Ok, so music today is better than the music made by?
80's U2, REM, The Police, Michael Jackson, The Smiths, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Queen, Joy Division, New Order, Led Zeppelin, Guns n' roses, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Phil Collins and the Genesis, Peter Gabriel, The Cure, Dire Straits, Metallica, Jesus and Mary Chain? Maybe i am not that ignorant...
First, you would have to define "today" as a specific time period. If we're just saying 2014, then you can only compare a single previous year like 1986 or whatever.
My argument is that there's more great music coming out today than in years past. It certainly doesn't mean that the top albums are on par with the top from a certain year three decades ago, but it means there's more branches coming out of the tree if you will, they just might not be as sturdy as the ones in the past. I'd rather be in an era where I can add 50 or 75 great albums a year to my library than, say, 25 from 1984 or whatever. Granted, the top five choices from 1984 probably
will slay the top five favorites of mine from 2014, but I'd rather have
more than less because great music is great music. Not everything is going to be
Pet Sounds.
If you look at this way (and something a lot of listeners of modern music can agree with me on), look at the top 100 albums from 1965 on RateYourMusic and compare them to 2010 or whatever (remembering to take out all the metal recordings since they're overrated to an extreme on there). Obviously, you won't like every title since this is a combined list of thousands of other people, but you'll find that the lists tend to run a little deeper/stronger the further you go down in 2010 whereas 1965 starts with wall-to-wall classics and then enters "meh" territory a lot faster.
But my argument in the first place wasn't that I personally think music is better now than before. My argument is that there's certainly a ton of great music coming out nowadays and to think
Bridges to Babylon would even to deserve to be ranked in the Top 1000 of recordings from 1997-onward is an absolutely ludicrous statement. I'm just so sick and tired of people saying modern music sucks when they don't actually go out there and listen to it and only hear a sampling at best of awful modern rock and album rock radio - which now has the most static play lists it has ever had, full of dinosaur acts repeating themselves (Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters) and a lot of untalented newbies. The
mainstream music scene is worse than ever before, that's unquestionably true both from a rock perspective and in general, but that doesn't mean there isn't a ton of great stuff bubbling under the radar of those who aren't looking much further than in front of their own noses.
Anyway, my main point is that it's a lot easier to impress people that listen to five albums a year and are now hearing a free record from one of their favorite bands than it is to impress some of us that listen to hundreds of albums of year and have admitted somewhere on Interference that there are dozens (or 50 or 100) that we find better from 2014. Doesn't mean you can't think what you want about the album or absolutely love it (I'm glad for all of you, if not also jealous), but it does mean some of us aren't being needlessly critical when we just find it boring compared to the overload of intriguing ideas we're hearing in the modern day all of the time. To call the new U2 record risk taking in 2014 shows that a lot of people aren't listening to the music of 2014.