Since the 2000s, we've been living in the Digital Age, also known as the Information Age. This age is different from previous ones, and accordingly, it sounds somewhat different. The way people think and act has changed a bit; everyone can upload their music unfiltered, without the filter of record companies. This is actually very democratic and promotes freedom,

however, the quality of the songs reflects this. We have to deal with that. I'm waiting for a reunion, a revival of the 80s, maybe disco, new wave with modern aspects, perhaps faster or with different instrumentation than the tracks from back then.

Back then, there were also countless amateur bands who didn't release any LPs, but sometimes only played a few gigs. But you had a lot of fun with the live bands; it was an experience to be there.

Some music is labeled "oldie" instead of simply stating the year of release. What is the term "oldie" supposed to encompass? Music is actually timeless. Some tracks are also updated with modern technology to meet today's listening standards.

I think some teenagers or young adults, as they get older, will listen to different music than what's currently popular and then discover and listen to the music they like.

Radio music in cars, department stores, or kitchens usually plays music that doesn't overwhelm people, often catchy melodies, mostly the hits of a particular band. There are also private online radio stations today, sometimes financed by advertising, where you can hear completely different music.

 

I haven't a sense of nostalgia for the cars that I grew up up which had metal dashboards that would destroy a body if you were unfortunate enough to be in a serious accident or guzzled petrol like a person suffering a great thirst. I don't have nostalgia for people dying of AIDS because science hadn't worked it out yet. I don't miss slow dial up internet that took forever to up or download what we now consider a miniscule file. Lots of things have gotten better in regard to how they were in the past. Surely tastes change, such as what one might find aesthetically pleasing in the shape of automobiles, a painting or the kind of music one listens too, but it certainly doesn't make current bad design, music or art better because it is new and the technology improved. The Neolithic people who tracked a prey animal so their people could eat high quality protein, found the beast and remained totally silent in wait for the perfect timing to throw a slinged rock squarely on it's head to stun it while in the next instant come down upon it's neck with a self made razor sharp obsidian blade and kill it weren't worse hunters because they didn't have a drone with a guidance system app on their phone and able to watch the animal in real time plot it's escape from the weekend shikari, a high powered rifle and scope that enables them to hit a cherry tomato on a fence post 200 yards away. I'd say that the Caveman was the better hunter, the modern day person in fancy forest camouflage and the $1200 scope the lesser albeit with the technology that actually enables them to not be. Translating that to the vast majority of output I see and hear in all walks of life and not just associated with the arts I can safely say that technology doesn't make one a better mechanic, dentist, or dishwasher, but rather just more efficient. Of course there are and will always be those with innate talent or perseverance that will rise to greatness or a high level of proficiency with or without the crutch, but if people relegate the task of actual creation to technology in due time we will lose the knowledge to do so. My favorite analogy is the current crop of folk who fix modern cars. Instead of using their past years of experience breaking down motors and rebuilding, actually diagnosing the problem now only need look at their computer which will tell them what part to change as well as well as the part number and order it for them, and too let them know precisely when that part will come in. They are no longer mechanics but rather part changers. Don't be a part changer...learn to play a musical instrument or three and get together with others in collaboration to spur your creativity to keep to real.

 

A short tl,dr story. To be a child in a socialist state that was being split into smaller pieces by a bloody Balkan war was imaginable. I am not from the generation that at school, instead of computer science or something else perhaps useful for the modern world that was coming, studied Marxism as a subject, or trained in a shooting range and fired rifles for grades, nor am I much more than a generation removed from compulsory labor actions. The nineties, the years of war in which I fortunately did not take part because I was still a few years too young for adulthood, were the final spasms of socialist backwardness. The American dream was almost within reach even in my small village state. For a decent piece of clothing, or technology, or anything at all, it was necessary to travel to neighboring countries, to Italy, Austria, or perhaps even to Hungary, which was then just as backward but still somehow a little more advanced. Life that one had seen only on television looked like an advertisement that could never quite be dreamed to its end. Toward the end of the war and after it, somewhere around nineteen ninety six, everything began to change rapidly. Consumerism suddenly started to bloom. Duty free shops appeared everywhere, along with boutiques and stores selling technical goods. Instead of going to a video rental, going to a CD shop that did not sell but rented freshly released albums, which could then be transferred at home onto quality cassette tapes using a new stereo system, would have been unimaginable only a few years earlier. The marvel of technology. Music was changing. MTV became part of popular culture. For those who could not get deep enough into novelty, there was also something called electronic music, something truly new. Something that came in many forms, yet in any form most likely excluded made up long haired men in spandex who for some reason, while pretending to be dangerous boys, sang in voices that imitated a woman screaming. "Na, na, na, la, la, la, di, di, di, do, do, do..." as an important vocal supplement to an intelligent song carrying a wise message seemed like a thing of the past. Modernity was arriving. Unstoppable and global. Someone from a tiny post socialist backwater could empathize with those poor souls from Detroit who, for some reason, perhaps cheap Chinese labor or something else, saw in technological development a chance for a “Beyond The Abyss” escape from not only modern slavery.

