That’s different from OG gangsta rap, how?
There’s a big tendency for people to whitewash the past and only have memories of the good stuff. I do think that coping mechanism is part of human nature to at least some extent.
This sort of shit irritates the crap out of me. I belong to some “nostalgic” local area Facebook groups and there’s always crap about how much better this and that was in the old days, and how kids no longer do this or that, or blahblahblah, and I think back and am really happy that my two daughters are being raised now instead of the 80s (when I grew up) or the 60s (when my parents grew up). I think overall it is a better world now than its been, but with its usual ups and downs and pockets of flare-ups.
When I was growing up, the culture was complaining about the uselessness of the “slacker” Generation X. Since Gen X has come to age, they’ve been pissing on Millennials (oh, does that irritate me). And now I’m gettings hints of the pissed-on torch being passed to Gen Z. And I assume it will continue when Generation Alpha enters the workforce. It’s all a load of shite, if you ask me. I see good and great things about the generations younger than me. If anything, I believe they will save the world the we tried our best to destroy (if it isn’t already too late – that’s my only fear, and it’s not their fault.) OK, “save the world” is a bit of overstatement, but I do firmly believe their contributions will be more positive.
Some of it is also that those people didn’t see the not-good stuff. I worked with someone in the '90s who used to go on and on about how the '50s were so much better. I’m sure he still believed it but he stopped going on so much about it to me when I pointed out that he was a straight, white, male whose parents probably didn’t beat him and that the '50s most likely weren’t so great for people who didn’t check all of those boxes.
I’m certainly not enough of a connoisseur to give a run down, but it’s different enough that it’s causing lots of people to get all upset and talk about banning it.
Not that they didn’t do the same for gangster rap when it was new, but now that’s mainstream and accepted, and this new stuff isn’t.
Oh, absolutely, it’s definitely a matter of perspective and ignorance of just how much skin color and gender affected your experiences. Sure, maybe things were good for you, but they weren’t good for huge swaths of people. This doesn’t mean you should feel guilty or ashamed of being white and male (which a lot of people interpret such statements as), but to be reflective and aware of the privilege that confers (to most.) Two of our dear friends are a married, mixed race female couple raising a daughter and a nephew. I cannot even imagine that set-up being possible in the 80s, much less the 50s. To me, that’s a huge leap we’ve come to as a society in acceptance of people not like us, though certainly probably about half of us (not here, but in the US in general) don’t agree, and I’m sure they run into prejudice. But it’s a far cry from attitudes back then. I’m happy that they can mostly live the lives they want in the open, though things can continue to improve. I would hope one day society comes to a point where the vast majority truly accept people living their own damned lives.
It was a time of craft and personal adventure. Today you can buy a ticket and go to darkest Africa or get a world class drone at Walmart. In the thirties and forties adventurers worked their way on tramp steamers and racers built cars, boats and airplanes in their garages.
Of course it is foolish to yearn for an under paid, under educated and under fed time. But I would not assume it was boring.
I wonder if part of it is because the experience of kids today is so different from their parents that they have a hard time finding common ground to connect with. On the other hand, I grew up in the 80s and when I became a teenager my mother told me how much different my childhood was compared to hers in the 60/70s. I’ve talked to some of my younger coworkers about dating, and it just seems like a very different landscape from what it was when I was their age and I can scarcely relate to their experience. That isn’t to say my experience was superior. But I did note that when I was their age I had to ask someone out face-to-face and get rejected in person rather than via text. I imagine a lot of women these days would prefer to avoid being asked out by someone in a face-to-face situation to avoid that kind of awkwardness.
It irritated me to. I got really tired of hearing complaints about millennials killing napkins, diamonds, strip clubs, and casual dining restaurants like Appleby’s. No company is entitled to their business and if you want to attract millennial customers then you’ve got to pivot and cater to their needs. I hire interns at work, and for the most part younger people are good workers. You just have to threat them with respect and compensate them fairly.
