"I know that I am completely behind the times when it comes to modern music. I could not name any song in the charts today, or any number 1 from 1990 onwards." OK, that's not too bad because if you just consider the music on the charts like the Billboard 100 then I agree completely. I haven't paid attention to music on the charts for many decades. Then there are responses from other people like this... each quote from a different person.
- "Nothing new (last 25 years) moves me at all"
- "I’m clueless to most music after 1990"
- "The exact period I gave up on ‘new music’"
- "I have been contentedly out of touch with popular culture for the last 25 years at least"
- "I’ve been progressively more lost with music since I spent two years overseas in 1990-91. Since then I’ve heard maybe half a dozen artists whose albums I’ve enjoyed, and none since around 2010. But 1974 keeps sounding better!"
- "I don’t keep up at all either"
Over the years I've heard many similar responses to a discussion about new music. All of them had not made sense to me. It is something I've heard all of my life and was very prevalent when I was young. All the time we heard how the best music was the big bands from the 40's and and the crooners from the 50's. This was all our parents generation and the idea of the new music of rock and roll was abhorrent to many older people at that time. We heard it all the time about new music. The generation slightly older than us also talked about music in that manner. I can remember my Uncle Charlie, who was about a dozen years older than me, telling me how good the 50's rock and roll was and the new music of the late 60's was trash that he didn't like or understand. We heard that kind of attitude a lot about our music.
For many years I heard similar new music screeds from people of my generation that thought that anything coming after so called classic rock was junk. Then there were people from Gen X who thought that all the new good music ended in the 80's with New Wave, Punk and Hair Metal. Speaking of metal. There were a lot of people who have expressed the opinion that no good music has been made since the rise of Heavy Metal. Then there is Rap and that is it's own particular story that I'll need to devote an essay of some focused criticism and discussion at some other time. I do have my opinions.
Last month I went out to dinner with some old friends from the neighborhood I grew up in. People I hung with all the time back in the 60's and 70's. The subject of music came up and of course they all knew I had an extensive collection of albums and loved all of my music. As we talked it became very apparent that most of the people sitting at the table only listened to the music of the 60's and 70's and paid no attention to anything released after later than the music of their youth. It was like a damn cliche.
When asked by someone to name my favorite album or music I like to say it is something I haven't heard yet. It is some music I'm listening to for the first time. I have always loved listening to new music. All of my life I have read the reviews of upcoming albums decade after decade. I would spend hours browsing record stores and in particular the racks of new releases. As the Internet grew I spent more and more time looking at new releases on various music websites. I still do that weekly. Now days I also check out the new release playlists on Spotify. In particular I religiously listen to the weekly new releases of classical music that comes out every Friday. It's usually a Saturday morning ritual for me.
I stopped collecting new music when I retired at the end of 2016 so from 2017 on all of my new music listening has been on Spotify. I still go to my regular music sites each week and look at what has been released. If there is something I am interested in and there are usually at least a dozen albums then I look them up in Spotify and add them to my personal album collection in my account. Then over time I give them a listen. Yep, I love listening to new music.
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