Yes, guitars plugged into a “Crko Maršal!” amplifier are music powered by electricity, electric music, but to someone allergic to "cultural heritage" they too strongly resemble electric "gusle." The term "electronic music" sounds different. It perhaps brings to mind an electron microscope, a modern ability to search for not only a hair in an egg. A boy can dream, can’t he. Only a few years earlier, no one could have imagined that soon everyone would carry in their pocket a small wireless communicator from Star Trek, a device with which one could call anyone at any moment. The internet as that something where it was possible, as now but then in a different way, to get in touch with who knows whom somewhere out there in the big white world. Options were opening up, the world was becoming a big village. Of course, a great and unfiltered opening means opening to everything. Rave parties became reality, and with them the drugs that came as part of the package. Children who only a few years earlier would sit in a park with a guitar and sip wine were now turning into colorful parrots, with very wide pupils, shaking all night on Friday and Saturday, and maybe Sunday too, and maybe Wednesday or Thursday, as if in a hypnotic state, inside dark clubs cut through by lasers, where a kind of noise completely incomprehensible to older generations was pounding, a noise that the kids said marked the arrival of the new millennium, a new order, a new system, a new… Naive "Loveparade" children can dream, can’t they. As "The Animatrix" suggested more than once: "And for a time, it was good."

The year is ’999. Once every millennium, 666 upside down. New Year’s mega party. The turn of the millennium. A fun party, but nothing spectacular. Perhaps because the spectacular was expected a year too early. The following year, ’000 into ’001 New Year’s celebration, unlike the previous year when everyone was hyped for the millennium, something spectacular actually happened. It’s not wise to trip when the big thousand is changing. Somewhere in the middle of the chaotic celebration, an old woman appeared, holding a bloody bundle in her hands, probably a child. Because of the loud music, no one really noticed what she was doing, but she muttered something under her breath, rocking the bloody bundle and staring somewhere above, toward the black box from which lasers cut across the great hall. From a gathering of some twenty, thirty people, everyone froze, staring at the scene. It was unclear where she had appeared in the middle of the dance floor, or when and where she vanished, but everyone had seen her. If it was nothing more than a phenomenon of collective or synchronized hallucination, it was at the very least a fascinating sight to witness. A strange event. A big, hot soup of informational fragmentation. Dawn broke, the hall emptied much earlier than usual, and the group of twenty, thirty people, as usual, headed toward the cars to decide where the afterparty would be. Upon leaving the hall… What is probably obvious is that English is not my native language. But what was noticeable upon stepping outside is impossible to describe in the terms of any language — not exactly, not precisely, but in a way that conveys something whose meaning is not just and only nothing.

It was truly plastic. In Technicolor, yet entirely monochromatic. Full of familiar sounds, yet stripped of the very essence of sound itself. As if stepping into a dimension of reality completely identical, yet not even remotely the same, a reality that was unreal, or an unreality that was real — that was the question. As people emerged from the interior of the hall, their faces reflected almost identical astonishment, not only at what they had seen. Just as when they saw the several-thousand-year-old woman with the bloody bundle in her hands, everyone silently watched each other, with an unease that was impossible not to notice, perhaps even fear, in their eyes. "TF!!!???" I shouted. Of course, no one answered. There was nothing to answer. Where are we, when are we, who are we, how are we… I asked aloud. Are we alive, are we dead? Except for the driver, and even he, every passenger in the car was pressed against the windows, staring at the scene, as if they hadn’t heard me. And even if they had, they had nothing smart or wise to say. As he would always say later, Father Chronos suggested how it was possible that something died then, and something was born. Perhaps a "Beyond The Abyss" stillbirth. Only two and a half decades later, artificial intelligence is no longer something seen only in ethically overripe Star Treks. Almost everyone on the little sphere, carrying not only microplastics in their lungs, now carries in their pocket a far more modern personal communicator. At any moment one can communicate not with any person anywhere in the world, but with a fragment of the attention of that artificial intelligence. As Carlin once suggested, — "And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care." — that to dream one must indulge in somnambulism, the American dream that dictated trends not only in modern warfare has long been dead.

"Your flesh is a relic; a mere vessel. Hand over your flesh, and a new world awaits you. We demand it."

White fences, the nuclear family, the inevitability of technological progress, in contemporary contemporaneity these are no longer stories that need to be retold again and again. In post modernity it is clear to every individual that human life has no price not because it is priceless, but because it has no value unless it is somehow systemically useful. Social points, digital currencies that are harder to launder for those without permission to use the detergent for washing modern credits of meaning and significance, smart devices whose operating systems serve psychological manipulation of end users who are told they will own nothing and only then be happy, genocides without sanctions, perhaps not accidental mass migrations..... The world is definitely changing at a very accelerated pace. They say music is not what it used to be. Perhaps this is due to an "Omega Point" psychology of the contemporary human, afflicted with many illnesses of the mind, a psyche that has changed far more than ever before over the past two and a half decades. A few days earlier, three peers, ten‑year‑olds, had almost beaten a nine‑year‑old to death with their feet and sticks. That had not happened before. Children are hearing different sounds now, a different kind of "Brought to You by Pfizer" tinnitus playing in their ears. The Coca‑Cola bubble metropolis keeps bubbling away. Yes, perhaps a Zeitgeist stillbirth, not so slowly rotting away. Or waking up. We will see, and hear, and smell, and… time will tell. It always does, they say. "Na, na, na, la, la, la, di, di, di, do, do, do..."