I can see it being an Eighties sitcom, and them having to hide the truth from everyone. They were toying with these themes on Soap.
I’ve heard theories advanced on this board about once taboo things becoming mainstream/okay because of the influence of the media. That Barack Obama was able to become president because Morgan Freeman once played the president in a movie.
On the flip side, I actually find my kids culture reasonably easy to follow, but moreso, my kids had more shared interests culturally with me than I did with my parents. Mine are still fairly young, but I see youngsters – probably very much influenced by the internet and access to culture across timespans – be much more open to, say, music from the 90s, the 80s, the 70s, than my generation was of their parents’ music. Music culture seems much more eclectic, too – back then I remember there were the heavy metal kids, the classic rock kids, the goth kids, the alternative kids, the house kids, and while there are still genre preferences, I don’t feel I see as much of “this music is great, your music sucks!” attitudes as when I was growing up. Of course, I’m no longer in high school, but I’m listening to my 7-year-old listen to music, and I hear the usual modern pop, then I hear some Balkan techno (due to a TikTok meme, but it was disconcerting sitting here at the computer and all of a sudden I hear some South Slavic language come out of the Echo), then Duran Duran, then “Spin Me Right Round” by Dead or Alive, then something from Encanto, and then some K-Pop. It’s just such a mish-mash of cultures and time periods.
That’s what I was going to say, more or less. Basically when you’re young you’re inexperienced, so you try all sorts of stuff in food, music, dating, clothing, hair, etc…
As you get older, you’ve done enough of that sort of thing that two things happen. One, you have a good idea without trying things whether you’ll like it or not. For example, I’ve had enough of various kinds of liver to know that I don’t generally like it. So I probably will not try it. Not because I’m a grumpy old fart, but because I have a lot of experience.
Two, as you gain experience your “catalog” gets larger. When I was 16(1988), the music “catalog” in my head consisted of some various classic rock my dad listened to, some “oldies” mom listened to, and all the other music I’d scared up on my own via radio and tapes over the past eight years or so (when I got my first radio). Now that I’m 49, I’ve had 33 more years to accumulate that catalog of what I like and don’t. I’ve heard a lot more of that classic rock and oldies, a lot more of the music in the intervening 33 years, etc… So when I am listening to music, I can choose a song I know I enjoy from the ‘catalog’ of songs I like (whether that means radio, CD or something else), or I can go find a new one I may or may not like. Of course, #1 above does apply; I know that I’ll probably not hate a new Adele song. Or that I probably won’t be wild about a new Justin Bieber song. But otherwise, it’s a matter of comfort; it’s often just easier and more sure to go with what I know.
I’m not that way with everything; I really like watching new TV, reading new books/authors, and eating new foods/restaurants/cuisines. But I’m not a “music person”, so I let my old-fart flag fly and generally listen to old stuff I like because I can’t be arsed to seek out new stuff. Same thing with fashion; I’m not concerned with keeping up with trends very much.
I saw Soap for the first time in the early 00s and was surprised at how ahead of its time (in many ways) it was, yet still from a modern perspective a bit cringey. Or “cringe” as the kids say. But at the time, I did not know it had even existed, nor would even have thought it possible for it to exist.
I don’t know that it’s “supposed” to work that way, but each generation pushes on different boundaries and not all of them are going to be in the same direction
For example, you mention “gangsta rap”, I was in my early 20s when Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg first got big, talking about how they reveled in dropping “a 1-8-7 on the muthafuckin’ cop” and killing Bloods and whatnot, and “smoke weed every day…!”, and I was like “how is this on the radio?”
And now they’re doing those songs (albeit with skipped/muted references like that) at the Super Bowl halftime show.
But what’s the boundary being pushed these days, then? I’d say sexuality and gender issues. Li’l Nas X being openly gay, with a huge hit song “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” which is graphically homosexual.
