“You know, we were happy in those days, although we were poor.”
I will take exception to this, because it’s the coolest album art I’ve ever seen and I paid for the hard CD only for the album art. I already had an electronic copy of the entire album.
I am referring to Tool’s 10,000 Days CD. The guitarist, Adam Jones, won a Grammy for this art. Wikipedia sums it up better than I can. I think Jones showed that one can actually do a lot more with CD cover art than the vinyl format affords.
I think that CD covers lend themselves as much to creative artwork as well as vinyl album covers and even electronic albums. My cite for that one is Bjork’s recent Biophilia. Stephen Colbert played with the smartphone app she developed as a companion piece to the album, and the apps go with the album. If you only have one or the other, you really only have part of the work. IMO, this far exceeds the level of art goodness I’ve ever seen on any vinyl album. The nature of the art has changed to work with the technology, rather than the technology has left the art behind.
I also think it’s a moot point that most artists these days don’t bother making a bunch of extra bells and whistles with their packaging because most artists didn’t bother back in the vinyl days either. There are many reasons for this, but I think the bottom line here is: music and art and technology have all evolved together. Was the 2-dimensional 4-color generally non-interactive vinyl record cover superior to what Tool and Bjork are doing? I think that’s only a matter of taste and what the definition of “art” is to you.
Point taken.
I was born in 1954, so I guess I’m an old fart to most here. Most of the things that the OP’s mother cites as hard were not viewed as horrors back then, and are probably not viewed as horrors now by those who experienced them. I grew up in a house with no A/C, three bedrooms and one bathroom, in a household consisting of three adults and four children. I think what prompts people of my age to mention facts like this is not that we thought or think that these circumstances were horrible, but that most people who have never experienced these conditions (mostly younger folks) would consider them horrible. The same goes for walking to school or my mother smoking in the car and lots of other things that were standard in my youth. In the US, it seems that the standard of living for average people has risen pretty steadily for a long time. This tends to make younger people take for granted things that were rare or unheard of for older generations. At least in my case, most of my mentions of the austerity of my youth are prompted by complaints from younger people about some luxury they can’t do without. The House Hunters television show is enough to provoke me to shouting at the TV. 
On the other side of the ledger, there were a lot of things that were really wonderful about my childhood years in Baltimore. Even some things that some might perceive as drawbacks had a plus side. For example, I went to Catholic school for twelve years where it was possible and expected that corporal punishment would be administered for some transgressions. I was on the receiving end of this a couple of times. Most students, who behaved better than I did, never experienced getting swatted by a nun. The up side of this rarely-used form of punishment was that I went to school for twelve years in classrooms that were filled with quiet, mostly attentive kids. For another example, in the blue collar neighborhood I grew up, any adult who saw me doing something that they thought I shouldn’t be doing would tell me to stop just as though they were my parents. On several occasions I was escorted home by neighbors who explained my transgression to my mother, who then administered whatever discipline was called for. I think the whole idea of this “neighborhood parenting” might horrify someone who has not experienced it, but it was actually a pretty good thing.
Here are a few things that I routinely did when I was a kid that just don’t happen now. When I was eight and had passed a swimming test, I was allowed to go to the neighborhood pool by myself, riding my bike or walking the mile or so distance. I could stay there for hours without my parents. I spent most summer days there. My parents went there on weekends. By the time I was ten, I was allowed to use public transit to go all over Baltimore without an adult present. I went to Orioles games (which I could easily afford from lawn-mowing money), the zoo, Fort McHenry, all over. My mother would ask me where I was going when I left the house, and tell me to be home for supper at 5:00. Other wise I was free. Even if I wasn’t at the pool or riding the bus around town, my free time was pretty free. After I did chores on Saturday mornings, I would leave the house to go play with friends and only return for meals. There were kids everywhere, adults keeping an eye on things, and life was pretty good.
I think I’m supposed to say something about kids and my lawn here, but I can’t remember what it is.
I know…but this is totally not a selling point to me…wtf am I going to do with the art? I want to listen to the music, not look at the art. I guess I’m just a heathen. 
On topic, I will never agree the “old days” were better, just because of the difficulty in acquiring birth control and the pressures on women to have the child if they got pregnant, and either give it up, or marry someone they were eminently unsuited for at seventeen.
Hooray for freedom from the yoke of being forced to bear children!
I’m quite a bit younger than you, but I’m going to go right along with you on this one. From age 11 or so, I was allowed to ride my bike wherever, and be gone as long as I wanted, as long as: A) I was home by the time the street lights came on, and B) I had gotten all my assigned chores done before I left the house.
And while I thought all my dad’s manual labor chores were horrible (and I would have blogged about it, had blogs existed back then, LOL), I’m glad he managed to teach me a lot of house upkeep skills by making me do them. I’m glad they made me earn my own money. And mostly, I’m glad I could tool around on my bike all summer long and get away with murder. I was also expected to run errands for my parents while they were at work (in the summer). They sent me all over town, unsupervised, on a 10-speed. No helmet. 
We used to hang out at the neighborhood parks. I don’t see many kids at parks anymore. I see adults working out, moms with babies in strollers, lots of people with dogs, but very few children actually playing. When I do, they are always closely supervised with several adults around carefully monitoring their every breath. I feel sorry for kids who don’t get the experience of exploring an abandoned house or getting up a pickup game of some form of ball or tag in a vacant lot with broken bottles everywhere.
Why, when I was a kid, our parents sent us out into heavy rush hour traffic with sharp knives to play and we turned out just fine… Okay, that last bit was a tad hyperbolic. But I do think kids are a bit more sheltered these days and I think they suffer from that. I don’t think it’s fair that most kids don’t seem to have as much independence as we did at much younger ages.
Dogzilla, “when the streetlights come on” was when I had to be home after supper, if it wasn’t already dark by then. In the dead of winter, we weren’t allowed out after supper, but for most of the year, I had to be home for supper at 5:00, and home when the streetlights came on after supper. Good times.
I was on a group tour in the now abandonedcoal mines of Wallons, Belgium. The tours were led by former miners. Our tourguide did a near impossible thing, by making us feel guilty of two separate things: one, that generations of miners did the (indeed) hard work of mining coal there, and two, that the mine was closed in 1990 and all minders sent home with a pension.
I came of age in the '60s, and everything was better then.
Well, unless you were black, female, gay, poor, sick, physically- or mentally-challenged . . . etc., etc., etc.