Was music really better when you were younger? Or is your mind deceiving you?
If you like Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” Fall Out Boy’s “Dance, Dance” and Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” as much as I do, chances are we were born around the same time.
When I listen to those songs now, I’m hit with waves of nostalgia — first crushes, the tribulations of high school, and the highs and lows of living with my parents.
While I’ve come to appreciate younger artists such as Doja Cat, Lil Nas X and Sabrina Carpenter in recent years, songs from the 2000s hold a special place in my head and heart.
But a younger colleague recently told me that “the music from 2008 through 2016 was top tier.” She said that she loved Meghan Trainor, One Direction and Kesha during that time — all artists who were the soundtrack of her crucial developmental years.
As I see other generations of music lovers say music was so much better when they were younger, I wondered why. We can’t all be right — or maybe we are? I talked to experts in how music influences our brains to find out.
“It’s not that music was better when (we) were younger; it’s that music elicits very, very strong emotions,” said Dr. Rita Aiello, a music psychologist at New York University who examines how people process music and how music and memories shape each other.
Aiello remembers the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and Barbra Streisand’s “People” as two of her favorite songs from her youth. “Music is an extremely powerful cue for remembering what has happened before in our lives,” she said.
But why does music hold such power? “Music is episodic,” said Dr. Robert Cutietta, a professor of music at the University of Southern California. “If you look at an artwork or something, you can look at it and leave. Music is over time. There’s a part of our brain called episodic memory — that’s where it goes.”
It makes sense. A person’s preference for popular music peaks around age 23, according to a 1989 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, with a 2013 follow-up in the journal Musicae Scientiae reporting age 19. A 2022 replication of the latter study in Marketing Letters: A Journal of Research in Marketing found that a person’s music preference peaks as young as 17.
“It’s part of your identity,” Cutietta said. “During those years, we are developing so much (of) who we are, (and) we get attached to the music.”
Cutietta, who was born in 1953, cited the work of the Beatles and conductor Leonard Bernstein as among his favorites. Those artists helped shape his musical tastes as a teenager.
This attachment to your identity may be why you feel less of a connection to contemporary music as you grow older.
The emotions tied to music at impressionable ages help form a lifelong bond, with happy and sad feelings intertwining — even complementing each other — when listening to a song.
“If we were sad (listening to a song) 20 years ago, we’re going to be sad today, but with a distance from that sadness … so there’s a different sense of enrichment in the experience,” Aiello said, noting that “sadness can be the opening of joy.”
It could also explain why listening to something you enjoyed from an earlier, tougher period in your life can bring a sense of catharsis when hearing it now, she said.
What if you think of the 1970s and 1980s as the holy grail of “real music,” even though all decades contain good and bad songs?
It may be because you’re remembering the artists, songs and albums that were meaningful to you and forgetting the ones that weren’t. “There are circumstances that made certain songs particularly meaningful to you and the memories of those circumstances will come back as you listen to the songs,” Aiello said.
Those meaningful songs still resonate with you, Cutietta said, eclipsing the forgettable ones.
“Every era has horrible songs that became huge hits,” Cutietta said. “They’re still there somewhere in our memory, but we choose not to pull those up. Naturally, we’re going to pull up the songs we like.”
I’m sure that today’s young people will hail the early 2020s as a great time in music, saying that the artists of 2038 have nothing on those from their day.
But most likely, they’ll be thinking about how the artists they loved shaped their younger selves and forgetting the songs that didn’t matter.
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