I think there's more amazing new music today than ever.

I think what passes for popular music, is worse than any generation before it has ever produced. That's right. Today is worse than Color Me Bad and Poison.

Poptimism fucking sucks. Calling people a sexist/racist for not liking what you like fucking sucks. Passing off pop stars that are just slightly outside of the twerking sex-worker realm, preaching cheap girl-power as some form of feminism aimed at 13 year olds, sucks. Exploiting hot button political issues in a surface level fashion to further your sex-selling bullshit, sucks. Critic-proof artists, no matter how good they are technically, sucks. The media cumming all over itself at the first chance to write endless praise about some fucking shit stain of a record like Emotion - sucks.

But underground rock and metal scenes right now are really REALLY vibrant. With metal - the doom/stoner revival, and with under-produced black metal and the black-gaze movements, I think if you're coming from a 70s, 80s or 90s perspective it's really easy to not get it. At first glance most of it comes off as just noise, even to lifetime Slayer fans. There's something about it all, that initially it evokes a yawn you have to push through to get it. While previous generations were increasingly loud, fast and aggressive as a means to carving out a niche for their generation that the previous ones couldn't follow, nowadays it's kinda in the other direction. Getting Megadeth fans to understand Windhand or Monolord, I think would take some doing. Getting Nirvana fans to understand Grizzly Bear would too. Getting Rob Zombie fans to understand Uncle Acid - even though the subject matter is largely identical, would be as well. Sabbath fans wouldn't understand Deafheaven. Devin Townsend fans, on average, are just shaking their heads at Ghost thinking "didn't we already do this?".

While I'm personally moving away from it - a lot of what's going on with indie rock, dreamwave, lo-fi, synthpop and so forth - is incredibly vibrant. There's some really interesting things going on with hip hop even though it gets sucked into the poptimism vortex at times.

It's all about where you're looking. Mainstream music mags have never been so irrelevant. This new generation doesn't have a counter culture, it has a consumer culture parading around as some shallow shell of social justice wagging it's finger at everyone for being a racist hipster if you don't like the latest Kanye or Carly Rae Jepsen. If you ignore that - you can find some really interesting shit.