I joke at self service tills that “I’m just 18” when they come over to check my age… then I remember I’m three times that, and some! I was fifty eight this week, a day I never thought would come. It’s not because I have some illness, but because somewhere in my head I’m still twenty something and could never imagine that one day I’d be that old.
Age affects us in many ways, but when it comes to music, it seems many people, and a lot of respected musicians and producers have a poor memory. It’s the worst kind of sin. Sin? Yes, I use that word deliberately. One of the worst sins we can commit is to forget where we came from; I see business leaders, religious people, politicians, and sadly, musicians all do it and to our detriment.
History Will Teach Us Nothing
This whole “music is getting worse” trope seems to have found new oxygen, partly because we now have YouTube, social media et al. with which to peddle the myth. There’s nothing new about it, our parents, their parents and probably every generation since the invention of recorded music has said it.
And it’s a myth born out of a poor grasp of history and forgetting where we came from. I don’t care who is saying it, it’s as wrong as it always has been and that’s exactly where I want to start with some historical context.
Take these three critical reviews;
“Nothing we have exported in recent years quite justifies imported hillbillies who look like sheepdogs and sound like alley cats in agony.”
“If you don’t think about them they will go away and in a few more years they will probably be bald.”
“(They are) not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic.”
Wondering who these three criticisms are about? The Beatles. Yes, the same sainted band who many men of my generation genuflect when talking about, in fact often the same band we hold up in comparison to modern music when we want to set some bar with which to compare it. These weren’t any critics, but respected writers for publications like the Washington Post and New York Times in their day. Of course we now know they were wrong about so many aspects of The Beatles in their assessment.
The same was written about Elvis, the Rolling Stones, in fact name me any artist you hold in high esteem and there’s going to be someone of my age who wrote them off.
When We Were Young
The bands that were around in my formative years were punk; The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Stiff Little Fingers. That was fun. I don’t buy into the whole ‘it changed the social fabric of society’ rewriting of history narrative about punk, I just loved the energy. The barrage of criticism that hit us during punk was relentless. No melody, loud, brash, two chords, bad language, no one can play. Perhaps the critics were right. Punk wasn’t a lesson in musical excellence (see below), it was a way we could express ourselves, irrespective of talent.
Your list will be different depending on the era; for some it might be Frank Sinatra, others Led Zeppelin, or Dolly Parton, or REM, or Radiohead, or Sting, or Adele and the cohorts of that period. Of course there are outliers, but generally this is the case.
And this is my second point. It’s easy for 58 year old me to forget where I came from. To forget the musical landscape I walked in. To forget I was once struggling to string three chords together, to find the words, to record my masterpieces as my father shouted ‘turn that shit down!’ And now to sit in judgement over this generation accusing them of exactly the same things, forgetting where I came from. That’s a sin (that word again) and it’s hypocrisy of the worst kind. It rewrites my history to only include the edited highlights of musical success. It rewrites musical history as a whole, it fails to give anything context on so many levels. It forgets that in every musical period there was a lot of crap.
Some research shows that if you ask anyone to tell you the best musical period in history, it's likely to be during our teenage years and early twenties. Our formative years, when we fell in love, were heartbroken, we went to parties, consumed substances, and the music that we hold in high esteem is the mixtape of that period. Some notable exceptions later in life will be weddings, babies, and music around personal loss. Unknowingly we made a soundtrack to our lives and these are often our musical heroes, the bar with which we judge all other music. We fail to appreciate just how deeply personal the music and the people who made it are, it’s our emotional DNA.
We’ve Had Our Turn
I just watched Dua Lipa perform at Glastonbury 2024, one of my twenty something daughter’s favourite acts. She is incredibly talented as a writer, musician, and performer. Then of course there’s Taylor Swift, another enormous talent, I speak ill of her in front of my 9 year old Swifty daughter at my peril. There’s The Weeknd, Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo, Ed Sheeran, the list is endless.
Musical talent, be that writing, singing, or production is alive and well in 2024. It might not be the kind of music that formed men like me, hint… it’s not meant for us! I may not like the songs, the way they make them, the production methods, I may not even understand it, but that’s irrelevant.
We’ve never had more musical genres, and more music from across the globe, partly thanks to the rise of technologies that have made creating and distributing the music easier than ever. Music has never been broader or deeper, with genres and sub-genres now at around 6000.
Is music getting worse? No, it’s just different. Men (it’s normally men) of my generation, who want to be a cliche, and trott out the myth that music is going downhill, should remember where we came from.
We’ve had our turn, STFU!