There's a fine, some might say invisible, line between a deep passion with an agitative edge and simply knowing that anyone with half a brain would realize you are right if they just opened their eyes or ears. Whether that line exists is also probably dependent on perspective, particularly in the case of Dave Thompson's I Hate New Music: The Classic Rock Manifesto.
Those who grew up the era of classic rock likely will find Thompson's manifesto reasonable, rational and, for the most part, right. Younger people might just consider him a curmudgeon putting down the music of younger generations.
Thompson's thesis is straightforward. Good, let alone great, rock music is long dead, the victim of an abundance of technology and a dearth of imagination. Thompson believes death occurred during a 10-month period in 1978 when eight particular records were released. Identifying the specific LPs may be too much a spoiler, so suffice it to say the bands releasing the LPs were not only popular, those records would sell more than 30 million units before the century was out and all went platinum or multi-platinum.
I Hate New Music posits that technology made things too easy technologically and reliance on it moved music from innovation to simulation. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix recorded with analog equipment and tape and, depending on the year, a very limited number of tracks. Today's digital age means only a keyboard or mouse is necessary to edit, change, or even create layers and layers of notes, tones, sounds, or vocals at will. The same is true with instruments. No one would mistake the sounds emanating from a mid-1970s Moog synthesizer for a guitar or saxophone. Today, computer software or a compact synth can replicate virtually any instrument.
The ability to simply press a button to achieve a particular result impacts not just production but essence. Thompson believes that although the highly engineered, multi-multi-multi-tracked and overdubbed releases of the recent past may sound impressive, there's "something not there. It's called humanity. The sense that the song was written by a human and performed by flesh and blood." It isn't just age causes Thompson to note in his prologue that you use to give a store clerk some money and, in return, receive "a piece of plastic in a cardboard sleeve, with lyrics and liner notes and a real neat picture. Not a microscopic computer file that you can only play through your tinny laptop speakers, and it still sounds like shit that's been run over with a forklift truck."
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