It’s official: modern music is bad

It’s one of the hoariest cliches in popular culture: that every fading generation must, in flailing anger at its own imminent irrelevance, turn on the next generation and say, ‘your music is dire’. From the crusty judge contemptuously asking ‘who are these Beatles’, to the middle-aged outrage surrounding the spitting and pogoing Sex Pistols, to the Tory MP who expressed his horror at the Beastie Boys and Run DMC for ‘mocking disabled children in Montreux’, it is an established human tradition. And of course, it is always nonsense. It turns out the next generation has music of equal brilliance, passion, vivacity, excitement.

Except, perhaps, this time. If you are a Spectator reader of a certain age, or indeed any human of any age, and you’ve found yourself listening with bewilderment to the repetitive, loud, inert, droning, crunching, and infantile vulgarity of modern music while thinking, ‘er, this is seriously poor.’