So when I saw the middle aged lady rocking a Wu-Tang shirt at new seasons today, I realized a few things.

Absolutely. My favorite bands going into college were The Smashing Pumpkins, Depeche Mode and The Cure along with The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I sought out all kinds of older music, because I just loved music. It was harder to find back then, you needed an older person to help guide you to the lesser known stuff, but listening to oldies stations helped. Movie soundtrack albums introduced me to a lot of deeper cuts - Quinten Tarantino paved the way for a lot of the prestige series soundtracks we get these days. When streaming music became a thing, I thought it was one of the greatest gifts technology had ever given. I was no longer bound by financial limitations in how much music I could explore! What a gift! How would this influence music going forward?! So much possibility!! It didn’t really pan out the way I thought it would, but it has made lesser known genres and artists more readily available, and that’s fantastic. I think kids today are so far removed from the music of the 50’s-70’s, it’s not as easy for them to hear it passively and relate to it, so they aren’t as curious about it. The 80’s-90’s are much more familiar to them, and I hear those influences in their music often and that era’s bands are on the ‘vintage’ t-shirts they buy. I’m not a fan of most of the mainstream pop and hip hop music these days, but it is possible to find great music being produced in those genres and I love it when I can hear the lineage/progression from past artists that I thought the kids didn’t know/care about. 🙂