Due to all the recent BSD posts I have spent the past month exploring NetBSD and OpenBSD. Really enjoying the journey and finding that I can do everything I am currently doing easily on both.
I still listen to a lot of prog rock as well as classical, more than I did when I was a teenager or in my 20s. But I also occasionally listen to current popular music with my teenage daughters. Some of it I like, some I do not, but myself and my daughters all agree that they would like to hear some big change in popular music. Not saying it should be a return to something like grunge, but it would be interesting to hear something different like that style was.
Part of me agrees that pop is ripe for that sort of upheavel but my arguments that it won't happen are:
1. Angst will probably always be the teenage condition but I don't think the distance between what's being recorded and what teens and young adults are feeling is as great as it was in the 90s.
2. Music listening is so much more fragmented now that even if some artist hooks into some underserved emotional need, it might just grab its group of followers and then sorta descend into its own little subculture, safely away from the mainstream. The third and fourth lines on any contemporary festival act list has a lot of acts that fall into this category.
3. Kurt Cobain was this unusual combination of wanting to be anti-authority, anti-establishment, alternative on one hand, but then very ambitious and seeking fame and record deals on the other. It's paradoxical but he was that and that combination of attributes is really good for changing the mainstream music scene but I don't think most people can live in that contradiction for that long and therefore people like that are rare.
In my view, we're in a sort of repeat of 00s R&B. Lot of substanceless tunes with honestly seriously vulgar lyrics but immensely catchy and fun. The main difference is this version is less danceable (but also more subject to dance routines on TikTok!). And I don't mean it in a pejorative way, not every good song need to be meaningful.
I had an Eagle, too, along with models from other shows like Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. As I grew older, I realized how unrealistic they all are, as spaceships go. The Eagle still feels like it could be real, though. (Yeah, I know a modern pedantic internet space nerd could rip it to shreds, but you know what I mean.)
