I’ve only seen these with kids, not millennials.
There are lots of them.
Just a few of them:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtudQl_4A-oxpdXVtXaCJSw
I read a Slate article on this that I can’t find. But here are some links anyway.
March 1965! The most amazing week of the 1960s: Bob Dylan, MLK, the pill, Vietnam, and more.
So what happened then? This deserves a longform article.
Remember the “Generation Gap”? Like, it was suddenly discovered in the 50s and 60s that kids today were nothing like their parents. They wore different clothes, listened to different music, used different slang, took different drugs.
The parents of those kids grew up in the fucking Depression, capped off by World War II. The generation gap kids grew up in the prosperity of the 50s and 60s. There was a generation gap because the world had changed radically in the 20 years between 1938 and 1958.
But there has been no such cultural, economic, and political revolution in the 20 years between 1998 and 2018. Yeah, the internet, blah blah blah. Things have changed. But they haven’t changed like the radical changes of the past.
The 50s are when pop culture started to be invented. Before then there wasn’t a differentiation between “music the kids listen to” and “music grown ups listen to”. There was just music, it wasn’t age stratified. Along came the 50s and 60s and there are all these new kinds of music that the kids listen to but the adults don’t. The generation gap. Except all that ended because all the people who used to listen to “music for old people” died. I remember back in 1983, when this ended. James Watt thought he could score points by complaining about The Beach Boys and rock and roll. And everyone rolled their eyes. Rock music was no longer “music for kids” but just music.
I guess you’ll still see some Republicans railing against Hip-Hop, but that’s not because it’s music for kids, but because it’s music for Negroes. The musical generation gap has been over for so long that people don’t even remember what it was about, other than a vague sense that kids don’t like old music.
I always tell my (college) students “Man, what a great time to be alive.” And having a depth of music to choose from is a big part of it for me.
My dad and I would’ve never listened to the same music… or even called it music. I put one of “those kid stations” on in the car, once, and he barked “What is this crap? You canNOT call this music! Do you really LIKE this? Do you honestly think it’s MUSIC?!?”*
It was a song by … America.
Folksy Lite Rock at its most harmless.
Fast forward a generation and my Late Millenial kid’s filling up his phone with some new music and he says “Just realized, all of my favorite bands are missing people.” “Whadya mean?” “Half of the best bands are dead. The Who? Half dead. Beatles? Same. Zeppelin, Cream, Dead, AC/DC, Ramones, none of 'em are all there.”
I’d love to say somebody raised that kid right. But he’s raised himself, and just knows good music. With ZERO generation gap.
*Keep in mind, this was Southeastern Wisconsin in the 70s, so if you heard that growled by Red Foreman you’re spot on.
As a Gen X-er, beyond the early 60s I can’t listen to any tune with singing without keeping how old it is at least a little in the back of my head. Instrumental classical and jazz is another story, because aside from production values and obscure techniques that weren’t invented until a certain decade and which I wouldn’t be able to identify anyway, it can sometimes be hard to tell when a piece was written.
To me the freshest-sounding stuff from the 50s is chicago blues and to a lesser extent jump blues because I wasn’t exposed to them growing up so I don’t automatically place them in a time period, and the former is a direct progenitor of rock music, bypassing rock and roll to give rock a direct infusion of great blues-based guitar.
I think that circa-1966 threshold still in the minds of even young people today (even if some of them can’t pinpoint the date explicitly) is reinforced a little by how, coincidentally, that’s right when television switched from mostly-black-and-white to mostly-color. So, when we hear music from since that time, we associate it with real-live color — be it 1970 or 2010. Even if we’ve never seen a video clip of that particular song, we’ve seen enough of them from both sides of the black-and-white/color divide to subliminally associate musical styles with one or the other.
My son is 21, And he and all his friends listen to music from the 60’s to the 1990’s, with only a smattering of new songs in the mix.
I believe it’s because new music sucks. And I know every older person has been saying that for a hundred years, but now it’s true. Pop music is now completely dominated by formula music sung by engineered artists of marginal talent, with the songs being written by a handful of professional songwriters you’ve probably never heard of. The music is intentionally designed to sound similar, it’s compressed as hell to raise the average volume at the expense of nuance, and it’s totally devoid of anything approaching artistry or individuality. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
No wonder young people are discovering music from a time when individual artistry was still a thing.
