I was born in 1980. If you compare the popular music of 1940-1980 with that of of the popular music in the period 1980-2020 there really isn't any comparison. 1940-1980 is vastly superior to 1980-2020. Sometimes, in certain areas of life, we don't progress, we go backwards.

That applies to film too. Cinema in the 1970s was vastly superior to cinema in every decade that has followed it.

‘Societies without many young people “are simply less likely to be dynamic, less interested in risk taking, than societies with younger demographic profiles.‘

H/T:- @Bully_25 https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/comfortably-numb/

I think this gives us a clue why popular music in the 1960s/1970s was so much better than before or since - likewise for cinema in the 1970s - i.e thanks to the post-WW2 baby boom there were many more young people than before or since.

1940-1980 - birth of rock & roll (& its million & one sub-genres like punk, metal, prog, etc,) soul, reggae, hip-hop, electronica.

1980-2020 -

Less young-people, less risk-taking. Less risk-taking, less creativity. Less creativity, worse art.

Forgot to mention Funk here. Another 1940-1980 era musical innovation. https://twitter.com/post_liberal/status/1304837137985085440?s=20

‘Among the 25 top-grossing films in 2019, just three—12%—had a story line and characters that had not already appeared on screen. The others were all sequels or remakes. By way of comparison, the percentage of new stories and characters for the top-25s from 1950 to 1979 was 90%.’

Taken, again, from this Charles Murray review of Ross Douthat’s new book https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/comfortably-numb/

Re: cinema. When I was a kid computer games used to try to look like films. Now films try to look like computer games.

We all love dunking on Boomers but they made the best music. Pick any year in the late-1960s/early-1970s & mine the great music of that yr & you will find a treasure trove of greater value than each of the entirety of the first two decades of the 21stC. https://twitter.com/danlburrows/status/1304851504130650113?s=20

Why was their music better than anything Gen X, Millenials & Zoomers are capable of? Well, there was more of them for a start. Creativity is, in part, social. So much of our great popular music comes from the big cities, thats not a coincidence.

Jazz is born in New Orleans. Hip-Hop in New York. Rock & Roll is indebted to Liverpool, London, Birmingham & Seattle. Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing/Duluth, Minnesota, becomes Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village, New York. Creativity is social.

Millennials & Zoomers are much more likely to be loners than Boomers were. 22% of Millennials are literally friendless. I don't think that augurs well for art which thrives upon social interaction & in environments which facilitate social interaction.

The petri dish of great pop music requires lots of young people all in one place (a city usually) interacting with one each other, bouncing ideas off one another, inspiring each other to greater heights of creativity. This is what we see in the 1960s & 1970s.

We dont see as much of this later on & we are unlikely to again. Far too many Millennials & Zoomers are sat on their own in their mother’s basements playing computer games.