Wheat from Chaff

[Lynn LeFey]

This is just a general thought I'm putting out there. I read the 'new music sucks' thread, or whatever the title is, and I felt a need to make a more broad statement about things. Life, reality, whatever.

Iv'e broken 100 posts today, so I can stop the spamming nonsense and maybe say something worth saying. Not that Memes of cats aren't always awesome.

We are all battling several forces as we age. One is that our tastes evolve and refine. So we see stuff we liked when we were young as better than what young folks have now. Which is, frankly, utterly false. I have this mental model I made called the 'Flintstone Threshold'. It's the exact opposite of Nostalgia Blindness. It's that moment when you realize that something you loved as a kid is really utter crap. This is, of course, named after the 'Flintstones', and my moment of realizing how paralyzingly bad it really is.

Another reason we look fondly back on all the 'great stuff' from the past is because as time goes on, all the total crap made isn't SEEN anymore. We see classics like 'It's a Wonderful Life' on TV, and maybe think... 'See? Stuff back then was good!" Except you don't remember all the god-aweful double-feature movies that were made, because NO ONE airs them anymore.

I loved comics as a kid. My friends have told me point blank that there are NO good comics. I let them read 'Watchmen', 'Dark Knight Returns', 'Sandman', 'Rising Stars', 'Tick', and 'Astro City'. Now they have revised their statement. There are no OTHER good comics out there. This is what I'm talking about in the subject line. I've shown them some of the best of the genre. And this is the same with everything. TV, film, radio, musical composition. There is good stuff in any media, you just have to dig through the tons of garbage to get to it.

Old musicals weren't better. It's just that the ones that WERE better survived. Old TV wasn't better. There's virtually no TV pre-80s that I even consider worth watching. It is pretty universally ALL bad.

Is there a lot of garbage put out now? Sure, probably more than ever, because there are more PEOPLE than ever, and producing media is easier than ever, lowering the bar to entry, and allowing in people that market forces would otherwise keep out. Some will be talented, most won't. That doesn't mean there isn't GREAT stuff being made still. You just have to dig sometimes to find it.

The world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. Stay Calm. And don't be so pessimistic about the future.

This message coming from someone who is NOT an optimist.

That is all. Thank you.

[glorn]

Saga is a very good comic book.

[Steinar]

A fitting parallell is in manufactured goods. People look at e.g. an old car which is still running, and say "Look, they were properly made back then, still running." Yeah... that's the only one in the world still running... and people had to bring tools and have at least basic mechanical competency when taking a trip with one because they broke down all the time. The only one surviving will be the one that just had a lot of luck the day it was built and with what people worked on it through the decades.

Anyway, I actually do think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but the amount wheat vs chaff I guess is prety much constant. Whatever you look at, 90% is crap. That's just an effect of statistics (by definition, must songs will be composed by mediocre composers) and your own taste, at any given time, obviously only a smallish subset will be in your own sweetspot (if you listen to 10 completely different songs, you will probably like one of them better than the others).

I sometimes tune into radio channels just to listen to what "the kids these days listen to", and usually I end up with some of it being catchy and much of it being pretty bad, i.e. not to my tastes... and that would have been the case every single year since I developed any personal taste at all.

Most people are mediocre, that's what mediocre implies. Personal taste is personal, that's what personal implies.