Musically Stuck in the Past

Photo by Janine Robinson on Unsplash

I remember riding around in the car with my great-grandparents or my grandmother as a kid. I would always ask them to turn the radio to the hip-hop and R&B station. They reluctantly did and were immediately irritated by what they had heard. They couldn’t understand what was being said and expressed that the music didn’t have any substance. This music was just flat out something that they couldn’t identify with.

I grew up in the '90s, so we’re probably talking about music from The Notorious B.I.G., 112, Jodeci, Tupac, Brandy, and whoever else was hot at the time. All of these artists were at the top of their class then, and I couldn’t understand how this music was trash to the elders of my family. How could they say that this music wasn’t soulful, hard to understand, and had no substance? How could they not get the feeling that they were listening to the greatest pieces of art to ever be recorded at that time?

If you were to ask my grandmother who she thought was better than the artists that were coming through the airwaves in the ’90s, I know for sure that she would say, Gladys Knight, Aretha Franklin, and The Temptations. If you were to ask my great-grandparents who they thought were better than those artists, they would probably say that nobody was better than Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, or Louis Armstrong. All of these were great artists, but if you…