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They don't make them like this anymore?
Indie | Saturday 25th August 2012 | Osh
Listen to anything considered “classic” on YouTube, and trawl the comments at your peril. For there, you shall find users relentlessly criticising the state of twenty-first century music compared to the glory days of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Black Sabbath, and many other undeniably excellent acts. These comments are often accompanied by a proclamation that the commenter is in his early-to-mid teens (as if their grammar wasn’t already an indication) and is oh-so-special for knowing who Led Zeppelin are, though this view is often shared by people of all ages. And is, to not put too fine a point on it, bullshit.
Yes, the 60’s and 70’s produced some of the finest music ever created. But so has every era. The 60’s had The Beatles, the 70’s had Bowie, the 80’s had Run-DMC, the 90’s had Nirvana and the 2000’s had Radiohead’s weirder side. As well as an awful lot more incredible music, and an awful lot of rubbish. And that’s where the issue comes from. When people (even those born in 1997) reminisce about the 1960’s, they imagine through John Lennon’s tinted glasses a time when every release was a "Pet Sounds" or an "Are You Experienced?", a time when the music-consuming general public had superior taste, far removed from today’s world where nobody listens to anything but Kesha and Nickleback. In reality, the 60’s was as guilty of consuming bad music as any other time, such as The Monkees, a band from a TV show who somehow ended up having huge-selling albums released under their name, the first few of which the band themselves did nothing on. This formula can be repeated for smash hits of all generations, which get forgotten about, just as nobody now cares about Itsy-Bitsy-Teenie-Weenie-Yellow-Polkadot-Bikini and nobody in 2030 will care about Justin Bieber.
Just as older music has an awful lot to be ashamed about, modern music has an awful lot to be proud of. The Strokes, The White Stripes, Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys, Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Gorillaz, Gnarls Barkley, The National, The Shins, The Libertines, Foo Fighters, Beach House, Arcade Fire. The list of fine 21st Century releases could go on for far longer. These quality acts are the ones that will be remembered in the future, where people are doubtless bitching about how awful music is in the 2050’s and how they would have killed to be alive in 2012.
To round it off, here's some of 2012's finest:
Simon Pease
