Has music ceased to matter?

[Guy Rowland]

OLD PERSON THREAD ALERT

I'd guess for most of us here, music defined our youth. Whatever era we were in, whatever artists and composers did it for us, we were in thrall to the power of music.

And music was EVERYWHERE. In the UK during my teenage years, the nation would watch Top Of The Pops each week and complain about it. There were the megastars - Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince who were cultural icons that transcended music. When Byran Adams was no1 with Everything I do for 98 weeks in a row, everyone knew about it. Frankie Goes To Hollywood shocked the nation. When Blur and Oasis released new singles in the same week in the 90s, it was a top news story. MTV was a cultural phenomenon.

The stock of music itself seems to have been reduced. It's now a niche interest. We have Taylor Swift, I'd say she is the only artist at that level of ultra-stardom that was once common and she's about 90 now. NEW music seems to have become subsumed by ALL music - old songs aren't seen as old any more, it's all in a giant melting pot where new artists have to compete with everything ever recorded, not just what is popular right now. While that's terrific on the one hand, I think it has ghettoised new music, and it's a double whammy because streaming makes careers unsustainable.

Making music is now so easy you just type in a prompt. Inspired by nothing more than a passing thought, the creative process is entirely eliminated. As Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park: "I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here. It didn’t acquire any discipline to attain it. You read what others have done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourself so therefore you don’t take any responsibility for it.".

The background to young people's lives are memes, not songs. The sacred ritual of saving up for an album, buying it, finding you didn't like it but would play it 30 times until either you did or found you REALLY didn't like it, is gone. It forced us to be challenged.

In short - music doesn't seem to matter like it used to.

But maybe that's not quite as bad as it first seems. I think the biggest changes have been to mass culture, which - arguably - was never so much about the raw power of music but the power of celebrity. Perhaps music can - and does - still mean as much as it used to on an individual level, it's just it is now lost in the cultural noise. Or is that itself slowly dying?

YouTube recently offered me up a cover of a favourite Prefab Sprout song, Bonny, by Seal. It knows me well. But it was the comments that really got to me. So many saying Paddy McAloon was one of the great underrated songwriters.



But this comment in particular speaks to the extraordinary power of music to connect people across time and space at such a deep level. How remarkable it is that someone wrote a song 40 years ago that has this effect when sung by someone else:

You watch a thousand videos and hear a thousand songs and you still feel hollow. And then Seal sings Bonny and you know you're not alone.

I hope someone feels the same in another 40 years about a song from their youth today.

[Tobias Escher]

Interesting topic, for sure! I think most of it comes from the kind of music you grow up with, particularly what social group you get into.
So I'm 39, and my whole life everything in the realm of popular music has completely passed me by. Any No.1 hit song when I was a kid, there's a good chance I've never heard. I genuinely had never heard a single Michael Jackson song until he died. Not one. It was just not the social circle I was ever in.

As a little kid (think start of primary school) I was big into classical music. Had my own record player (yes, at a time where these were already dead) since I can remember, and thousands of records from my parents. Still have them, still listen to them a lot.
Until about 11/12, that was pretty much it. One exception were Abba (again, YEARS after their stuff came out! My first CD was The Album in 1993, came out in 1977). And the only contemporary exception was one German pop/rock band, whose newest album was basically the soundtrack to summer camp I attended. That was the only "new" music.

Through family, I was and still am super big into Genesis. Again, decades after the fact. Only the old stuff, nothing from the Phil Collins era (still have not heard anything after the 70s).

So it was 99,9% classical music plus Genesis at home, some Beatles, Abba (that was the early 90s!!!). And then came German power metal. Quite early. From about 12/13, it was exclusively classical music and metal. Gamma Ray, Blind Guardian, Helloween, ... then when it started Symphonic Metal, later folk metal, basically anything but death metal. And still mostly classical music.
EDIT: From around 2008, bluegrass and "rodeo country" has come in. Never mainstream country,only the stuff like Dave Stamey, Chris LeDoux. Not a single track of all the big stadium country guys.
All that has stayed that way.

