I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about how all new music sucks. “Skrillex is a hack with no musical talent.” “A kid can’t make a great sounding album with GarageBand.” “Nobody knows how to play an instrument anymore.”

Maybe it’s a fear of change? Maybe new music doesn’t have the same nostalgia of music you listened to when you were younger? Maybe it’s a fear of technology in music? Maybe we’re worried that old skills will be lost to new methods of creation? Maybe we’re jealous that a kid CAN make a great sounding song with GarageBand instead of spending years learning an instrument? Maybe older or more traditional musicians are upset that the barrier to entry to create music is much lower now?

I don’t think it’s a great idea to ignore the past or ignore how past creators built the framework for where music is today. But the death of music has been predicted for centuries, and it’s all a bunch of bullshit:

“Music was chaste and modest so long as it was played on simpler instruments, but since it has come to be played in a variety of manners and confusedly, it has lost the mode of gravity and virtue and fallen almost to baseness.”
— Boethius (c. 480-524)

“Music was originally discreet, seemly, simple, masculine, and of good morals. Have not the moderns rendered it lascivious beyond measure?”
— Jacob of Liège (c. 1425)

“They are so enamored of themselves as to think it within their power to corrupt, spoil, and ruin the good old rules handed down in former times by so many theorists and most excellent musicians, the very men from whom these moderns have learned to string together a few notes with little grace. For them it is enough to create a tumult of sounds, a confusion of absurdities, an assemblage of imperfections.”
— G. M. Artusi (1600)

“The Overture to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio was performed recently, and all impartial musicians and music lovers were in complete agreement that never was anything written in music so incoherent, shrill, muddled, and utterly shocking to the ear.”
— August von Kotzebue (1806)

“Serious music is a dead art. The vein for which three hundred years has offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded speculators picking through the slagpile.”
— Henry Pleasants: The Agony of Modern Music (1955) 

“When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine – it kinda sucks the life out of music.”
— Dave Grohl (2011)

(Ok, the Dave Grohl quote wasn’t completely fair— it’s more of a personal opinion and not a wholesale disregard of all new music. I take that one back.)

And somehow with each new generation, new methods of creativity become accepted. In 2050, will we all be lamenting about how “nobody makes music like Skrillex anymore?”

What do you think?