steve t has expressed very well a couple of the things that bother me about what music has become...people used to sing a lot about their 'life'...now many songs are, as he says, about emotion that doesn't tell much story...(one friend of mine refers to something he calls "young girls singing their diary". My own favorite description is 'navel-gazing' songs. Another I have heard is 'the beingness of being'...the themes are simply different than the 'external' subject matter that used to be so common.

None of this solves the problems we have been discussing, but it is one way to explain that there ARE differences.