I can truthfully say I have never listened to anything "mainstream". As weird as it sounds, I don't know a single song by Taylor Swift. Not one. Primarily because I just hate hate hate the blandness. All of it. I've been forced to sit through some pop songs (don't even know by whom) a few years back when someone had the radio on in the car. And the whole time I thought "this would be nice if it would KICK SOME ASS!!!!!!". It's just all so bland. All autotuned to death, if a drummer plays more than 1 note per hour it feels it already is too "hard" for them, no distorted guitar in sight...
And the same 4 bloody chords over and over again, ultra bland. It all sounds like 1st guitar lesson (I don't play guitar), just soooooo boring.
It just all feels to me like "let's write a song that absolutely NO ONE can find in any way producing any emotion whatsoever. If they could feel empowered, it's too much. if it makes them sad, too much. If they think it has a message, too much".

I remember when Amy Winehouse died, I read about it here, and I thought "Who??". I had never heard a single of her songs. Really not my style, I can see what people saw in her, but it really always passed me by completely.

Nowadays I learn about new music still primarily by friends recommending it. Also Auto-Playlists on Apple Music in the car after an album ends. Reading music magazines.

Guy. I took that paragraph:
"Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince who were cultural icons that transcended music. When Byran Adams was no1 with Everything I do for 98 weeks in a row, everyone knew about it. Frankie Goes To Hollywood shocked the nation. When Blur and Oasis"
Michael Jackson - bought a best of a few years back. My music player showed I skipped through a few songs. I listened to a few right now, somewhat liked it. Going on the list agin.
Madonna - never heard a single song
Prince - I have genuinely never heard the name before
Bryan Adams - I know him from the Dreamworks Spirit movie, and can sing these songs by heart. Didn't know he had done anything else, because I never bothered to search.
Frankie goes to Hollywood - never heard of them
Blur - same
Oasis - I know the name, but have never heard any of their songs (I searched for their biggest hits on Youtube, none sounded familiar).

It's totally crazy how much these things can pass one by...
Long story, no sense . For me music was never about the stars, never about what's "in", I always found that boring.

[GR Baumann]

I never heard, not to my knowledge, a single song from Swift. I probably heard snippets in the radio, the 45 seconds before the news or the likes, but not to my knowledge.

Look at "existing" genres, in the thousands, if not five digits already.

I fart into a Neumann U67, sample it, and call it cosmic flatulation, chop it up, and have a Gangsta-Kid rap to it, this hits some numbers, and now I fart 50 times, and publish a sample library, cosmic flatulation Vol. 1. as heard by Gangsta-Kid. etc.

The inflation of music is irreversible! We will not see a time again where a single band or musician influenced society, the way Bob Dylan, Hendrix, Beatles, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Zappa et al. were able to.

The constant flood of shit in the system has kids hooked to their little digital dictators, and the games just about started with AI coming to town.

So yes, there is a grave somewhere, on it's tombstone chiseled:

Music was my first love
but
Elvis sold over 1 billion records

[progger]

One thing is for sure, everything is always changing, and we never know exactly how those changes are going to unfold, particularly as other people perceive and adapt to them. All we can do is try to be as aware as possible of our own feelings, thoughts, and reactions as we get hit by those changes, and, hopefully, to stay as authentically true to ourselves as possible. And thrive. As artists, laborers, craftspeople, or just the messy and silly humans we all end up being anyway.

At the moment, music is definitely not the focal point of western-world pop culture in the same way it was in the 1980s and 1990s. I find that a bit sad, even though I've always mostly enjoyed music considerably older than I am, with periodic exceptions. Ironically, music is more important to me than it was back then, while I was growing up, or at least it feels like it is. It's always been important to me, since I was a wee lad, but it's only grown in significance... all while I become more and more aware that it shouldn't matter nearly as much as the numerous crises facing the world today (socioeconomic inequality, backsliding into authoritarian oligarchy, an ever-worsening global environmental catastrophe that continues to be mostly ignored, etc).

