the tropes and standard practices of your chosen style/ decade/ etc - and once you’ve reached that “old person” plateau, you’re (probably) just as cooked as everyone else.