Allen Conn:"But listening to the top 40 of the year a few years ago sure drove home the point that our pop music was light years beyond the current crop."

It can also be exaggerated though as to how great things were 40 years ago. Lot of good stuff about then but a lot of less impressive stuff too. We've been watching the old repeats of TOTP since they stared showing them last year at 1976. Skip through most of it as it is pretty dire. Plus there is some good stuff about now too. Just because it doesn't get in the charts doesn't mean it isn't there. Kids nowadays also have easy access to so much. Much more than we did.

Exactly! As someoneelse said, our parents probably said the same thing when we were listening to stuff in the 60s and 70s. There was an *awful* lot of crap about back then....it's just that we only remember/ replay the stuff that's stood the test of time.

And it's ridiculous that so many people just denigrate *all* new music...there's a lot of good stuff about still, admittedly mostly not in the charts....but it was ever thus. The stuff I was listening to in the 60s and 70s was rarely in the charts and my parents had no idea of its existence....in much the same was as those above denigrating all modern music or idioms are almost certainly unaware of the majority of what youngsters are listening to these days.