*27-11-2025*

i absolutely cannot stand when someone says “music isn’t like it used to be” like they have no fucking clue, like they’ve never really listened to anything beyond whatever cookie cutter 60s-90s mainstream playlist they scroll past on spotify or youtube, maybe they think sonic youth is “obscure” but in reality they’ve never touched the edges of what music can actually be, like they have no concept of the ocean of sound that exists rn, today, globally, in 2025, and it’s insane, it’s FUCKIN' limitless, and yet here they are romanticizing some imagined pre 80s golden age where somehow all the magical bands were white men in the uk or us who had access to studios, record labels, money, and leisure, ignoring the fact that billions of people were just fucking surviving(we still do), if that, in places being ground into the earth by imperialist, colonial, capitalist systems..

a vietnamese kid in 1975 wondering if they will eat today or maybe they could be dead if they aren't careful enough, an iraqi/iran child in 1981 trying to dodge bombs and chemical gases, a african teenager under apartheid or in some famine zone wondering if they will live past twenty years of age, and if we're talking folks from 1st world countries - a working class kid in london or new york who has to spend an entire week of wages to buy one lp just to even hear what we now take for granted in a click, these are the realities that “i wish i was born in 1973” people never even imagine, they just want to be the comfortable, affluent, white male version of existence, insulated from oppression, free to nerd out about music like how they do on reddit.

and yes, i’ve had those thoughts too, daydreaming a life where i could just dive into music through vinyl records, meet my fav musicians, watch 'em tour when they were in their prime. but the difference is ik thats a fantasy, and anyone who doesnt is just wilfully ignorant.

and yet, today the reality is fucking breathtaking: music has never been more accessible, more global, more insane, more experimental, more mind blowing than it is right now.
we may not “own” physical media it like we did in the 70s or 80s. sure, we stream, rent, download, hoard digitally, but the accessibility is cosmic. i could spend hours in 2025 chasing obscure subgenres from every corner of the planet, from india to japan to sweden to the us to south africa, and find bands that literally redefine how you think of rhythm, tone, noise, energy, political expression..

i've listened to such amazing new bands like rectified spirits, formidable hate machine, sprain, shearling, swans, den der hale, haunted horses, cages(black hole telepathy), black country new roads, black midi, daughters, lightning bolt, girl band, protomartyr, and a million more, some mainstream ish, some utterly underground, some so niche you would never hear them unless you were digging, obsessing, hunting, and yet they exist, freely accessible with a computer, a solid state drive or a hard drive, a good pair of headphones that dont kill your ears, and a great internet connection. and think about it..

the odds of me being born in 1957, in a household where i could even afford to get into these things, being white, middle class, in the right city, the right social circle, the right family, are astronomical, infinitesimal, like lower than 2–5%, and that’s before we even account for whether i would be interested in exactly what i am interested in now, scouring forums, following threads, obsessing over hidden corners of music, films, and other forms of media that the mainstream doesn’t touch.

the irony is, those nostalgia obsessed people think the past was inherently better, magically superior, but the past was a fucking gated community, a tiny white boy club where billions of humans didn’t even get the chance to hear music, let alone play it, let alone make it, let alone invent new forms that could one day explode across the globe.

today, the underground is literally everywhere:
india producing insane metal bands, japan producing noise or math rock artists that break your brain, europe and the us pushing their scenes even more.. rock, post punk, post metal, industrial, drone, experimental electronic, glitch, post rock, and weird hybrid forms i could never have imagined during that time.

and this is without even touching the fact that music today is inherently more egalitarian in a weird sense:
you don’t have to be part of some studio, label, social circle, or class to make something amazing, all you need is knowledge, skill, persistence, and access to a computer and internet, things that cost less than a single week of wages for a working-class person in the first world, and maybe it's still pretty hard for folks in 3rd world country but it's atleast better, unlike the past.