Mediocre music has saturated everything in the industry, as perfectly represented by the fake AI "artists" on Spotify that just exist to further consolidate that company's wealth. Non-AI music today often sounds even less interesting, at least AI did some proper homework! It's probably been nearly a decade since I've heard a new record that truly excited and inspired me, and I keep going back to Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Ravel, or Prokofiev (etc) for inspiration. I've also been a grumpy old man since the age of fifteen, according to my cousin, and I fully accept that.

But from my audiences – the folks coming to shows I'm playing, as either a sideman or leader, the folks buying and streaming my albums, the clients who like to work with me as an arranger or session player – I can perceive an ever-growing boredom with this saturation of musical mediocrity and automation. I've recently felt very gratified for having taken so many years to properly learn how to play, write, arrange, and produce music, I have plenty of gig work (for which I'm immensely grateful), and I've been reinvigorated to invest in my creative work, making records just for the sake of doing something cool, not in the hopes for great financial gain. I think the world is becoming newly and increasingly hungry for genuine, authentic, human work done on a high level, and that possibility excites me.

[Guy Rowland]

But from my audiences – the folks coming to shows I'm playing, as either a sideman or leader, the folks buying and streaming my albums, the clients who like to work with me as an arranger or session player – I can perceive an ever-growing boredom with this saturation of musical mediocrity and automation.

Excellent! Without question, this is a movement that will continue. I hesitate to say "grow" with the same certainty, but that's likely too.

Ai generated videos of eye-popping incredulity already elicit only yawns. The twenty-somethings in my life unanimously are uninterested in anything by AI - in fact positively hostile. I think the market for live music, played before your very eyes by people with talent will flourish. The market for session players feels less certain to me so that's very good to read.

That's all one part of the equation, but your argument is bigger than that - the increased reliance on automation to create a homogenous sound. This is a subject that absolutely fascinates me. The synths and drum machines that started in the 70s birthed entire genres. Dance music threw out real musicians somewhere in the 80s and has never looked back - the public craved metronomic precision. Kraftwerk embraced the machines, now widely seen as perhaps the most influential group of all time. And I love Kraftwerk! I was an technological evangelist.

But now we can create literally any sound with ease it is an irony that everything sounds the same. By the time vocals are manipulated into sonic perfection, they do all tend to sound similar to one another. Artificial voices which never sounded quite real enough have seamlessly merged with real voices made to sound unreal and met in the bland middle.

All the while, a handful of TV channels grew to hundreds which themselves got usurped by trillions of videos accessible by anyone who can be bothered to lift a finger. The background noise of life turned into an overwhelming roar which exists to distract and even manipulate the world itself around us.

The mental health issues of the younger generations don't need too much explaining.

A friend of mine is a teacher of primary school children (5-11). She told me that recently she had to run a music lesson where kids were encouraged to write prompts into AI so they could "make their own music". It disturbed her to her core. On the other hand, I can already see how AI can be genuinely beneficial to creative artists so saying all AI is inherently bad feels too simplistic and perhaps misses the deeper point.

Jean Michel Jarre - another pioneer who embraced machines - has a wonderful simple phrase as he talks through how he made those ear-popping sounds 50 years ago, how he transformed noise generators and filters into a sonic landscape with "a little musical intent". There is something about those words that feels profound to me. Musical intent is the mechanism that has united songwriters, composers and musicians of every stripe for thousands of years. The desire to turn lifeless objects into art, the magic of creating something from nothing. The writer does the same with mere words. As humans it is in our natures to create art and tell stories.

If that intent is bypassed, we are somehow eroding our humanity - all in an era where relationships are gamified and online personas curated to generate maximum engagement. At the risk of ballooning an already vast subject even further, I wonder if the rise in fascistic tendances we see everywhere in the world is essentially that we're forgetting how to relate to one another as human beings.

"Machines do heavy work, while man controls the machines". This old quote is used more than once by the band Public Service Broadcasting who make music about human endeavour. Perhaps the challenge faced by music and art in general today is when that simple quote gets reversed. As one priceless tweet said, "When I was young I used to dream that I'd write poetry and paint all day while robots did the laundry and the dishes - not the other way around".

