I apologize if my being upset at "Imagine" is ruining your day.

[Withywindle]

140. Agreed.

Punk arose in the first place in part in reaction to the deification of 60s musicians, a lot of whom had gotten rich and lazy. It's fine to have heroes, but that attitude that "Music will never be as great as it was when I was young" completely kills creativity. Most musical movements have been in some way in reaction against what came before - it's that kind of creative tension that leads to good new stuff being made.

What cheeses me off the most about the OP is the assumption that Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift are the sum total of 2010's music. Because of course the 60s had no plastic teen idols with little substance, right? It was ALL enduring genius back then! Sure.

Fellow child of the 80s here: most of the greatest music of the 80s was never heard except by people who cared enough to go out of their way to seek it out. If all you listened to was pop radio (an industry Boomers controlled by that point), you would have never known it existed. The same is true of the 90s, the 2000s, and the 2010s. Corporate rock/pop sucked then, and it sucks now. To judge whole generations by that is just condescending and ignorant.

My life was changed by X and the Minutemen and Husker Du and the Birthday Party and early Sonic Youth and Diamanda Galas and even early R.E.M. My favorite 60s artists are the Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart. This isn't a hipper-than-thou thing, none of those artists are really obscure. It's where I was when I was still young enough to believe that music can change the world.

I think if anyone pitched a giant hissy about someone changing a Dead Kennedys lyric, Jello Biafra would laugh and laugh and laugh.