The complaints of older people regarding what the kids are doing musically are often dismissed— correctly so—as nostalgia or conservatism masked as cultural commentary. The answer to those complaints is basically that older people are always complaining about new music, they complained about Blues, Jazz, Rock, Funk, et cetera, et cetera, so it doesn’t really matter if they understand the new music. We don’t expect them to understand it. Some older people—the younger older people—will usually say something like “But that was different. My parents really were too conservative and didn’t understand what Rock was doing but you can’t compare Rock to Rap, Rock took real skill, you had to learn to play an instrument, Rap is just … ”.

Old people don’t get it; duly noted.

I’m old; duly noted.

I still think that I’m objectively correct when I say that mainstream music is trash and that kids don’t know which way is up and which way is down. Despite all the possible old-guy-hating-on-new-music counter-arguments, something is different in this world we live in. Something has been breaking in these past 20 years with the acceleration of the internet; and the damage is even worse within the past 8 years …

I’ll just sum it up like this:

Up to a certain point you can trace the heritage of black music within popular music—I don’t just mean in terms of “spotting the sample”—at a certain point you can’t. And when black music is less relevant to popular music than social media, reality shows, plastic surgeries, and face tattoos, there’s a serious problem, an existential problem. I’m thinking that the reason I don’t like the kids’ music is actually because the kids have no music.

• Bill Withers – Grandma’s Hands