I never truly listen to music anymore. Oh I have music on very often, but almost always to accompany some other activity. When driving I cycle through my XM presets. At the gym I have Amazon Music playlists. Running I have my little SanDisk on shuffle. Before bed I usually troll Ted Gioia's annual 100 best lists to find something to read by. About the closest I come to paying close attention to music is when a band on Austin City Limits catches my ear (recently Cage the Elephant).
It was not always so throughout my teens and early twenties I often spent time with headphones on just focusedly listening to music. And while it's easy to pass this off as a change of aging, it's also possible that there was more to it.
The tone of this article is annoying, but it's basically correct. The thesis is that 1980, the year of London Calling by The Clash and The River by Bruce Springsteen, was the end of rock and roll as a cultural force. This is very hard to disagree with. To be clear, I don't mean the end of rock music, nor do I mean the end of good rock music. Good rock and roll is being made to this day. It's hard to find, but it's out there. I mean the end of it as a vibrant cultural force. The end of it really mattering in any way.
40 years ago -- dead longer than alive. It was a great run: 1955-1980. What cultural relevance that remained in music went to Rap and Hip-Hop. Now even that has long passed its era of importance. Music has virtually no cultural weight at all.
What was lost in 1980 -- what best selling music no longer has -- was a certain sense of authenticity. Musicians formed or self-organized into bands that played proper musical instruments. It was probably mostly a pretense of authenticity, but at least it was honored. The kid with a guitar shows talent and makes it. As weird and hedonistic as the rock musicians could be, they also kept in touch with the fantasy.
Everything since has pretty much eschewed the image of organic success. Rappers, boy bands, American Idols, howling diva twerk-bots, have all fully embraced their own manufacturing. They are the products of marketing formulas as much as talent, if not moreso, and they don't try to hide it.
Of course, I always have to qualify my opinions these days because I am as susceptible as anyone my age to yelling at clouds. Kids, and some adults, still get enthusiastic about music. It still sells, especially if it is attached to a Disney animated film. (I should qualify that: it still reaches a large audience, whether it "sells" depends how you view streaming revenue.) But I just don't think it means as much to them as it did to us. In my adolescence I could put on a LP and a pair of headphones and find the strength to live in hope for one more day. Today they put in their earbuds and dream of the Tik Tok likes their lip synch will bring.
Good for them. Maybe they don't need music for hope. Maybe they have something better. Maybe -- almost certainly -- I really just miss the ability to feel that sort of life-giving enthusiasm for something. Wisdom exacts a toll that nostalgia can't replenish.
