Does Modern Music Suck?

"Music when I was growing up was so great, everything now is so terrible"

I read an interesting article recently, and it proved what we probably intuitively all know, which is that music is great when you’re young, but starts to suck as you get older, as those annoying “young people” with their crappy music come on the scene.

It turns out that for every generation, music is “best” when you’re about 17, and then starts to really suck when you’re about 35, and goes even further downhill from there.

Now, it’s my opinion of course that modern music really DOES suck, but that just proves the point as I’m 47 haha.

The nostalgia effect is clearly powerful. In the article “The power of nostalgia: age and preference for popular music”, they basically make the point that as life is generally pretty good when you’re 17 - meeting your first love, your body doesn’t ache all day, that kind of thing - that obviously that’s a good time for you to anchor fond memories to songs, and therefore those songs - in the best part of your life - become “good” music, and other songs become bad.

However, I think the authors have perhaps completely missed another aspect of the dynamic - Hearing!

You may have seen my previous blog post “Get your ears cleaned”, in which I discovered that having a professional ear clean has improved my hearing about 20%.

After having my ears cleaned, and having had my hearing improved somewhat, I’ve found that all of a sudden I’m listening to a lot more music, and enjoying it a lot more too. My hearing is not great - years of burning man and loud concerts - so there are certainly some frequencies missing, but it’s nice to have any improvement at all.

I’ve noticed after my ear clean that re-listening to some of my old songs, I’m suddenly hearing parts of the song I remembered were there, but had stopped hearing. the sharp high frequency “tisk tisk” of a high-hat is a little better now

I think that perhaps one of the reasons that our favourite music is from when we are 17, is not JUST because of the nostalgia effect, but ALSO that that’s the point in our lives when our hearing was great.

Since my hearing has been a bit worse over the last few years, even if I can’t hear all the nuances of various Michael Jackson songs, I know them so well that I can IMAGINE, and fill in the treble from when I was younger. A little similar perhaps in the way that it’s very hard to hear muffled conversations when you’re learning a language, but when you’re fluent in a language, it’s much easier for you to pick up words and have your brain automatically fill them in through context - your brain works out what sentence “makes sense”, even if you miss hearing one word correctly.

So - I think for me, listening to music from when I was 17 is more pleasurable, because if I can’t hear all the frequencies, I can imagine and remember them and fill them in, and that seems to be what happens. Since having my ears cleaned, I’m hearing a few frequencies that made me think “ahh yes - I remember that sound in the song being there, and I haven’t heard it like that before”

Modern music probably sounds crap, partly because we’ve never heard it the same way a young person does.