Left to my own devices

Having brunch at a local restaurant recently, I took notice of the music being piped-in through the discreetly positioned speakers while we dined. The songs were predominantly from the 1950s and '60s. Oldies, if you will. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, though it reinforced an opinion I have about modern society, that we are, for better or worse, wrapped-up in nostalgia. "If we were sitting in a restaurant in the 1960s, do you think they would have been playing music from 1910?" I asked my brunch companion. Ashley responded that it would have been less likely, though he countered with the fact that the curation of things (not just music) in recent decades has led to easy access to older material. It simply wouldn't have been as easy during the 1960s to have access to a recording from 1910. Perhaps accessibility is the driving force behind the lingering presence of what is, frankly, old culture? If so, is that a good, bad, or neutral set of ci...

There's something amiss with pop music fans these days. I don't mean that they're fans of pop music , more so that they seem to be fans of old pop music. This, in and of itself, isn't a bad thing per se, but it is a situation fairly unique to the last 45-50 years of popular music. And, with the current crop of singer/songwriter output being at such a low mark of quality, I do wonder if our culture's tendency to cling to the music makers of the past is perhaps harming the ability to progress in a new, even better direction?