You need to put yourself in the frame of mind of a kid who up until they heard rock and roll, Laurence Fucking Welk was the grooviest thing they’d heard.

You grew up in a world where Rock’n’Roll already existed. They liked it because it didn’t before and it took a while to slap a label on it. You grew up in a world where people bought music or paid to stream. When Rock’n’Roll started sheet music was the big seller. They had just introduced vinyl as a medium. You are exposed to all sorts of music today. Back in the 1940s US, predominantly, white people listened to white people music and black people listened to black people music. It’s only when some white people saw the black music was better and then unabashedly copied it for the more economically impactful white audience that this became a hit. It’s not just the quality of the music; it’s the culture and the change within it that came with it. It’s a big package.

I remember listening to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit when out came out thinking this was the roughest rock could ever go. ~30 years later it sounds rather tame. That’s the way our musical ears work. We tend to have a hardcore recency bias.

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Same reason as why wheels aren’t very impressive today, but they probably were the shit for quite a while in Sumer back then. Things don’t seem as impressive, or as [any other adjective], when they have been around for a long time and people have gotten used to them.

chuck berry, buddy holly, elvis, jerry lee lewis, johnny cash, richie valens. It was not all unremarkable and doubly so for the time. If you include the ones coming out of the end of the 50’s you got smokey robinson and aretha franklin which have some stuff I just love. Im not a big elvis or cash fan but there are a few songs. One thing funny about elvis for me is I like a lot of remakes of his songs with a bit of modern flare from modern artists.