[progger]

Indeed, and agreed. "Musical intent" is a powerful concept!

[wst3]

there is good music being written and recorded today, but it has become darned difficult to find it, and I think that is the problem - which stems from the acceptance of mediocre music (and art in general!)

I'm 66, grew up (musically) in a very strange mix (sorry) of music - my folks listened to the rat pack and others of that ilk, my grandfather listened to the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy and Stokowski. My friends and I started our journeys with Chubby Checkers and the Beatles (of course) and then branched out in many directions. Protest music. Rock and Roll. The blues. Progressive rock. West Coast rock. You name it we listened to it, largely because the local FM station played all of it. The first albums my parents bought me were Tommy, Chicago Transit Authority, CSN&Y 4 Way Street (from which I discovered a love for live recordings), Three Dog Night, Inna Gadda Da Vida, and Woodstock (which was played in the family room as often as my bedroom). In 9th grade I discovered Duane Allman, Clarence White, Danny Gatton, and Lenny Breau. Oh yeah, and Joe Pass and Mickey Baker. Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was an early favorite, Harry Chapin and Jim Croce were big favorites, and then there was James Taylor's One Man Dog, as was pretty much everything by Zappa. Somewhere along the way I discovered Coltrane, Davis, Copland, and Barber.

ALL of it was exciting! All of them offered something new from which to learn.

These days I listen to a college station, but even they are no where as adventurous as they once were, so finding new artists is getting more and more difficult. I remember hearing Nickel Creek for the first time on that station, along with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sean Colvin, and especially Nanci Griffith.

I really miss new adventures in music! I hope this is just a lull.

[Ashermusic]

Music has definitely become devalued.

When I was in my teens and a new album came out, I would buy it, listen to the whole thing over and over, read the liner notes, read the credits, and treat the record as a treasure,

Now people create playlists full of crappy mp3s of various artists and listen to them on a phone with earbuds while they are doing something else. And they will spend $30 at Starbucks on things that, excuse my indelicacy, they will excrete in under 24 hours but won't spend $10 on a CD or downloads.

[Piet De Ridder]

I’m beginning to think more and more that, once of a certain age, one should disqualify oneself from commenting on the state of music today and how younger generations consume it. It’s not our time any longer, is it? Me, I have no idea how exactly music figures in the lives of my daughter and my son (and their friends) — all in their twenties —, how important (or unimportant?) it is for them and what sort of pleasures they derive from it. Comparing it to how I and my friends discovered and subsequently lived with our favourite music (often a lifelong love affair), their way seems decidedly superficial and episodic (as in: short musical flings that last only a week or so and are then forgotten), but I might well be completely wrong about this and I probably am. Like I said: I have no clue.

When I watch other people, of that certain age (or older), talk — usually in very dismissive terms — about today’s music and the way it is made, marketed and consumed, I invariably switch off. Take Rick Beato, for example. Rightly admired, in my opinion, as the creator of countless incredibly interesting videos about music (writing, performing, producing) as well as being an outstanding interviewer whose recorded conversations with musicians, engineers and producers meanwhile deserve, still in my opinion, to be called of historic importance. However, the moment he decides to tackle the subject of today’s music, he invariably turns in an insufferable, bitter old fart. Is what I think anyway. And even if agree with some of his observations, it always feels wholly uncomfortable and wrong to me to discuss today’s music on old men’s terms.
Recently he had the legendary producer Glyn Johns as a guest. Another excellent interview most of the time, until the subject turned to today’s music: Glyn Johns, in his mid-eighties, dismissed all of it as unlistenable poo (both on technical and musical grounds). The only thing that tells me, is that these people are simply past the age that permits relevant and meaningful commenting on today’s music and the way it is embraced by the generation(s) for which it is made.

