Losing track of pop culture and sort of wishing for days of old……

You know, one of the oddest things about growing older is how you gradually seem to lose track of pop culture. When you’re a young person, you’re sort of in the middle of pop culture all the time…young people drive what is popular in our culture…or at least they do these days. And when you’re an older person, but have kids, your kids keep you involved in pop culture. You keep up with music and movies and stuff because your kids are into what’s current and you just kind of pick it up through osmosis….but when you’re finally old – as I seem to be these days – you really do lose touch in a major way. And that’s what’s happened to me.

In music is where I notice it the most….for much of my life, I was extremely musically aware…..of course, I knew all the popular music makers when I was young myself, but then went through the Cure, Nirvana and Pearl Jam music period with my son and Oasis and Smashing Pumpkins and that music period with my daughter….These days, though, I know who some of the pop music icons are – Beyonce, the Beebs, Justin Timberlake – but don’t know any of their music or anything about them. And, I know, I know, the folks I’ve mentioned don’t nearly encompass what’s popular today – but they’re the ones you hear about in pop culture news….or a whole bunch of other ones I’ve totally never heard of at all….

I’m not really into youtube…..I know lots of people who seem to spend much of their lives searching through youtube looking for new, worthwhile music. But I must admit, I’ve not spent five minutes doing that….for one thing, I don’t like watching video when I’m listening to music….I like to listen to music…and that leads me to the another reason I don’t use youtube to find new music. The sound quality on youtube video is gawdawful to say the least. I’m set up to run my computer through my giant stereo, but youtube stuff still sounds really crappy.

And then, of course, there is the whole computer thing. As much as I have lived most of the last 30 years dealing with computers, I sort of loathe the things. I love some of the stuff you can do on a computer like e-mailing my creative writing all over the place, or e-mailing music hither and yon…..I even have to admit, that while I’m not a fan of social media because of the chaos it’s caused in our societies, I do appreciate the chance to hook-up with old friends, promote my writing and share in decent, respectful discussion – when that happens.

But I think the overall effect computers have had on the world is largely negative.  It has sped most things in our world up to light speed, including our propensity to gorge ourselves on mountains of consumer junk, putting at risk our own survival and the survival perhaps even of the planet. I heard a guy on the radio the other day try to tell me that that internet is the greatest invention in the history of humanity….and I really can’t agree with that. The internet’s a good one to be sure, but it ain’t that good.

Anyway, so much for music - and I’m even more lost in other areas of pop culture. There’s such a glut of TV and movies these days, driven mostly by a virtual myriad of these new-fangled streaming services, that anyone with any acting ability on the planet is surely working and it is nigh unto impossible to keep track of that many “stars”…..when they mention Best Actor Nominees or something like that on the news, it’s not unusual for me to know absolutely none of them these days. Occasionally, one of the old folks who I know as actors still appears in the spotlight….but not too often, and when they do, they’re playing really old rickety people who can barely walk.

I sort of miss the olden days when there seemed to be some order to the pop culture world. There was only so much TV and everybody got the same stuff and could get everything that was out there. If you wanted to watch a movie, you went to a movie theatre because that was the only place you could see one. If you wanted to listen to music, there was the radio, or you bought a record, took it home and listened to it on a really great stereo with really great sound quality – so you had some idea what the artist or band you were listening to actually sounded like.

I think we’re facing a basic problem these days. There used to be a saying that went like this, “the cream always rises to the top”, and it meant that the legitimately good stuff would eventually break out into the public domain….these days, though, there’s so much crap in the system that the good stuff hasn’t got much of a chance to go anywhere……