Damn kids and their (whatever)!!: Reflecting on getting older

The other day I was talking to one of the people that is around my age, which is the back end of the 40's and this guy was talking about how awful the youth's music is these days. He was saying about how there hasn't been any "real music" since the 90's or maybe the early 2000's.

While I agree with him about a certain time period's music being "better" I do take time to look at the fact that times always change, and the people that are part of the last generation are normally going to experience great difficulty identifying with whatever it is that becomes popular among the young. Young people, outside of country music, kind of determine which way the trends flow because they are the ones most likely to spend money on it, wouldn't you agree?

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As I was commenting earlier today I thought of how I don't watch a lot of movies and when I do, I rarely make it to the end of them. One movie that I did watch, rather intently actually, was Gran Torino and I would imagine just based on the look of Eastwood's much-more-youthful look above, that movie is probably 15-20 years old by now.

If you aren't familiar with the film it is all about a man who is older and really dislikes all the stuff that the young people in his neighborhood and beyond are into. He simply cannot identify with the things that they do. Of course the movie is about a lot more than that, but that is one of the jists of it.

When my friend was talking about how there "is no good music being made today" my response to him was "you know how typical it is to say that don't you?"

And I realized that this is the way it has been since there was music. There might be rare exceptions of parents that genuinely did enjoy their kids music but for the most part I think every single older generation thought the music of the new generation was a bunch of bullcrap.

I think about in my own childhood and how I was the perfect age to be up with the times about new music in the early 90's and how grunge and the Seattle scene took the school parking lots by storm. We had no internet so there, and on MTV, was where we found out about new music. I loved Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Bush, and to a lessor degree, Stone Temple Pilots.

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It wasn't just the very different music, but it was the fashion as well as the makeup for girls, and just the attitude in general. I had what I consider to be very cool parents but they never had any real interest in the music and I gave up trying to show it to them very quickly. They thought my outfits looked stupid but man, basically everyone was wearing Chuck Taylors and those flannel shirts. We were just doing what the TV and pop culture told us to do I guess, just like skinny jeans and excessive hair wax is the style of today.

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_{whatever the hell you call this, was high fashion that would turn heads in the 90's}

I have a similar attitude towards all of this, the same way that my parents were towards my fashion and music choices were when I was a teenager. As it turns out, my parents (believe it or not) have similar stories from when they were in high school.

My parents told me stories about how they would have to hide a shirt in their backpack that they would change into once they got near school and also how they had to conceal the fact that they even had Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin records. Not only did their parents not identify with this new style of sound, but they went as far as to dub it as evil and blasphemous. I suppose this is more understandable with Sabbath, but Led Zeppelin?

We are all just products of our own time and this is what I tried to ruminate with my friend that was claiming that all music today sucks. I will mostly choose to listen to music that I like but to suggest that ALL music that is made today is terrible is to be pretty oblivious to the general passage of time.

in 20 years that people that are bopping around to whatever we call the music today are going to take great issue with whatever it is that teenagers end up liking in the year 2050 - you can take that to the bank.

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There are some pretty good clips of Dana Carvey doing "Grumpy Old Man" on Saturday Night Live that exhibits the type of person that I hope to avoid becoming, but all of us, at least to some degree, will almost certainly become on some level.

You are not making some sort of profound statement when you say something about "they can't even play any instruments!" or "a computer does all the work for them!". this is nothing new. People hated electric guitar when it first came out and the music industry was extremely reluctant to accept keyboards in lieu of pianos - until pop culture of the time revealed that these sorts of vibes simply weren't possible on traditional instruments.

I don't even know what the future will hold as far as music and fashion are concerned, but I am sure of one thing: The people that came up with the ridiculous notions of the generation before that the generation before THEM hated, will hate whatever it is that the young people come up with after them. It's a never-ending cycle and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

I try to enjoy new music, and every now and then a song will come along that I actually really like

Even before I saw how attractive the girl is in this video I had this song in regular rotation on my Spotify in my car and well, I can't even put my finger on what it is, but that's just a good song. Did Tate McRae actually write any of this, did she play any instruments to come up with it? I have no idea, and I also do not care. It's a good song IMO.

I agree with my friend that I don't personally like most of the music made in the past 5, maybe even 10 years. But to suggest that none of it is "good," that's just an ignorant statement.