I still find A LOT of great and great-sounding new music. I keep buying new jazz albums with more or less the same frequency as I always have done (and there are some true jewels among them), I keep buying classical recordings of new music (it is, I admit, more of a challenge to find stuff I really like), I’ve discovered some interesting electronic music (not a lot, but some), contemporary film- and tv-music is often amazingly creative and worth giving my full attention, and as for today’s pop and rock: some time ago having accepted that it isn’t made for me, I mostly ignore it, except for the odd track which finds its way to my ears and manages to cause genuine enjoyment there.

I do hope and wish that young people, and all generations to come, keep finding a similar degree of excitement, inspiration, joy, passion-triggers and maybe even directions for their life’s journey in the music-of-their-time they discover and come to love, just like we did. (Provided AI doesn’t get too big a say in the matter, and even that might turn out alright, I’m pretty confident that they will.)

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[Ashermusic]

There’s tons of great music being made, no doubt, but I am around a lot of young people and it’s just a fact that they don’t listen with the same level of commitment that me and my friends did. And you can dismiss it all you want, Piet, make excuses for it, reject putting a value judgement on it, call me a “you kids get off my lawn “ guy, whatever but as Bob Dylan wrote,”You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Music has been devalued, period and if you don’t believe that it’s because you don’t want to.

[mr anxiety]

Well said Piet!

[Guy Rowland]

I do hope and wish that young people, and all generations to come, keep finding a similar degree of excitement, inspiration, joy, passion-triggers and maybe even directions for their life’s journey in the music-of-their-time they discover and come to love, just like we did.

I hope so too. And for some, undoubtedly, it will.

There are perhaps two issues I'm conflating in this thread. One is the current state of the music fan / music scene, and the other is the impact music has on society. I think the latter is undoubtedly diminished overall. For the former, I reckon there will be less hardcore music obsessives due to increased competition. But they're not a dying breed either.

That Apple Billie Eilish documentary was quite the eye-opener. The fervour of her fans was borderline terrifying, not entirely dissimilar to Beatlemania on the face of it. But while the appeal of the Fab Four seemed to be, as The Rutles put it, their trousers, the appeal of Billie seemed to be existential. She spoke to teens and maybe even pre-teen girls in particular who live in the same world as her. They tell her she has literally saved their lives. It wasn't lust, it was more saviour syndrome it seemed to me (well, no doubt with some lust in there too - they are teenagers after all).

Point is - for these fans it isn't casual. They will obsess over every word in every song.

Dammit Piet, I'm old and talking about young music. And actually I've heard Rick Beato be pretty complimentary about the likes of Billie.

But THOSE kinds of fans are not the kinds of fans we think of our younger selves as, the kind who pour over the liner notes (and yes I absolutely did this too Jay). The star is the appeal, not the bass player or the engineer. Though maybe that absurdly talented bastard Finneas has actually got some into production, who knows?

Incidentally, Billie and Taylor are the answer to AI for the youth. AI might be able to turn out a song that sounds like either with ease, but any true fan would spurn it. If Swifties bought all of Taylor's re-recorded albums again because it would stop her being sad, AI isn't going to represent any kind of threat to them now, is it?

[Geoff Grace]

It’s not our time any longer, is it?

<rant> Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas

In other words, it's our time as long as we draw breath. I also push back on the common preface of "Back in my day," which is dismissive of the current life that exists to utter those words. Each point in life is meaningful.</rant>

But I concede the sentiment with which those words were given: most of us here, including myself, are largely removed from the current experiences of young people, other than those experiences that are shared by most people.

To get squarely back on topic, I think music still matters; and it's clearly important to some people. However, it does have a lot more competition than it used to. As Guy mentioned, media has grown exponentially over our lifetimes; so our focus is more scattered than ever before. That goes for all ages.

I'll add that I think the experience of playing music adds the the experience of enjoying music. Here in the US, music education budgets were cut back in 80s; and they never recovered. This is often linked to the emergence of turntables being used as instruments in the 90s and bands going the way of the dinosaur, especially in ghetto neighborhoods. Did that harm the overall level of appreciation for music in the US? I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

I've experienced this in other areas of life. For example, I watch sporting events of sports that I played as a child, and I'm not particularly interested in watching sports that I never played. Playing sports helped me appreciate sports, and I expect that people who similarly played an instrument for a few years as a child still have an extra level of appreciation for music that lasts today.

