Like that non-stop hoopla about a banana taped to the wall with the middle-classes screaming
“Oh my god, this is what’s been missing from my life. How many millions do you want?”
But they were already doing that story more than forty years ago; the case you’re out to make needs to be something like, say, arguing that Roger Moore’s 007 movies are clearly better than Daniel Craig’s, or badmouthing Schindler’s List, or something.
People were getting excited about a urinal over a hundred years ago.
Anytime I start to feel critical of the tastes of today’s youth, I just watch a random 1960’s sampling of Steve Allen ridiculing everything I hold dear musically. As a 50-something I need to constantly remind myself that my duty isn’t to understand the art of today, but rather to just get out of the way.
Which, as far as I can tell, was after the painting that later got revealed to be the result of a donkey’s swishing tail, but was before the glass of water on a shelf.
(Not to mention the THIS IS A PORTRAIT OF IRIS CLERT IF I SAY SO telegram.)
Has anyone addressed the underlying problem with MortSahlFan’s thinking? No, not the fallacy of “Everything was better before…”. I mean the title:
Docs/Interviews That Emphasize Degeneracy In Arts?
Not “Do you think the Arts have degenerated?” He starts right out asking for evidence that supports his preconceived prejudices.
As a dad who has to constantly explain to his kids why I know so much [DEL] bad [/DEL] okay, uncreative and shallow music from my youth, I can refute MortSahlFan’s conclusion-that-we-won’t-talk-him-out-of by just flipping the AM radio dial* in my '63 Chevy.
*My kids love to get me on my soapbox by asking why I was such a Beatles fan in the early 60’s. And I explain how you had two or three AM stations playing the Top 40: “Imagine, kiddos, the SAME forty songs.” And before the Beatles, it was schmaltz like HEY HEY PAULA, GO AWAY LITTLE GIRL, and BOBBY’S GIRL; or novelty acts (TELSTAR and PEPINO THE ITALIAN MOUSE… in the Top 5!). The Beatles were a breath of fresh air, but only a small percentage compared to the crap on the radio.
I think the OP is overlooking this, and also decrying the ongoing(? - has it ever been any other way) regression of popular cinema and music to the lowest common denominator, and with the advent of ubiquitous visual stuff, the fact that few unattractive singers are going to be popular. I tend to agree with him there- it’s a shame that say… Mama Cass would not make it in today’s music world due to her appearance, despite her undeniable talent.
He needs to remember a few axioms - 90% of everything is crap, the past looks like it was better because only the really good stuff stands the test of time, and that in a lot of cases, the real artistic work is being done in genres/styles that he probably doesn’t listen to.
For example, I’m guessing the OP doesn’t listen to hip-hop. I generally don’t either. But I have a lot of friends who do, and while gaming one night, he was playing a bunch of modern hip-hop/rap/trap that he liked, and explaining the innovative points to it- a lot of the musical terms went over my head, but I saw what he was talking about- it WAS innovative, and it was interesting, even if not my cup of tea.
And this golden age of TV and the blurring of a lot of lines that used to be very solid and thick between TV and cinema means that we get some REALLY good stuff now- high production values AND better/more elaborate storytelling. Case in point- “The Expanse” on SyFy/Amazon Prime. The TV show has covered up through the fourth novel now in four seasons. It tracks pretty closely to the show, although not completely. Well enough so that most hardcore book wonks aren’t disappointed. But the thing is, the production values, acting and set design are terrific as well.
I keep feeling like had this been made 15 years ago (hypothetically; the books hadn’t even been published back then), we’d have got a chopped-up movie of the first book, or we’d have got some sort of janky 22-episode TV show that probably would have succumbed to the temptation to veer off into soap opera/political drama territory, rather than sticking to the story. Neither of which would have been a good choice for the show.
And you get a lot of straight-to-Netflix/Amazon/Hulu movies these days which aren’t necessarily Hollywood blockbusters, but nor are they chintzy Hallmark movies or SyFy schlock like “Mansquito” or “Sharktopus” either. Not all are good, but some are, and the ability to roll them out at minimal distribution costs means that we get to see some really interesting movies now- most don’t have a lot of effects or anything, but we get to see actors and directors do their things that we might not have otherwise seen.
