To Our Parents, Teachers, and everyone who was socially aware between 1965-1989,
I'm sorry that we have ruined music. I'm sorry that we made horrible "noise" that we pretend is music and have replaced singers with people who can talk really fast to a mind-numbing bass beat. I'm sorry that we think that writing the same song over and over again is acceptable and that mass producing music that all sounds the same is okay. We lack the originality and the need to have a new form of music that you enjoyed. We never had a repressive soceity for us to reject by wearing leather jackets and rolled up jeans and tube socks and mildly swaying our hips seductively. We never had a major social revolution involving free love and drugs. We never had draft cards to burn. This has left our generation in a strange place. With nothing to really rebel against, at least not a unifying and common "enemy" of our generation, and so we wallow in the success of our parents and bask in your accomplishments. We sing about money and sex and excess. You sung about love and unity and peace. We sing about how wonderful it is to be tormented. You sang about how to treat the one you love right.
We will be the first generation to not earn more than our parents.
We will be the first generation to not have a unified goal. The saying "shoot for the moon, because even if you miss, you'll land among the stars" means little to us because we've already been to the moon (and by us, I mean you).
So maybe we just need a goal. You're a hard act to follow, though, but maybe if we get together, we can have a goal.
To Gerneration I:
Let's get a goal.
A) The new layout is kinky.
ReplyDeleteB) What inspired said post?
C) Our new goal is to conquer Mars. It is now official.
On the whole, I consider my self a signee of this open letter. But if you think a good chunk of that era's music was NOT the same song over and over again, you need to brush up on your CCR, REO, Eagles, Foreigner, and (it hurts to say it) Beatles. Granted, they did it with a lot more energy than we do, and they didn't have to listen to two of what I consider the most disheartening developments in contemporary music: the Colbie Callait brand of thoroughly unoriginal, Macy Gray + Norah Jones - Talent new-folk and the absolute bastardization of classic rock samples in tracks for which Sean Kingston and Flo-Rida really ought to be ashamed of themselves. If our musical ancestors recorded the same song over and over, at least they had the benefit of originality. What our music is doing is worse than unoriginality or even theft. It's a wholesale dumbing-down of what music ought to be about.
ReplyDeleteP.S. The other day MD asked me for summer music advice, and just about everything I suggested to her (all mainstream, of course) came from the era you just extolled. I mention this because she opened the conversation with the question: "Do you listen to anything besides showtunes?"