I was talking to someone recently about those pop music tapes and CDs we used to buy back in the day, and I told him that I stopped buying them when I got bored of mainstream music and became more interested in rock and RnB. And when Top of the Pops was taken off our screens, well that was my last link to mainstream music gone!
Admittedly I know very little about mainstream music these days. I'm familiar with certain artists but don't know much about them or their music. I personally feel a lot of mainstream music started to go downhill around late 2000s and I lost interest. I prefer to listen to the latest offerings from my fave rock artists or music from back in the day.
What does everyone else think of today's mainstream music?
To be honest, as they say, I never really listened to that much contemporary pop even in the 70s and 80s when I was a teenager and young adult. I liked the oldies even then. So, anything from the 90s (with the odd exception*) and certainly beyond, I have little interest in, and even less knowledge of. The first album I ever bought was a double album called Rolled Gold, which was a compilation of The Rolling Stones 60s hits and I bought that in the mid-to-late-70s. So, by that time, they were even oldies.
I have an aunt who is only eight years older than me and when she got married in 1971 (when I was ten) she gave me about 100 of her old singles (45s) which she had acquired from the late-50s to the late-60s, some of them were hand-me-downs from her older sister, and these became treasured possessions. She did keep her albums though. But I used to play these records constantly. Back then it was a big deal owning your own records. I also used to like listening to my mother and father’s records a lot, which, needless to say were all stuff from the 50s and 60s.
But I did like quite a lot of contemporary stuff from the 70s and 80s though, I just wasn’t overly obsessed with it, like some of my friends were. I’m much more into 70s and 80s music now than I was then. The funny thing is, even if it’s a song I didn’t care for back then, I can hear it now and it takes me back to those days. My mind often seems to work in a peculiar manner, a lot of things I didn’t care much for years ago (like music, TV shows and movies), I like now, usually for nostalgic reasons.
Of course, back then, when a teenager, I never admitted to my friends I liked all this old stuff, this would have resulted in instant ridicule! Although you may have gotten away with admitting to liking The Beatles or even 'old' Stones, but not much more. By the mid-to-late-70s, even Elvis (especially 'old' Elvis) was pretty unhip.
* The last new pop song I recall taking a liking to was Fairground by Simply Red and that came out in 1995. I turned 34 that year and the interest in contemporary music – and pop culture in general – I guess was well on the decline by that time.