Popular music today

I did turn 40 this year, and though I feel pretty good and look okay, I must now face the fact that I am just not as cool as I used to be. My precious 15-year-old niece Brittany (pictured here with our cousin Chris) has shown me in no uncertain terms that I am completely out of touch. I will readily admit that I cannot stand the popular music today. I don’t know why, but listening to the radio stations that play the "hits" gives me a terrible headache. Rap "music" (and I use the term "music" very lightly) is horrible, and at least the music I listened to growing up had melody and engaging lyrics. Or is that what all old people say? I just cannot equate The Gap Band with Ludacris.

I thought that I liked the new country music for a while, but all of the songs have the same themes, over and over again—a misspent youth, high school days, old rock & roll records (see Kenny Chesney and Rascal Flatts). What happened to the songs about Mama, prison, getting drunk, and trains? What happened to feel-good songs like "I Like It, I Love It" and "A Country Boy Can Survive"?

I am firmly convinced that all of the best music has already been made. I love ‘70s music most of all, especially the Eagles. I was born in 1968, so I grew up with the ‘70s music providing the soundtrack to my life. My Mom had a membership with the Columbia House record club back then, and we used to listen to our albums and our 8-track tapes for hours. Bread, The Carpenters, Bo Donaldson & the Heywoods, Helen Reddy, Tony Orlando & Dawn, Neil Sedaka, Andy Gibb, The Bee Gees—I could fill up a book with all of these phenomenal artists! The ‘70s also represent an innocent time for me, as this was before I started worrying about boyfriends and other grown-up things. For our culture as a whole, the ‘70s spawned an orgy of "free love" in conjunction with the Sexual Revolution. But oh how that changed when the ‘70s were over, when America was confronted with one of its greatest crises as the AIDS epidemic began.

I do love Southern-fried rock, classic rock, and classic country. ‘80s music is great too, but it’s pretty pathetic that the best new music on the pop scene today are those delightful tunes we hear in the freecreditreport.com commercials…