We Are All Stars

It's tempting to think that your audience is essentially... you. Or, I mean, about the same age as you, therefore, no need to adjust your cultural references for relevancy. ('Cause you know somebody out there also bought that Reef CD, right?) Sometime during the half-decade or so, I officially became an "old," meaning there are scads of other people writing about music and pop culture, and many of them are young enough to be, well, my much younger siblings.

Particularly with music, I sense a big generational divide. Not necessarily the bands or artists being blogged, but the way the topic of what's "good," or even what's "cool" is approached. This comment on GenerationXpert  (note: the original post veers dangerously close to slut-shaming, and some of the other comments are downright homophobic), I think, sums up the difference between X and Y when it comes to music:

In music, for example, I thought X'ers's formative experiences covered a wide spectrum, from the hair metal days (which I seem to recall you being a fan of, and which certainly used sex to sell) to the more "authentic" grunge revolution, which didn't. In the Eighties, pop icons could use sex and be "outrageous" (Madonna, Prince), or not use it at all (R.E.M, Springsteen).

I think you could take that further and say during the 80s and 90s, the chasm between commercial music and indie was wider, and if you were someone who preferred the latter, you'd rather have root work done than listen to radio music. Even more importantly, there was no great equalizer like YouTube. Rebecca Black wouldn't have existed in 1987, or if she did, she wouldn't have been that season's Tiffany or Debbie Gibson (that would be Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, respectively), she could have been playing in a punk band or penning a zine. She wouldn't have been famous, or "internet famous," because her kind of fame didn't really exist.

I don't think this is truly a bad thing. If it weren't for this internet thing, I wouldn't be blogging, or probably writing at all. I'm just as much a part of the problem, though I'm not sure I consider it a problem. But I do find it a little disheartening that everyone seems to want fame, even a small part of it.