There’s also a selection bias. Anyone’s knowledge of media created before they were born is limited to what distributors choose to distribute years later. When you think of 1950’s films, you’re going to think of the ones you’ve seen, which are the money-makers like All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, etc. No one is going to spend the money to distribute the clunkers that no one liked even when they were new, so you’ve probably never even heard of, let alone seen, the 90% of movies produced that year that were crap, per Sturgeon’s Law.
Hasn’t stopped Adele or Lizzo. For that matter, there are a lot of female artists like Billie Eilish and Lorde who don’t use a sexualized image. And Elliot’s chart success fell off after she left the Mamas and Papas, which featured the conventionally attractive Michelle Phillips.
Add Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, Beth Ditto, Mary Lambert, TiKA, Megan Thee Stallion, Elle King, Kelly Clarkson, and a bunch of others. I’d say that this is the best era for female musicians who aren’t conventionally thin and pretty since the heyday of Lillian Russell.
Mama Cass is probably a bad example, though, since her solo career was hurt by her heroin addiction.
Thank you, that’s great and gave me the laugh of the day. 
Plus, say we temporarily grant for the sake of argument that one of the acclaimed survivors from back in the day — I LOVE LUCY, if you like — really was better than anything that’s been created for television in the last 40 years.
If that’s so, then what can we do with it? What happens if, today, you pitch a sitcom with a pilot episode where a woman (a) is married to a bandleader, and sure wants to sing in his show; but, for now, (b) gets work at a too-fast conveyor belt of chocolates? See, the whole punchline is: she eats the chocolates!
What happens if, after sincerely praising LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, you pitch a show where a kid loses his haircut money and tries to hide it from his parents by cutting his own hair, and the joke is that he then tries to hide the ensuing bad haircut? Also, he forges a note from his mom to get out of performing in a school pageant!
You’d get thrown out, is what. If we genuinely grant that it got done perfectly back when, then we can’t plausibly spend 40 years hitting those same notes again; if folks weren’t going to get stuff they hadn’t seen before with Tony Soprano and Don Draper, then they wouldn’t have gotten Tony Soprano and Don Draper.
Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell wrote a song called “Ocean Eyes” for her high school music class. They released it on Soundcloud, simply so her music teacher would give her credit for a school project. Next morning, it had a thousand listens. Now the YouTube video for the song has been viewed 251 million times, and Billie and Finneas are multiplatinum artists with five Grammys. This, incidentally, from a young woman who wears baggy clothes to de-emphasize her body, and lets spiders crawl over her face for a video.
The proliferation of alternate distribution platforms for creative output has meant a much wider field of artists are available to the public. There’s a lot more crap, of course, but there’s also a lot more talent, as well. In the 80’s, Ani DiFranco had to start her own record company to release her music without any corporate meddling or gatekeeping; Billie and Finneas just had to upload a song to the internet.
I’m 52, and still love Poco and Queen and the Eagles; but I have no patience for people like the OP. Think there haven’t been any talented artists since the turn of the century? Adele, Evanescence, Delta Rae, and Billie Eilish say otherwise.
More to the point, they do have a lot of effects. I recently watched a movie from about ten years ago, and after the fact realized that one of the scenes, despite showing a perfectly mundane event, was physically impossible to produce entirely using a camera. This was a movie made on a shoestring budget by a bunch of film students still in college, but the cheap computer editing tools they had available were enough to produce that scene that would have been impossible in the OP’s day.
There are always clunkers, but if you look at the best, chances are its pre-1980… Just do the comparisons… 1939-1979 vs. 1980-2020.