Best,

Geoff

[Lawrence]

I intend to continue aging until I’m dead. It’s sort of a fetish, this continual living I’m doing, refusing to die before my time, refusing to be bereft of validity as a result of my decrepitude.

I may also express opinions about music, old and new, though I admit to listening to very little hip hop/ dance oriented pop music as it generally leaves me cold. It’s often very well produced and sometimes well written, but it’s awfully damn perfect.

Most of the negativity I find myself expressing though has to do with the shrinking opportunities for young folks to make a living writing and producing music. It’s always been competitive but scoring is paying less and less for everyone but A-list composers. Streaming has taken large hunks out of the royalty model. Yes, some very business savvy artists make it virally but it’s rare. I was lucky enough to have made a living in the music business for about forty years without working as a waiter or driving a taxi. I see that growing increasingly more difficult for future generations.

The fact that the music that one experiences at seminal times remains a model of “good” music for life is very human and unsurprising. One should remember that those who are young now will eventually get old and become nostalgic about “their” music and scornful of the new new thing.

It’s natural. It’s cyclical. It’s fine. New young people spring up all the time.

[Geoff Grace]

One should remember that those who are young now will eventually get old and become nostalgic about “their” music and scornful of the new new thing.

It’s natural. It’s cyclical. It’s fine. New young people spring up all the time.

Yes, it’s as old as time.

I remember Steve Allen making fun of The Beatles. His routine was in response to the younger generation saying that The Beatles were geniuses. He read an example of their lyrics, in a slow, deadpan manner:

“You say yes…
I say no…
You say stop…
And I say go, go, go…
Oh no…
You say goodbye…
And I say hello…

(Pause)

Hello, hello…
I don't know why you say goodbye…
I say hello…
Hello, hello…
I don't know why you say goodbye…
I say hello…”

I’m sure that many members of a generation raised on Cole Porter were rolling with laughter at the stupidity of us young people.

Best,

Geoff

[Ashermusic]

Again, I have no problem with the music itself. It goes without saying that each generation finds its own music.

But I think that it’s simply obviously empirically accurate to say that as a whole, making a commitment by listening to a specific album by an artist with 100% of attention after actually buying it is just not as much a part of as many people’s lives anymore, unless they are involved in creating music.

So it “matters” less. Because I have spent my entire life devoted to making music I put a value judgement on that but of course nobody else is required to.

[Guy Rowland]

I remember Steve Allen making fun of The Beatles.

Ha, then there's that Goldfinger (1964) quote:

My dear girl, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!

007 - what an insufferable git.

[GR Baumann]

Has music ceased to matter?

Which ultimately begs the question for me, is the time for music as a political vehicle over, or does it even carry more weight today as a political lullaby for a largely depoliticized population on the stage of this ignorant reactionary world where easily 10 million and more follow Tradwife messages?

[Piet De Ridder]

<rant> Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas

In other words, it's our time as long as we draw breath.

I might be wrong, Geoff, but it seems to me that Dylan Thomas is talking about a more general decline and a degree of resignment that comes with old age — in Flemish/Dutch, we have the nice word ‘berusting’ for that, which I can’t find an English equivalent for but which sort of means: restful acceptance —, whereas I am specifically doubting older people’s ability to talk meaningfully about what stirs and excites generations 40 or 50 years younger than them.

Mind you, I never was a great believer in old age wisdom to begin with, and the older I get myself, the firmer that disbelief is becoming; the ‘Old Sage’ always felt like a preposterous contradictio in terminis to me, ever since I was a youngster.

