Why can't I connect to today's pop/rock music?

...There’s another aspect to all this, what you could call anticipatory nostalgia: when you’re in a Moment, and suddenly think "will I remember this fondly one day?". With music, I’ve found that this question never raises itself when you actually are living through a period that turns out later to be regarded as a Golden Era. During post-punk, or late Eighties bliss-rock, or hardcore/jungle, I never thought about posterity: I was too fully immersed in the here-and-now, it felt like this Moment would extend itself in perpetuity. But when you’re actually ambivalent about a contemporary pop phenomenon, not wholly convinced or seduced (see: electroclash), I find the question becomes irresistible: you can't imagine who could possibly look back on this one day and feel an ounce of nostalgia.

Yesterday the CD coming with the German Rolling Stone was a sampler on post-punk (which I know I like but don't know too well) including tracks by the Au Pairs, Modern Lovers, Teardrop Exploders, Fall, Slits, X-Ray Spex, Fat Gadget, Gene Loves Jezebel and someone I had never heard of called Reininger. I found this early new wave stuff so much more original, powerful and challenging than any of the bands hyped today which I won't mention again. It clicked with me immediately and now I am not sure if this is because of the quality of that music or a kind of diffuse nostalgia. I write diffuse here as I didn't know most of the tracks and even the ones I knew like It's Obvious by the Au Pairs had a complexity and diversity about them I hadn't noticed before.

I ask myself the question why this is so. Is it my age, I am approaching 40, and do I settle for calmer music now? Or is it the fact that I have listened to a lot of rock music of the last forty years and therefore only hear the rip-offs in the new music? Or could it be that my nostalgic feelings are hurt by bands who do more or less the same as bands 15 or 20 years ago? Don't I listen closely enough to the new stuff to detect the hidden qualities? Or aren't there any and are the new bands really bad pale copies of the past heroes? In one question: is it me or is it them?

Listening to Loveless in 1991 or Heaven or Las Vegas in 1992 (as so often I was late) were revelations which haven't been matched for a long time. I'd like to know if there are other people out there who feel the same.

By the way I am really happy that I do not have to live on writing about music I don't like.

Stylistically this was one of the worst entries ever in my weblog. Sorry about that. But I leave it as it is as this is only a place where I scribble my undigested thoughts. I hope you got the gist nevertheless.
Even the question in the title is a little useless and almost rhetoric in hindsight. When rethinking about it I realize that I have hardly ever connected to current pop/rock in my life. Most of the bands I love I have discovered when they had already disbanded or when they were way past their peak. Just three examples for three decades.

a) I obviously haven't listened to The Velvet Underground in the sixties as I wasn't even in school when they were in their prime. I discovered them in the mid 80s on a Bavarian radio program during my studies. I bought all their albums on CD in 1990 and I still enjoy listening to them today.

b) In the late 70s/beginning of the 80s I hardly listened to rock at all therefore Joy Division wasn't on my radar. Instead I fell in love with Nick Drake via the Fruit Tree box (he was long dead already) and I started to get into Keith Jarrett's jazz solo improvisations with the monumental ten disc box of his Japan concerts called Sun Bear Concerts. The first Joy Division song I ever heard consciously was Love Will Tear Us Apart in 1992 on Bernard Lenoir's radio program at France Inter in the version of the Swans which I would still prefer to the original I guess. It took me at least five years to appreciate Joy Division and in 1999 when the Preston concert was released they had become one of my favourite bands of all time.

c) The third band I'd like to mention are the Smiths which I discovered at the end of their career in 1987 when The World Won't Listen was released. I met an English guy on the Greek island of Paros who worked as a DJ in a club there. He constantly listened to that Smiths album on his walkman and I remember That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore and especially Panic which I thought was called Hang the DJ at the time. It was a nice ironic turn that a DJ introduced me to this song. They had already disbanded in 1988 when I found all four studio albums plus The World Won't Listen plus Hatful of Hollow at Zweitausendeins (a bargain German record and book shop with mail order) as a cheap Portuguese vinyl pressing for 40 German marks. I couldn't resist and had to make this rather big investment at the time which I never regretted.

The exception to the rule was 1991 when I really got into alternative music and listened to the music coming out almost immediately after its release. But that is another story and deserves a real weblog entry I think...