It’s kind of a cliché to point out that the most important artist of our time is technology; but for those who have been part of this mass experience called popular music during the entirety of this bridging period — from say the 1990s until today — there is a kind of guilty emptiness that we allowed this musical holocaust to happen, and now we have no savior to guide us out:
First they came for the compact discs, but because I wasn’t especially enamored with the format, I said fine;
Then they came for my stereo system, but since they were replacing it with a digital playback device that eventually became my telephone, I didn’t complain;
Then they dethroned all of my rock gods, but since they were all a bunch of phony losers with no attachment to reality, I said “Fuck it”;
Finally they enslaved me to Google and to the data-mining hivemind of Web 10.0’s insidious Matrix-y plan to turn human cultures and subcultures into algorithms for advertising and mind control, and by then there was no one left to free us from the infernal Skynet machine we had created.
…
Or something to that effect. Hurry up with my damn croissant, and Happy New Year!