What Did People Use To Listen To Music In The 1940s

Music: Why do most people from the previous generation hate and criticize the music of the current generation?

Lots of answers that touch on reasons, most of which revolve around older people always disliking the stuff younger people do, but that's not the whole story.I'm a musician, who grew up in the 80’s, but I do like and listen to modern music. I always have. Part of that is because my music taste has always been varied, and occasionally… eclectic. But I feel the same way about new music as I do about the music of my youth, and every generations music for that matter, and that's that it follows Sturgeon's law - Wikipedia : 90% of everything is crap.I recognized, when I was young, that most of the music on the radio wasn't very good. That sent me looking for other music, from other genres, and from other generations. It also kept me listening to new music as it came out. But I found the same problem every time I took a deep dive into a new genre or generation: mostly it wasn't very good, with a handful of artists who were very good, followed by a million copycats who just didn't understand what they were copying.Take away the nostalgia of what was playing in the background during memorable moments in my life, and what I'm left with is a very few good artists who did something worth listening to. Of course it varies a bit by each musical generation; some have more good artists and other have fewer, but overall it hangs around 90% crap and 10% good.So there are gems in modern music, but mostly it's unoriginal, parroting of something good someone else did, with all the things that made the original good made bland and lifeless. Even within a single artist's catalogue, as they try to recapture what they, themselves achieved on a previous song. It's inevitable.So a lot of people dislike what they hear in younger generations' music because the examples they have to work from are largely crap, and the examples of their own generation's music that they have in their heads are either the top 10% that was worth remembering, or they have a nostalgic attachment to it. We forget all the bad songs that we knew were bad at the time, and only remember the “best of,” or the ones attached to personal moments.I, for one, won't stop looking for the good music in new generations and movements. But I will tell you that Post Malone, Drake, and Cardi B are the crap you won't remember later, when you're 40, unless you have a personal nostalgic attachment to one of their songs. They are the fodder for “why did I listen to this crap when I was a kid?”

Why do people from the 1940s and 1950s seem more well-mannered and classier than people today?

Because it was all a sham, a facade. I am 70, and remember the 1950’s fairly well. Many of the responses here would have you believe society was in some golden age of civility and rectitude. In fact, it was a cesspool. It was great if you were a white male. You could kill a black man or rape a black woman with near-total impunity over much of the country. If you were a woman, you could be a mommy, a nurse, a teacher, a secretary or a telephone operator. I once met a woman who commanded the Space Shuttle and another who led a Mars Rover team. I happen to think that is a huge improvement in society.But you didn’t hear about child molestation back then. No, you didn’t hear about it. Because victims knew perfectly well what would happen to them if they told anyone.Novelist Graham Greene, writing about child actress Shirley Temple, nailed the mentality of the times perfectly with:"Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire."Shirley Temple: the superstar who had her childhood destroyed by HollywoodAnother case that’s become fairly notorious is that of Lauren Chapin, of Father Knows Best, who was a victim of childhood sexual abuse.You know all those cases of aging clergymen being accused as pedophiles way back when? Do the math. It didn’t happen in the drug-addled Sixties. And you can bet it was way worse back when clergy were all but untouchable.That “golden age” was the very embodiment of Matthew 23:27: “You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”A measure of the extent of the hypocrisy is that when people began challenging traditional sexual norms in the 1960’s, the whole system popped like a soap bubble. Because nobody actually believed in it to begin with. Comedian Pat Paulsen ran a joke Presidential campaign on the TV show “The Smothers Brothers” and one of his campaign speeches said “Let’s get sex out of the schools and back in the motels where it belongs.”Don’t give me any crap about the “Good Old Days.” The “Good Old Days” are right now.