Old fogies of pop music

here they go:
Billy Ocean is the Greatest Ever! OMG!!!11

It’s hard not to smirk when a Billy Ocean fan calls other music bland. Isn’t Carribean Queen the quintescence of bland? Isn’t it constructed entirely from foundation to pinnacle out of bricks of bland? I’m not saying it can’t be fun to listen to, but it is soooo pop. A simple melody, catcy and heavy on bass, looped repeatedly for three plus minutes; easy lyrics to remember, easy to forget. It is undemanding pap for the easily entertained. It is pop. Great for a party, but low on artistic merit.
I don’t get it when people say the music of these days is garbage. It is garbage, but so was the music of the nineties, eighties and the seventies. I was there, I know. It sucked.
Disco? What the fuck was that? And Milli Vanilli? Abba? The Spice Girls? Puff Daddy and Mase? MC Hammer? Bollocks all!
I remember bumping Caribbean Queen when I was in my lower teens. It was “rad” and “awesome”, I thought, but my dad didn’t like it; he was particularly offended by the use of electronic keyboards. And don’t get him started on the synthesized opening notes of Madonna’s Borderline (still a guilty pleasure all these years later).
The point is, my dad said eighties pop was trash, and that real music was in the seventies, when people had real talent.

A few years later, more mature now, I read an article saying the same thing about seventies music: particularly denouncing disco. These guys were saying that real music was in the sixties, with soul music and rhythm and blues.
I wasn’t surprised when I came across another complaint: all this doo wop and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, these Monkees are trash. Real music was big band and swing…

Paul Simon sang, “Every generation pulls a hero up the pop charts.” The way we feel about our youth is the way we feel about the music that played in our youth’s background. When the music of later days doesn’t make us feel the same, because we are, of course, not the same anymore, we take that to be a deficiency in the music, even though it is really our fault for not being young anymore. When the children of the sixties express reverence for their Beatles and Elvis, they are worshipping their own glory days. When the kids of the seventies shout the praises of the Bee Gees, they are honouring their childhood. When anyone says Billy Ocean was the coolest, what he means is that life was the coolest when I used to listen to Billy Ocean.

I note one thing about those who prostrate before pop of select decades. They don’t often mention the really great music of the time. Eighties apologists don’t say much about Springsteen and Prince and Aerosmith. Could it be because to acknowledge their skills would be, necessarily, to acknowledge Smashing Pumpkins, D’Angelo and Nirvana—nineties men?
Seventies’ lovers go on and on about Kool and The Gang and The Commodores, but they never mention Hendrix and Dylan.

Paul Simon sang those words in 1986, by the way.

And quit hating on rap. Astley just wishes he could write a verse like KRS One.