Step away from the keyboard

It seems to be a law that any YouTube video featuring anyone who was a star before 1980 will get a comment about how much better (cleaner, classier, sexier) things were back then.  Sometimes the sentiment is not even phrased as a comparative, as though somehow in the intervening years quality itself has been expunged from existence.  Singers were actually talented! Comedians were actually funny!  And they didn’t need 4 letter words to do it!  (Has anyone noticed whether it's the same person writing these every time?  I haven't been paying that close attention to it.  Let's assume for the sake of argument that it's not.)

It's kind of an odd statement to make; clearly an opinion, but stated as fact.  But it's probably framed as fact to conceal that it's an opinion, because, let's face it: it's the kind of opinion only an old person would have.  (Entertainment wasn't sexier, classier or cleaner back then; you were.)  It doesn't really follow from the proposition that Entertainer A is Good and Entertainer A is from the Past, that Therefore Everything from Today sucks.  I have been to the past.  Entertainer A is an anomaly, just as Entertainer Z who's a genius from today is an anomaly.  Everything since the dawn of time has mostly sucked.  Thank goodness for Entertainers A and Z and others who broke out of the mould of mold.

To anyone who feels compelled to express their love for an artist or piece of art from their youth by taking a dump on the making of entertainment today, may I suggest a different perspective?  Couldn't it be that both have something to offer; that quality may not be a zero-sum game and that therefore the relative goodness of one era of entertainment does not imply the general suckiness of the other.

For me a great part of the attraction of good entertainment from the past is its age.  There's no denying it.  Enjoying classic art is a way of seeing through those eyes again (or anew for those encountering it for the first time.)  It's good to break out of your current perspective from time to time-- perhaps especially when the perspective you get is of yourself from the outside.  If art is good, that's part of what it's doing regardless of when it was created.

Art from the past was "cleaner" because it was straitjacketed by codes, subject to censorship and in some cases illegal for it to be anything else.  Art today is not "cleansed" because it no longer must be in most forums.  Change is not always bad.

There's an implied question mark after the titles of these collections.