Madonna’s had a hit song in “Like A Virgin” contributed to a Tipper Gore led campaign to “save the children!” from such themes in popular music in the early 1980s, but can you imagine “Montero” charting in the 1980s? 1990s? Even the 2000s, which had Katy Perry’s hit song “I Kissed A Girl (And I Liked It)?”
There is often an equal tendency to do the opposite . . .
Sturgeon’s law (“90% of everything is crap”) and survivorship bias account for a lot of misleading mass culture comparisons.
When you compare today’s movies to old movies you’re largely comparing the full gamut of today’s movies (of which 90% are crap) against the very best 1-2% of older movies, since those are the ones that get remembered, rewatched, have homages to them in other mass culture, etc.
There was plenty of bad music in every decade. The stuff that gets played from the 1970s today is largely the good stuff. There were almost certainly lots of bad 16th century plays, but the only ones 99% of people ever see are Shakespeare.
And not all of his were blockbusters.
I think this is largely because music was much more the primary medium of the cultural vanguard from the 1960s through the 1980s (and to a lesser extent through 2000ish). That’s where the boundaries were pushed. Television and film were largely controlled by stable gatekeepers and had various codes of permissible content that were largely not challenged. The counterculture was all in music because the barriers to entry were low enough that it couldn’t be effectively gated.
But music’s counter-cultural position started to wane when the Hays code went away in the 1970s and we got morally complex films, it dropped further when cable television kept the FCC from limiting language and violence and nudity on television, and it absolutely fell apart with the internet.
If you want to be shocked and frightened by modern culture, you won’t find it on Spotify, but there are some really vile corners of the internet out there.
As I age I notice myself becoming a lot more resistant to change. I resent the loss of familiar things, I resent the inconvenience of doing things differently for thinly justified reasons.
And then I turn a sharp eye to why things are changing, which in many cases is that people with no stake in the situation simply want to sell a new solution because they get paid to change things.
Moreover there are egregious violations of the Chesterton’s fence principle. People see a situation that seems absurd or nonsensical, and feel driven to improve it, but without first going through the exercise of learning why the thing existed in the first place, to ensure that the change is necessary and still satisfies the intended need. And if I raise these concerns, they’re dismissed simply as “you don’t like change because you’re set in your ways.”
The more I see of these sins, the more skeptical I get of change and modernism in general. Over time, this will lead to a reduction in the amount and type of new information I can acquire, as well as an increasingly irrational opposition to change, until I’m too stupid to see any merit whatsoever in anything new. I hope I’ll die soon after that, but my family medical history suggests otherwise. It’s really sad to think about.
I think this is how it happens to a lot of people. I’d like to think I’m different, but I have no real justification to believe it.
I don’t agree. I think human nature errs towards forgetting the bad and remembering the good. I hear time and time and time again about how “great things were back then” with no acknowledgment of the great now. We tend to want to believe that the best years of human history are the ones we grew up in. At least that is my observation.
I don’t understand - or appreciate - what little I see/hear of modern music. We watch SNL, just to catch a glimpse of some somewhat modern performers - and we just don’t get how it is music. Seems more like “performance art.”
I assume many folk who love all these performers today will feel similarly 30-40 years from now.
Yes, some small percentage of people are able to embrace cutting edge art late in their lives. But I imagine that a greater percentage develop broad preferences when they are being exposed to art and developing preferences for the first time, and that those broad preferences color what they prefer throughout their lives.
I think developing such broad preferences requires immersion. Perhaps if I made an effort to embrace hiphop or some other modern music, I would begin to appreciate it. But I have no interest in making the effort. Certainly am not about to put in the time/effort I did when younger.
Heck, when I was in HS/college, I was all into hard rock, new wave, and punk. Now, I’m far more into acoustic oldtime and bluegrass - whether freshly minted or well aged. For the greatest part, when I’m listening to music now, I’m interested in music that will inform the music I like to play.
What, pray tell, is the alleged problem with napkins?