I have a huge collection of music of all varieties, but I definitely find older music to be more comforting. When I was growing up, my parents, my mom, who's more into classic rock and pop, and my dad, who's mostly into classic country played music around the house constantly. My dad has always been into collecting a lot of vintage/antique things, and when I was little, he went through a phase where arcade cabinets were his thing. So, in our basement, we had a pinball machine or two, Asteroids, one of those bowling games where you put sand down on the board and pushed the metal puck thing to knock down the pins, and, my favorite, a jukebox. I spent many, many hours as a kid listening to records and playing those games. When my dad eventually lost the job he had at the time, we had to sell all of that stuff, but we kept all the records that had been inside the jukebox, because my dad knew how much they meant to me. To this day, I still have them, they're my most prized possessions, and I take good care of them while still spinning them on occasion. Listening to a lot of those songs takes me back to some of the best memories I have. Unfortunately, when I started going to school, and kids would ask me what music I liked, I would rattle off a list of classic artists, and they would be genuinely confused. Then, that puzzlement turned to scorn, and it became one more thing that I was made fun of for. Finally, after catching on a few years too late, I started to realize that maybe, just maybe, I should try to see what all the hype was about the Backstreet Boys and such. So I started getting my hands on the Now That's What I Call Music series, which I honestly can't believe is still a thing. It was as good a place to start as any, and it made me realize how locked into only liking the top 40 most people are. Now, this was the late 90's, early 2000's, and I have some guilty pleasures which I quite like from that time. Then, as a teenager, I started getting into a lot of rock music. During all that time, I denied that I ever liked any of the classics I'd grown up on, and actively ridiculed them to cover up the fact that I really missed all the associations I had with them. Luckily, I started to come around when I was maybe 16 or 17, I started listening to all of those different styles, from what I'd grown up with, to the rock and metal I'd developed a fondness for, and that's how I began expanding my music collection over time. Now I have almost 6TB worth of stuff from tons of genres, but now it's not being accused of being weird for liking older music you have to worry about, although that does happen, it's being accused of being a hipster. I guess you can't win no matter what you do.
Anyway, my favorite time period in music history is the 1960's. Everyone was an individual, everyone was evolving. yeah, a good deal of that evolution was drug-induced, but no matter how it happened, it did happen. I sometimes feel like I should have been born during that time, that I would have fit in better as a person. Musically, everything was exploding. They say a musical revolution happens every 30 years, so I suppose we're due for one soon, but I can't see what could possibly top Beatlemania, or even the grunge movement of the 90's, not with what we currently have going on. What will it be, tracks written by AI? I guess that will be revolutionary, but it won't be one I want to have any part of.
The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.
A few years later, I've bought an old gramophone for 78rpm records and it's really great. It's a completely different feeling having to wind up the turntable, insert a new needle (gramophone needles only work for about two songs) and so on.