[Puncture Repair]

Are albums getting worse with time or better? What does time do to albums or those that make them?

Sometimes I get a little hung up over the fact my chart is mostly albums from the past 13 years, but I find that modern albums tend to be more progressive, stronger at story telling and sequencing than older records, which often have the better musicians or tunes, but fail to actually grab my attention.

I have a friend who is completely blind to any modern music, telling himself that it was "better in the day" and his entire world revolves around The Beatles and The Who or the Rolling Stones. But that seems so sad to me, it completely rules out any excitement of an upcoming album, or just thinking that your new favourite album of all time could be just a few months or years away. Maybe it's more magical to think that you just happened to be born and alive at the time to be able to hear your favourite album, which would never change no matter how many records are released afterwards beyond your death.

In the grand scheme of things we're only 60-70 years into this phase of 'modern music', guitar rock, rap, electronic - it's all completely new and chances are they won't be going away any time soon. There are still hundreds of thousands of new records that will be released in the next hundreds of years, music from the 60s or 70s will just be a blink in that time frame, as will the music we listen to today ultimately. Or is 'modern music' on the decline, and soon something better than guitars or electronics will replace it, just as they replaced Classical and Jazz.

But really I like to think time has no correlation to the quality of music. So what if an album just happened to be released in the most recent 5 years - time is something you can't control, so why should something completely out of our grasp somehow play a big role on what an album sounds like or how respected it should be? Some years will ultimately have better albums than others, maybe this year five of your favourite albums of all time will be released, there's no knowing - the stars might just happened to align, so to speak.

I think you should just enjoy music as it comes, and forget how old it is entirely. If an album sounds dated, it sounds dated - and just because your dad likes it doesn't mean you should try and appreciate it. We all have different ears.

[GeevyDallas]

It's cyclical

[Jasonconfused]

I used to be like your friend.
I still prefer those older bands but now I respect new music. I don't know if artists are getting better or worse at story telling, but I just prefer the genres of the albums that were made prior to the 2000s. It's probably just a social thing. I've never really gotten along with my generation and find a lot of them to be annoying so I think I subconsciously have avoided the culture that "belongs" to my generation. So I guess that my taste in albums has been formed by the people for which that albums were made or targeted. I'm not saying that I reject new music based on it being new. My taste has actually been formed in a way that I actually don't enjoy most of the modern music. There are some exceptions of course.
_________________

[nutso42]

When the same music keeps getting made over and over, it gets tiring.

My favorite album ever is London Calling by the Clash... but if everyone were making the same album, it'd get tiring.

Fortunately, there's always new musicians coming up with new things. As long as that continues, music will never get old.

[purple]

It's all gone downhill since Nathan Milstein's Mendelssohn Violin Concerto

[Guest]

Great music is great music, regardless of when it was released. For every newly released album that I listen to, there's at least one album from the past that I find out about and hear for the first time. I just keep trying to expand my horizons, and I find that the year of release has no bearing on my enjoyment of a record.

[thejoj96]