Comment by coldtea
2 years ago
>But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better."
I think the constant trap I see today is people perceiving different eras' output as "different but equal". A lot of this has to do with the populist notion that everything is about "taste" and nothing can be possibly better or worse.
But there are absolutely periods of better and worse art output, decades or whole periods of cultural stagnation, sometimes in all arts or other times just in some, periods of burst developments, etc. When we see art and music history at large, we easily discern them and have names for them - and history scholars have.
But when it comes to post '50s music, we can't fathom that some period is better than another, as if history is finished, and every decade is perpetually equally good.
The funny part is that we think that in the period with perhaps the most decline compared to the past.
Well, personally I definitely think, for music like you bring up, that post-90s is better than anything 1900-through-80s. The breadth of options of the present day is great, and the bulk of 20th century pop music that dominated the airwaves before that is just weak compared to the heights of classical music in centuries prior.
I just don't think it's a moral failing if you disagree.