and yes, it’s true, we might be renting the music rather than owning it, but what we gain in accessibility, scope, speed, and diversity is incomparable, like i can go from hearing a brutal experimental metal band from india to a post punk artist in chicago to a ukrainian/eastern europe black metal duo in an hour, all without leaving my room, all without spending a fortune, all without being part of some social or racial elite(though it still affects things heavily).

and the modern bands, the global underground, the insane experimenters..
they’re fucking brilliant:
swans, black midi, daughters, lightning bolt, girl band, rectified spirits and formidable hate machine, haunted horses, cages, protomartyr, black country new roads.. everywhere, always, globally, constantly pushing.

and the fact that this is global, that these things are no longer limited to inner circles of white boys in the uk or us, that someone in a small town in india or japan or germany or brazil can make music that’s heard and loved worldwide, that’s revolutionary.
it’s fucking radical.
it’s the musical revolution we’ve been waiting for our entire lives. and anyone who looks at that and says “music isn’t like it used to be” can choke on their nostalgia, because the revolution is happening now, it’s insane, it’s accessible, it’s alive, it’s global, it’s political, it’s experimental, it’s brutal, it’s joyous, it’s melancholic, it’s every feeling ever compressed into sound waves and digital files, and it’s ours if we want it, and the best part is:
you can be a working class kid in 2025 anywhere in the world, in a place that would have been unimaginable in the 70s or 80s, and still access it.


but still..
i hate capitalism.
i absolutely fucking hate it.
i don’t want to live under it, i can’t, and the worst part is how everything, literally everything i love, is being strangled by it, suffocated, reduced to a price tag, to a commodity.

art, music, books, cinema, even the little things that used to be sacred, they’re all packaged, sold, monetized, algorithmically curated to maximize profit instead of human meaning, instead of expression, instead of rawness.
and it sucks.
it fucking sucks.

you see someone dropping a new album, and half the narrative around it is streams, clicks, views, likes, “viral potential” marketing campaigns, merch tie-ins, instead of whether the music makes your soul shiver, or whether it makes you rethink yourself, your place in the world, your body, your politics.
you realize that even if you consume this art 24/7, obsess over it, get lost in it, immerse yourself into it, it doesn’t change the system.
it doesn’t destroy the fucking machinery that’s commodifying everything, every note, every word, every pixel, every fleeting moment of beauty you thought was yours. it just numbs you. delays the reckoning. the fact that everything is being shaped, packaged, and sold by the same forces that keep people starving, keep people fighting pointless wars, keep oppression alive in the background while you binge, stream, scroll, obsess, lose yourself in the illusion that aesthetic consumption equals freedom. it doesn’t. it just makes the machine smile. you can’t romanticize this world, no matter how many hours you sink into art, how many underground bands you obsess over, how many obscure vinyls you dig up, how many digital files you hoard, how many forums you scour up. it’s all still mediated through capitalism. every ticket, every album, every merch drop, every “exclusive” release, every tiny indie label struggling to survive is still trapped inside a system designed to commodify your desire, your obsession, your attention.

arghh shi- nihilism creeps in, and sometimes it’s unbearable.. the realization that the beauty you find in music, in art, is ALWAYS already tainted, filtered, consumed, monetized, even in ways you can’t fully see, like the machine finds a way to touch everything.

you love these sounds, these experiences, this art that should make you feel alive, and yet it reminds you constantly that life itself, outside your headphones, outside your screens, is structured to crush meaning, to monetize attention, to commodify desire, to stretch you thin and leave you anxious, frustrated, exhausted, craving more, forever.

the truth, the brutal truth, is that obsessing, consuming, even understanding, does not dismantle the system. it only delays it. it does absolutely nothing.
it only gives you a cheap thrill, temporary grass crest shield, a temporary numbness from the cornball ahh world being sold back to you one album, one ticket, one post, one stream at a time.
even the things you love most are caught in the machinery of capitalism..
only endless circulation and commodification.