MrMiyagi wrote:oddity wrote:MrMiyagi wrote:I'm sorry, but I disagree with the entirety of this sentiment.
One: Every generation's music - hell I'll expand that to art - is about sex and/or drugs. Go read John Donne's The Flea or Homer's Illiad. Hell, the Bible has loads about sex, that just doesn't get read on Sundays much. And every new generation develops it's own language, which largely includes slang. Much still persists in todays culture and you just take accept it because you weren't around for it's inception to criticize it for being "pointless".
Two: Anyone who thinks they should be kept safe from mass exodus they suggest, odds are they've got more issues than the people being excised.
Fair enough. Music has largely been about relatively similar topics across all genres for the past 60 years or so. Perhaps it isn't quite the drug talk I care about as much as the lack of creativity in the execution nowadays; Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is at least artful and somewhat subtle with how it portrays drug abuse, but when the latest smash song in hip hop literally goes "molly percocet" for minutes on end, you have to question the appreciation for art of the generation that hoists it up. With hip-hop the change in culture is particularly astonishing, as you can track the lyrical quality slowly declining since the 80s and 90s. It's gone from Nas rapping about how 'the buck that bought the bottle could've struck the lotto', and Biggie painting his grueling and gory crime stories with the wit of a bestselling author, to the likes of Future, Drake, and Lil Uzi. Even Kendrick Lamar, who is a bastion of lyrical wordplay in the mainstream, is one in a sea of talentless peers who are being sold en masse to a generation that doesn't care anymore. It has gotten to point where, as I said earlier, rappers are now finding success by incoherently mumbling their words, which is about as far from lyricism as one can get while still talking. I can talk about music for days, so I apologize for the bloated response. As a musician myself, however, I can see first-hand how the industry is moving in a much more sterile, safe direction than we've seen for decades, and I cannot understate how very much it is a detriment to music culture.
When it comes to slang, it definitely has been used before. But again, not in this capacity. #culture has taken over #everything. Why construct grammatically correct, coherently worded sentences when we can just take the main word or two and #forgetaboutit?! This is abuse of abbreviations and slang to the point where it actually illustrates a demonstrable effect on people's writing ability. The decline in IQ from generation to generation has continued(http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/BRBAKER/), even though we have the internet. We're getting simpler and simpler, listening to simpler music and writing simpler phrases. As they say; art reflects life.
Your exodus bit is a bid to the populous. Logical fallacy, and also untrue. Would you like to see all the areas in which millennials do much worse than previous generations?
-Lower lifespan http://www.shfwire.com/millennials-facing-shorter-life-expectancy-due-obesity/(due to obesity too, which is absolutely shameful and indefensible considering that right now in other places people are desperately fighting starvation)
-Lower marriage rate http://www.bentley.edu/impact/articles/nowuknow-why-millennials-refuse-get-married
-Lower child-birth ratehttps://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/millenials-not-having-babies/391721/
-Lower home-ownership ratehttp://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-just-as-likely-to-live-with-their-parents-as-they-are-to-own-a-home-2015-11
-Lower earningshttps://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/jmaureenhenderson/2013/11/30/millennials-earn-less-than-their-parents-and-the-recession-isnt-to-blame/&refURL=https://www.google.com/&referrer=https://www.google.com/
Please come up with another wannabe philosophical statement about how I'm the crazy one for pointing all of this out or I will excise you.
Obviously the financial crisis of 2008 plays a major role in these numbers, and what we see in culture reflects the abysmal state of millennials today. Please bear in mind that I do not think the culture is causing this mess. It is very much the other way around; I choose to attack the culture because it's the most noticeable sore.
P.S: read this over and i may have come off a bit... aggressive. no harm meant bro
Not offended at all, but I will offer some insights into your statistics (some of which are brought up in the articles you posted):
Lifespan - Obesity is definitely a shame and while I won't make excuses for the behaviors of individuals, but the fact that many of the largest and cheapest restaurant chains and food suppliers have abysmal nutrition (again, created and managed by non-millennials) should be credited as a large factor, as do environmental hazards such as pollutions of all kinds but especially fossil fuel consumption (again, started prior though proliferated and partaken in by millennials) causing increases in various kind of cancers (which hasn't quite hit millennials yet, but will the longer we live, unless we get cures and not just treatments). It's really unbelievable the lack of evaluation for materials in production that end up being health hazards. Another thing to consider is, how much longer could we really push lifespan without human intervention (getting into the sci-fi made real realm)? It could be we reached near-max and what goes up must come down (its somewhat likely, but not the cause of the projected millennial shorter lifespan)
Marriage and child-birth rate - the institution of marriage is under a large microscope from this generation, I'd like to see numbers on millennials born from "broken" households (what good is marriage if divorce is high?) and the fact that this is the largest atheist population ever and marriage is rooted in religion. My parents had 3 children (none of my extended families have more than 3 kids) grandparents were married in their early 20s and had 7 children and their parents had ~12 children, more than a few of whom died young from disease or in child-birth. The world population is massive, and generally speaking as successful birth-rate rises (meaning the number of babies who are born actually survive the birthing process) people produce less children. People, women especially, are seeing children less and less as a necessity for a "good life" even though there is a common stigma and pressure for women to make babies. I don't think this is a bad thing at all. People are still having children, just not as many. Not to mention viable birthing years has been extended thanks to modern medicine so you don't have to have a kid in your 20s, you can wait until your 30s.
Home-ownership and Earnings - I don't see how you can't attribute that to the economic crises and massive student loan debt this generation is facing (again, coming from institutions in place where millennials aren't in power). Because of the large amounts of debt a lot of millennials have, owning a home in your 20s is unrealistic and well-paying jobs are largely locked up by baby-boomers and genXers who aren't retiring at the same rate as their predecessors. And the fact that wealth distribution among companies is extremely top-heavy now. There's the whole "chicken and the egg" argument brewing about whether the companies that pay their employees more are getting better work because of it vs. their getting better work from their employees so they're paying them more, but the distribution from top to bottom is pretty clearly **** in most major corporations.
I think these common staples of measuring generations is getting turned on its head. Lifespan is definitely a main-stay, but everything else can be chalked up to cultural shift that place less importance on those factors or just a delay in achieving them. I hope I didn't pass the buck onto external forces beyond our(millennials) control, but I think there are a good number of things that are the way they are and now we need to navigate them (and while we can do a better job, it's still an uphill climb).
As for your music and language points (each very valid by the way), I'd like to direct you to those Norm MacDonald quotes from my previous post to BW. I find it interesting that clever phrasing of the same intent is considered to be superior. I know I have my own biases toward the clever, but it makes me examine why and I've yet to find a good answer other than novelty. There might be a level of "stickiness" to new phrasing, but I'm not quite sure if there is more. (Also, that IQ chart you posted has the US - pink line - actually increasing in IQ...)
I understand and agree with your explanations of why these things are happening, but again, I'm not looking to blame the people. Millennials weren't born with intrinsic characteristics that lead them to lower birth and marriage rates, and again, people are a product of their environment. Maybe I just worded it badly earlier, but when I rag on millennials, I don't mean that these people just happen to be terrible - I mean that the environment from which they come is flawed, and making this generation worse. That's true of every generation and all criticisms leveled at them. As for the IQ chart, I'm not only talking about Americans, and Europe and Australia's average IQs have dropped to the point where it offsets the very marginal improvement in the U.S. You don't see it on the graph, however.
