Bad, hec­tor­ing, scold­ing writ­ing?

Seri­ously, this kind of arti­cle is invari­ably a mis­take, a set of gen­er­a­tional asser­tions that rely on noth­ing more than per­sonal anec­dote and prej­u­dice. Are we still in awe of the sup­posed ‘mul­ti­task­ing skills’ of all gen­er­a­tions that suc­ceed ours? There’s no think­ing, just complaining.

Jazz will sur­vive many gen­er­a­tions, as will clas­si­cal and other non-commodified musi­cal forms. They’ll sur­vive bet­ter than they did before iTunes. Music is a vast store­house of aes­thetic, cul­tural and his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge, it tells us how peo­ple think, feel and imag­ine. A piece of music is full of infor­ma­tion. With iTunes, music col­lect­ing has been trans­ferred to a data­base for every­one, not just for obses­sive discog­ra­phers. And that data­base is flat, it makes no hier­ar­chi­cal dis­tinc­tions between styles, which means that clas­si­cal and jazz are not bet­ter than rock or hip-hip, but also that clas­si­cal and jazz are as imme­di­ately avail­able as hip-hop. Which means that they are right there to lis­ten to. I’m puz­zled over whether Myers actu­ally knows what iTunes is, as his asser­tion that it is pri­mar­ily desk­top and work ori­ented is demol­ished by each and every iPod and iPhone that Apple has sold. How many mil­lions is that now?

As for how a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion lis­tens, Myers should sit down and catch his breath. Yes, jazz rewards atten­tive lis­ten­ing, so does Mahler. I lis­ten to both. I also lis­ten to both in the back­ground with­out pay­ing them con­stant, direct atten­tion. So, what gen­er­a­tion do I belong to? Well, I belong to the gen­er­a­tion of music lovers, which is every gen­er­a­tion. We who care about jazz should be glad that “Gen­er­a­tion F” find it stream­ing through their ear buds (h/t Patrick Jaren­wat­tananon).