(I’ll just mention those who were around in the 60/70s, since it would be too unfair)… The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Elvis Presley, Wilson Pickett, Supertramp, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Steely Dan, ELO, America, Eagles, David Bowie, , Fleetwood Mac, Black Sabbath, Neil Young, Bob Marley, The Stylistics, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Love, The Allman Brothers, The Kinks, Elton John, Billy Joel, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, Three Dog Night, The Hollies, The Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground, Ray Charles, The Animals, Deep Purple, The Stooges, Aretha Franklin, The Zombies, Simon & Garfunkel, Steppenwolf, The Moody Blues, The Dave Clark Five, The Temptations, Santana, James Brown, Janis Joplin & Big Brother Holding Company, Sam Cooke, The Mamas and the Papas, Frank Zappa, The Supremes, The Everly Brothers, Sly and the Family Stone, John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, Four Tops, The Band, CCR, John Coltrane, Captain Beefheart, Wayne Shorter, Roy Orbison, Them, Nina Simone, Yardbirds, Charles Mingus, etc etc
The Godfather, Citizen Kane, La Strada, Nashville, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Network, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Battle of Algiers, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, A Woman Under The Influence, The Seventh Seal, Rashomon, On The Waterfront, A Clockwork Orange, Casablanca, The Misfits, La Grande Illusion, McCabe And Mrs. Miller, The Seventh Seal, Ace In The Hole, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Sound of Music, Midnight Cowboy, A Child Is Waiting, Harold and Maude, 12 Angry Men, Annie Hall, Ikiru, Mikey and Nicky, Lawrence of Arabia, Last Tango In Paris, Taxi Driver, Dr. Strangelove, Sunset Boulevard, Gone With The Wind, Bonnie and Clyde, Shane, North by Northwest, Sullivan’s Travels, The Philadelphia Story, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Rocky, The Deer Hunter, To Kill A Mockingbird, Vertigo, The Wizard of Oz, 2001: A Space Odyssey, All About Eve, The Graduate, Chinatown, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, Apocalypse Now, Rear Window, West Side Story, Cabaret, The African Queen, All The President’s Men, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, Butch Cassiday and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, The Apartment, Spartacus, The French Connection, Ben-Hur, Yankee Doodle Dandy, etc…
My wrists are cramping up, so I’ll stop it there after I’ve made my point… And that was the POPULAR stuff!
You don’t get it. For every Bob Dylan, there was one Engelbert Humperdinck, and for every Billy Wilder an Ed Wood.
Yes, there were a lot of great pre-1980 movies and music. There’s also a lot of post-1980 movies and music.
You can find other such lists if you search.
Watch a bunch of them and tell us what you think. Don’t tell us about your general philosophy of life. Don’t quote other people’s philosophy. Tell us what you think about each of the films you see.
I wrote:
> There’s also a lot of post-1980 movies and music.
I meant to write:
> There’s also a lot of great post-1980 movies and music.
If it’s just a matter of competing walls o’ text, then I’ll throw in my own, post-1980: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, Ani DiFranco, The Police, Morrissey, The Clash, Violent Femmes, Midnight Oil, Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, Digital Underground, Salt-N-Pepa, NWA, Evanescence, Disturbed, Oingo Boingo, REM, the B-52s, the Indigo Girls, Eminem, Missy Elliot, Pink, Delta Rae, TLC, Ludacris, Public Enemy, Maggie Rogers, Susan Tedeschi, Ingrid Michaelson, U2, Adele, Lorde, Drake, A Tribe Called Quest, UB40, XTC, Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, Alicia Keyes, India Arie, Nirvana, Green Day, Van Halen, 4 Non Blondes, the Bangles, the Smiths, Siouxie and the Banshees, Eurthymics, Madness, Foo Fighters, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, Bjork, Of Monsters And Men, Billie Eilish, Bonnie Raitt, the Pretenders, Outkast, Sigur Ros, Sugarland, etc., etc. And that was the POPULAR stuff!
And Tom Lehrer called it “children’s music.” And I don’t think the art form came from a simple maturation but from a revolution, a revolution of breaking away from “Tin Pan Alley” to personal work. And I acknowledge that there were geniuses in Tin Pan Alley.