settling the musical science

cheeky science for sunday night: a crowd sourced experiment

it’s a story as old as time:

the kids like their music and the adults of the day hate it.

this is natural selection. if you’re 13 and your parents like what you are listening to, you go find new music.

kitten calling

this natural circle of life where the rebel rock of one’s youth becomes the supermarket muzak of one’s adulthood (this happened to me with “the clash”) has led to an idea that there is really nothing new under the sun and that it’s all somehow subjective and that the music today is just as good to the kids today as ours was to us and that if the music is too loud, it’s because we have become too old.

well, sorry, but that’s just plain wrong and provably so.

word to your moms, i came to drop truth bombs…

and it’s not just genres. i have long liked many kinds of rap and hip hop from nelly to snoop to tribe called quest, the fugees, wyclef, the beasties, and young MC and “fitty”.

there’s A LOT of great music there.

but there are no two ways around it:

this year’s superbowl halftime show was palpably awful.

the music stunk. it had no redeeming qualities outside of “politically provocative to a certain subset.”

in 30 years, no one will be “kendrick rolling” anyone. no one will even remember this guy and his troupe of whatever that was.

i know he’s popular as all getout, but this is a country that routinely votes taco bell its top mexican restaurant, so i’m going to stand by my guns on:

i don’t care what the crowd said, that was just plain bad.

“you’re just old now and playing the fuddy duddy” will proclaim the detractors and the supporters of this new musical era and all manner of armchair anthropologists will back them.

history is on their side and i am the claimant of that most fraught of propositions: “this time is different.”

to be sure, my fight is uphill and the burden of proof lies with me.

it’s not them, it’s you.

congratulations, you’re “principal togar.”

you’re your parents.

all valid a priori positions.

so be it.

now

when one goes to any bar or restaurant, it’s rare (apart from dance music) to hear anything recorded after 2000, 2005 latest.

20 years is a long gap of “no one apart from children listens to this.”

but this is impressionistic.

being a gato of science, i propose a test, the fairest of tests:

here we have an 80’s classic laid down in lieu of what kendrick lamar mumbled his way through in the superbowl show.

see what it leaves you wanting more of.

you tell me:

i rest my case and await the decision of the jury.

bonus: “the police” (this is going to sting a bit)