Nobody Knows How To Make Good Music Anymore. Now Get Off My Lawn.

I have a feeling this post may go hand-in-hand with an earlier one wherein I claimed to be aging at a rate not unlike Dr. Marcus Brody in Temple of Doom, when he picks a fake Holy Grail and fulfills the ancient prophecy of the wise knight by hopping on the Express Lanes Towards Death (suffering dreadful agony and split ends along the way). Split ends notwithstanding, this scenario is naturally still in the works as Lord knows none of us are getting any younger, especially me. I've discovered yet another nail in the coffin, though, and I'm hoping some of you can relate. Music, people. I speak of beautiful music. The soundtracks of our youth! The stuff we grew up on! That we shaped and formed our lives to with depth and importance and real meaning! The stuff we played as background noise so our parents wouldn't hear us making out in the basement! WHERE did we go wrong...

Please tell me I'm not the only one that's disappointed with the crap that's been slung onto the airwaves lately. And WORSE, what the hell's happened to the world that causes anyone under 24 to have absolutely no recall of truly good music? My husband was at lunch a while back with a buddy from work who happens to be a huge Guns N' Roses fanatic. He was up in arms about the whole Chinese Democracy drama and the fact that it's taken as roughly as long to make as a California Redwood takes to reach its full height (ninety thousand years, give or take a few weeks to decide on cover art). In the middle of their heated discussion, their waitress came by, and, in an apparent attempt to prove that she had either just crawled out from under a rock or was still potty-training, she asked in all seriousness who Axl Rose was. An understandable query, since his band has only sold roughly 100 million albums to date, was listed in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists Of All Time, and was partly responsible for a huge defining movement away from 80's glam rock and towards 90's grunge. But what the hell do I know...

Call me a geezer, but I feel a sense of longing for the music with actual "staying power". When did people become old farts for listening to stuff like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Clapton or Steve Winwood? I get the whole "but it has a good beat" argument that people use for rap and a lot of the pop dance stuff out right now. I'd be lying if I said there weren't times that I had some seriously embarrassing tunes blasting within the safe confines of my car, or Ipod, or tacky speakers hanging out of my freshman dorm windows onto the streets of Boston. In fact, just to show the kind of sport I am, I present something below that has cost me a good amount of dignity in the past few weeks after I dug it up and had the foolhardy idea to show it to my more merciless friends:


If you squint real hard in the upper right corner.......Ah yes. There it is. I was a huge heavy metal/hair band fan back in the third grade, circa 1988, and although this didn't win me any friends at a time lavish with Debbie Gibson and Michael Jackson (pre-going out of his ever-loving mind), I was stuck on Poison, hence the weird Bret Michaels likeness above. Extra points for the chest hair, people.

I share this with you in the hopes that once you pick yourself off the floor and wipe the tears of laughter away, you'll realize, just as I did while writing this, that I'm just aging myself even further by moaning about how music has changed, probably following suit with my parents, and their parents, etc. etc. My taste for hair bands may have frightened my parents much the same as rap does for me today. And even though I want to complain about those little assholes across the street that come home at midnight with their bass thumping loud enough to crack the drywall in my house, I won't....because I'm a bigger person than that now. I understand that we all have our own special, personal tastes in music. And I can also take comfort in knowing that the crap they're playing is probably a remix of 70's classic rock anyway. See? Who says I can't accept our differences?