But about it no longer being ‘our time’: take me, for example: I still have the exact same creative fires blazing inside me as I had when I was, say, 14 — and they have kept burning during all the years since — but at the same time, I also find that I am no longer in tune with the world around me. Totally out of tune would, in fact, be the more accurate description. Musically, that isn’t so much of problem for me as I’ve always had a lot of self-confidence about my work and I create most of it strictly for myself anyway (and for one Imaginary Listener whose opinion I value immensely), but I am aware that I have to start watching my step a little as a graphic designer (95% of my graphic design work is for the music industry).

I get jobs now where I can’t design how I would, intuitively, like to design because that’s no longer what is expected or appreciated. And much of what is expected and appreciated — the current trends and fashions in graphic design, in other words — doesn’t impress me at all, not aesthetically and certainly not technically. Next to my own design work, I also prepare other (nearly always much younger) people’s design work so that it conforms to Universal Music’s technical specifications and doesn’t cause problems for the printer, and time and again, almost without exception, I am baffled by the sloppy, careless, negligent and technically inferior work I receive from upcoming graphic designers. (Whenever I tell my brother, who is also primed in the technicalities of graphic design and printing, about some of the stuff I receive, he gasps in disbelief.)

But that work, with its bad and mismatched image resolutions, its faulty colour profiles, its clumsily set type (using poorly designed fonts), its complete disregard for print-related technicalities — all of which, mind you, are objective observations and not an embittered older guy's dismissals — is what we see around us today. Maybe most people don’t notice it, but I do, every time I go out into the world, and I also see it in places where professional, high-quality graphic design used to be the most stringently upheld norm.

Like I said, after the first irritation has abated, I manage to pull myself together and accept that this is, apparently, how graphic design is done today. And I also know that, if I want to survive professionaly in this field (I still have quite a few years to go), I’ll have to absorp and assimilate some of it and make it part of my design-vocabulary, knowing full well however that I don’t really speak nor fully understand this new language.

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[Ashermusic]

First of all, Dylan Thomas was NOT talking about aging, he was talking about dying. “Good night”, “close of day”:.My grandfather died at 68 and had a quick heart attack, so he had nothing to rage against. My dad died at 98 after several months of going downhill and he raged against it until he died.

Secondly, Guy’s topic isn’t about the music itself, whether young people like music older people don’t. His question was about the role music plays in people’s lives now compared to earlier times. That can be objectively observed and commented on by people of any age.

Try to stay on topic, people.

[Tanuj Tiku]

I don’t think so and in fact music making and consumption is thriving. However, what’s happening to all that money and how it’s distributed is another topic.

Never in history have there been more music makers and consumers so how can music cease to matter?

I do think music has to now compete with many more things in life. Just like film has and we have been through this before with recording, television and all sorts of things.

Music making and listening is and has been an essential part of humans for thousands of years so I am not worried that it will cease to have meaning because of some developments in the last 30 years or so.

In fact the last 30 years have been a blip (hugely significant) in comparison.

How it’s made and consumed is another topic. It has and will continue to go through many iterations and/or seismic shifts.

I do have to confess that I have felt the weight of this question myself but that’s an emotion and I think the evidence points elsewhere.

[Piet De Ridder]

(...) Dylan Thomas was NOT talking about aging, he was talking about dying (...)

You're correct, Jay. My mistake. I (mis)interpreted the lines to better suit the conversation here. Apologies.

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[Luke]

I think it matters less - at least to the extent that historically it has had something of importance to say about culture, social movements, injustice, etc. But I don't think that's because younger people don't care or don't appreciate music in the same way. Rather, I believe it is because of how our society, technology, information cycles, environment, politics, religious reach, etc. have all changed to make for a faster world where society is more tribal, more polarized; where the likes of us, aging people, don't really see beyond the surface (somewhat to Piet's point, I suppose).

There will always be musician's with something of import to say, thankfully, so they'll have particular focus. But music, at least to me, doesn't seem to be the same driving catalyst as it was, say, in the '60s, or as adventurous and fresh as in the '70s.

As a side-note: watching Adolescence on Netflix was revealing in this way. But I wouldn't know the first thing about how a teen hears and processes music today. I'm not a product of today's environment.