When there was 'proper music'

Scroll down the YouTube thread for almost any punk/post-punk song from the 1970s and 1980s, and it probably won't be long before you come across the "I feel sorry for the kids of today" crowd. These are middle-aged (or older) commentators who don't just like a particular song by X-Ray Spex or the Clash or the Skids (or whoever), but are also at pains to point out that music was better then. So, in among all the usual "best days of my life", "I grew up listening to this", "got this in Virgin in Grimbsy in 1978" stuff, you come across comments like these. These are all taken from a YouTube comment thread for the Specials' Gangsters:

"When music was real" 

"Music back then was real"

"The kids. Don't have any quality bands these days. What a shame, they don't have any identity like the late 70s and early 80s. Great music then"

"Proper tunes"

"Forget all about the the crap that's going on today, sit back and listen"

"Good old days, England was England"

"Feel sorry for kids nowadays, same old rubbish"

"Compare today's SHITE music to ANY Specials tune ... not even close"

Terry Hall: a proper singer in a proper band making proper music 

It's depressing. Depressing on several levels. First, it's depressing (if not exactly surprising) that people are this closed-minded and conservative about anything. But second, it's depressing that people who apparently like (or liked) music that was once new and exciting have turned into such musical reactionaries. They've become their own parents, the ones who would bang on the ceiling if their teenage children were playing a Boomtown Rats or Jam record too loudly back in 1979. Parents who liked Johnny Mathis or Simon & Garfunkel (at best) and thought modern music was tuneless trash. And third, it's depressing that music that I also like (at least some of it) has become a sort of rallying cry for this attitude. It's a condition of ageing, I suppose. And also a fairly common life progression thing where people drift away from contemporary music, feel increasingly cut off and alienated by it, and so retreat back to the safety of their youth and the music they knew when they first went to pubs, clubs and parties. To the extent that this is simply a nostalgic-conservative strand in today's musical discourse, one you'd entirely expect to see as rock and pop music itself grows older and older (you now have to be in your sixties to directly recall "new wave", for instance), then this phenomenon is, I guess, no big deal. An annoyance, for sure, but a minor one. On the other hand, as Dan Hancox has shown with his stuff on the Proper Binmen meme and Restore Britain's far-right fever-dream vision of a Proper Britain, nostalgia is eminently politicisable. In some circles, mundane things like photos of binmen with old-fashioned steel dustbins on their shoulders or children riding Chopper bikes are the 1970s equivalent of Spitfires and Churchill's cigar and his V for Victory signs. It doesn't take much to build up a whole story around them, especially one that involves disparaging things like "health and safety" rules, or issues like sexual diversity or children with special educational needs and disabilities. Almost anything vaguely modern, in fact. Good old days, England was England. The Specials' punked-up ska (and the oddball doom-skank of Ghost Town) were great records then, and are great records now. But there have been approximately 951,267 great records made since Gangsters came out and the YouTube absolutists ("When music was real") are on the slippery slope to proper Britain politicised nostalgia.