Through no specific intention of my own, I have now put my wholeass human eyes on two different programs of people solving mysteries at old folks homes, a show and a movie.
But that's not the headline, here.
The issue I take, is that both of these things have featured Springsteen and Bowie music, among others, and I feel like I'm losing my goddamn mind seeing music categorized in this way. Yes, I realize that technically-speaking, this music was from a specific eras, but it feels like it's being intentionally marginalized, used against content of old, retired people, and therefore outdated, or no longer valid.
It's jarring and displacing.
Displaced is every Millennial's middle name, which makes it even more bothersome. We grew up in a very unique time in history where we had massive access to content. Cable tv gave us a huge variety of shows from classic to modern, to things that were intended specifically for us as kids. Many of those channels showed a huge variety of movies, classic, fairly-modern, and modern--constantly. Video stores were on every corner, and in grocery stores, and they were social meeting places. Our parents and every adult we knew had giant record and CD collections, and we had access to all of it. It was also why we were and are so fixated on nostalgia, whole industries popped up to support our media flare habit.
And likely, will be the only generation who experienced that.
We were and are media nomads. Years and eras did not matter, we weren't drawing lines in the sand about what we were supposed to like or not, we liked it all, together. Things our grandparents listened to and watched all the way to whatever was current at the time. Everything was homogeneous, and no one was bothered if something came out in the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, or the 2000s, and we shared it with each other, sometimes competitively. We had the benefit of being able to develop eclectic tastes in tv, movies, and music, and we consumed.
It was the most three-dimensional way of experiencing media, so now living in generation paywall, where everything is hoarded by corporations, partitioned, and obscured by ads, it's extremely difficult to access wide varieties of anything, and creativity will suffer. Education will suffer. Critical thinking will suffer. Experience will suffer. Worldliness and expanded points-of-view will suffer. People don't and won't know they need to go the extra mile to cultivate a bigger and better experience. Another problem living in a dead society to throw on the pyre. Culture will die. It will be marginalized and pushed out of the zeitgeist.
You shouldn't be listening to a few dozen musicians, you should be listening to thousands--internationally. The same with movies and shows. If you've never watched a 60's western, or a silent film, you have to take the extra step to expose yourself to everything outside the algorithm bubble your phone has you trapped inside. Make an effort not to let corporate greed keep you from expanding your horizons. Pirate everything. Keep physical media. Explore. Trade. Rinse, repeat.
