When I was growing up music was the thing that inspired me, the books I read, the clothes I wore, my political awakening were all dictated by the music I listened to. It was a constant learning process discovering new artists and then the artists that had inspired them. A love of The Clash got me into reggae and hip hop, The Jam into soul music, REM into country music and so on. I never tired of discovering new music and was delighted recently to find my daughters ipod contained some tracks she had discovered from my music collection.
However, in the last few years my ipod has been hijacked by my kids, and it’s great. I currently come in most nights from work to my daughter and sons strutting around the front room singing Rihanna and Jessie J songs, so just as I discovered new music through friends I met when I was younger I am now discovering a love of modern pop music through my children. People will always tell you that the music they listened to in their youth was so much better than todays music. Well of course it was, it’s been filtered by time, we won’t look back on the new decade by listening to Matt Cardles solo album, it will be smart pop songs that have been filtered by the last 20 years. As a general rule pop music is best made by young people with a fire in their belly and a bucket full of attitude so rather than throwing your nose up to todays young music it’s worth taking a while to actually give it a listen, in my opinion it’s pretty good.
