They don't write music like this anymore

Lately I have been doing a lot of cruising on YouTube in order to listen to songs that I may want to cover with the Imaginary Friends. Almost invariably, when I get to a video that features music from more than twenty years ago (mostly 70s classic rock or 80s R&B or something similar), and I read the comments, I read the same line over and over again:

"They don't write music like this anymore."

Now, I've seen this line hundreds of times, both online and in the real world, and I may have even said this a couple of times in different occasions, but tonight, as I read it being said about Champaign, "Try Again", I felt a small but insistent irritation in the back of my head.

For some reason, the fact that I had the most excellent jam session with my bandmates just this past Saturday night where we played and sang the music of our decades (the nineties and this side of the millennium) kind of gave me a different skew on the above line when I read it tonight. When that particular poster said in the text comments, "...they don't write music like this anymore," (correct grammar and punctuation mine), he or she is implying that the music that was conceived of after that time frame intrinsically has less literary or otherwise musical merit.

Now, I know that's not true, because had it been true, we would not have sung any of those songs we sang on our hang-out. Why would we enjoy singing a musically inferior song?

Second, upon more reflection, I realized that the statement is patently true. Of course they don't write music like this anymore. There are now many more artists than there ever were when "Try Again" came out, thanks to the Web, mostly. Now, that makes the probability of hearing a "bad" song much larger than it was decades ago, but it also increases the probability of you hearing a song (or artist) that is much closer to your tastes. That's because older bands and artists couldn't burrow into a niche; they had to appeal to more people in order to succeed as musical acts.

Anyway, in the end, the annoyance passed, because I pictured a time thirty years from now, and we check out YouTube (or a future descendant program thereof) of, say, Usher, "Love in This Club", and I pictured myself leaving a comment, "They don't write music like this anymore." ^_^

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: John Mayer, "Sucker".