, Columnist
Once We Listened to the Beatles. Now We Eat Beetles.
The social role of music in our culture has given way to the ascendance of food.
Yum!
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Since the 1960s and ’70s, food has replaced music’s centrality to American culture. These are invariably somewhat subjective impressions, but I’d like to lay out my sense of how the social impact of music has fallen and the social role of food has risen.
In the earlier era, new albums were eagerly awaited and bought in the hundreds of thousands immediately upon their release. Diversity in the musical world was relatively low, as genres such as rap, heavy metal, techno and ambient either didn’t exist or weren’t well developed. It was also harder to access the music of the more distant past -- no Spotify or YouTube -- and thus people listened to the same common music more frequently.