@ShiroKuro said in Notes from the piano bar: Another casualty of the ever decreasing shared culture?:
I didn't think the author was trying to make a point about musical quality, but just to say that, whereas with older songs, everyone could sing along, now, you can't expect that there is a set of songs that most everyone knows.
Yes. I couldn't quite tell where exactly the author was coming down, especially with this:
I’ve led a spectrum of humanity in singing the iconic “na-na-na-na” outro from “Hey Jude”: young and old, men and women, every race and ethnicity. Hopefully our culture will once again create songs so universally beloved. And if that happens, hopefully you can make an effort to listen. So that the next time I’m headlining at the piano bar, we can all sing it together.
His point is nebulous. I would argue that Hey Jude might not have been so universally beloved as universally known ( and perhaps often as an earworm!). And what to make of, "...hopefully you can make an effort to listen."? I suspect a lot of older people today don't even know a lot, if not most, current pop artists' music. When I was a child hearing Hey Jude on the radio, my parents generation were also hearing it, so they were exposed--like it or not--to the latest trends. And maybe it was time and place, but some not very nice things were said of 'hippie' music.
