MrMiyagi wrote:oddity wrote:I'm a millennial, and being surrounded by mostly millennials, I can quite safely throw about 90% of my generation under the bus. Maybe it comes with age, but no one seems to stop and actually think anymore. Our internet age has pitted content creators against our ever-dwindling attention spans, and as a result stand-up has differed to memes, hip-hop has degenerated to mindless mumbling about drugs and sex, and pointless slang phrases, hashtags, and acronyms have taken the place of normal conversation. Still, as Sturgeon says, 90% of everything is crap, and the 10% of millennials that have avoided losing their smarts and grace are truly some of the most impressive human beings out there. The massive upside to the internet is that, while it tends to simplify mainstream entertainment, it offers an unprecedented library of information at everyone's fingertips. The millennials who take advantage of that become some of the most knowledgable and intelligent people ever - the problem is encouraging more of that and less of the pursuit of mindless hedonism
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 rate
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/millenials-not-having-babies/391721/-Lower home-ownership rate
http://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-just-as-likely-to-live-with-their-parents-as-they-are-to-own-a-home-2015-11-Lower earnings
https://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
Living off borrowed time the clock ticks faster...
