"To Them, Music Is Just What You Listen To, Not What You Are"

"It’s likely that I was the only person in the world listening to all of these artists with equal satisfaction; looking back, those were heady times, perhaps the only period in my life when the songs I loved were mine alone and not part of some larger cultural landscape in which I was trying to find my place. By this I mean that my generation inherited its ideas about music from the sixties and seventies, when popular music and subcultures were knitted together inextricably and what you listened to defined not only the songs on your personal soundtrack but also the clothes you wore, the people you hung out with and your political views. Disco and rock, folk and country, metal and prog rock, new wave and punk: Each had its following, and each defined a particular worldview, and those worldviews were more often incompatible than not."


In Salon, Eve Epstein thinks about music then versus music now.