Yeah. Kids today (and really the past decade or two) are far more open minded about music than previous generations. More so than mine for sure. Not only about different generations fo music, about different genres too. I applaud them for that.
Millennials and post millennial are pretty cool as far as I’m concerned. Definitely no worse than my generation and quite possibly better.
Nope. Every older person also always thinks “now it’s true”. It isn’t. Maybe less true than ever.
I’m not a fan of a lot of newer music, though I won’t go so far as to say “it sucks,” because I recognize that I’m old, and my musical tastes seem to be solidly lodged in a range from 1975 to 1987. 
However, the point that pop music, for the past decade or more, really is dominated by a handful of songwriters / producers (many of them Scandinavian, interestingly enough) is a pretty clear one. As Nathaniel Rich wrote in The Atlantic in 2015:
“As I write this, at the height of summer, the No. 1 position on the Billboard pop chart is occupied by a Max Martin creation, “Bad Blood” (performed by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar). No. 3, “Hey Mama” (David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj), is an Ester Dean production; No. 5, “Worth It” (Fifth Harmony featuring Kid Ink), was written by Stargate; No. 7, “Can’t Feel My Face” (The Weeknd), is Martin again; No. 16, “The Night Is Still Young” (Minaj), is Dr. Luke and Ester Dean. And so on. If you flip on the radio, odds are that you will hear one of their songs. If you are reading this in an airport, a mall, a doctor’s office, or a hotel lobby, you are likely listening to one of their songs right now. This is not an aberration. The same would have been true at any time in the past decade. Before writing most of Taylor Swift’s newest album, Max Martin wrote No. 1 hits for Britney Spears, ’NSync, Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Maroon 5, and Katy Perry.”
I saw one the other day of a guy who had never heard Bohemain Rhapsody before. Somehow he had entirely missed one of the biggest rock songs ever. To be fair, though, he really responded to it and understood it very well.
I was thinking of this thread while watching Ronin the other day, that crime caper from 1998 with Robert DeNiro and Natasha McElhone. I hadn’t seen it since it first came out, but I started thinking about how it was only slightly dated/aged. Some of the clothes and haircuts had a 90s vibe, but it wasn’t severe.
I then imagined going back to '98 and watching a movie from '78, and how much more dated '78 seemed in '98 than '98 seems in 2018. (Think Hooper or Every Which Way but Loose.) And it’s not like I was a little kid in '98 watching movies from a by-gone era; I was almost 30 then.
Anyway, that’s what got me thinking of this thread. I’m wondering if maybe everything in entertainment is getting dated slower and slower as time goes on: Music, TV, Movies, all of it.
(Note: Teen shows from '98 (ie: Buffy, Friends) with teen and 20-something girls wearing high-waisted pants look super dated; almost as jarring as a '70s movie with bell-bottoms would be. So I think my point stands, but am not positive. Maybe girls clothes are a special case of “always looks really dated” as opposed to guys who always just kind of wear basic guy “uniforms”: Either suits (Ronin) or Jeans (EWWBL, Hooper.))
Its because we reduce a whole decade of shit to the top 20 or so songs we remember from that period.
I’ve seen a few of Joey’s reaction videos, I like him. My fave is probably his reaction to Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig in the Sky
He really, really gets it :DThis says it all.
The fact that you can just casually say, “a 26 yr old wanted to go to a concert with people 3 decades older than her” —and nobody thinks it is noteworthy or unusual.
Also post #45 by lemur866about the generation gap (a serious issue a couple decades ago,but now irrelevant)
The answer to the OP’s question of what makes something sound “old timey” isn’t about the music; It’s about the social context of the music, and who you feel comfortable sharing it with.
My grandson, born in 2001, is now a Senior in high school. His favorite musical artist? Dean Martin. I have no explanation.
I saw The Velvet Underground in Edinburgh in 1993, the first gig of the reunion tour. It’s by some distance the most age-diverse audience I’ve ever been part of - from young teen indie-kids to really quite elderly greybeards. As you say it’s the social context -pretty much everyone there was in a state of disbelief that the VU were actually there for a start - but the waves of appreciation rolling from audience to stage was a proper, proper lifetime moment. Lou, John, Mo and Sterling were visibly and audibly moved by it too.
I remember my 18 year old son, when he was around 10, saying “hey Dad; want to listen to Who’s Next with me?”. Both he and our 20 year old son will listen to music from the mid sixties through the present. The older one is more disdainful of anything that sounds too “pop.”