And I wondered why most of my favorite albums were recorded in the 1960s and 1970s and why I have bought only a handful of new albums in recent years...
I grew up with musicians like Springsteen and I remember how eagerly I was waiting for every new
album - not the next single! There's no one to grow up with anymore.
I spent my childhood in a country in which music was censored, so artists were often forced to conceal the actual message of a song. It resulted in extraordinarily interesting, intelligent lyrics and music. That's why you had to develop very good
listening skills to understand what was said beween the lines and songwriters needed to be especially
clever and creative. People seem to have lost those abilities. The "artists" wanna make a quick buck and the audience... They've gotten lazy, they wanna be entertained but they don't wanna explore and discover, they don't wanna
think.
People don't
understand music anymore. I recently heard someone say this about Billy Joel's album
The Stranger: "I believe my CD is broken." The reason for that statement was the fact that the intro of the theme song was repeated at the end of the record.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a record often was regarded as a piece of art. Great albums often came along with a cool cover. You didn't just sell or buy music... I can get crazy about that Robert Crumb comic on Janis Joplin's
Cheap Thrills or a Grand Funk Railroad LP that has a cover which looks like an oversized silver coin.
Right now Meat is raising my hopes that I'll be as excited about his new album as I'm about classics like Carole King's
Tapestry, Springsteen's
Born To Run, Bowies's
Ziggy Stardust, the old Led Zep and The Who stuff, etc.
I'll take you at your word. If it's not like that, I'll get bitter and despaired and will spam this forum with "everything was better in the good ol' days" rants.
