-The intrinsic value of music-

Well, I wouldn't know about the vinyls' superiority, having spent my youth hating clicks and pops and dust and the degeneration of sound at every further spin and waiting and hoping for something to come out that didn't have all those flaws that were always insufferable for me. Making music myself, I know that when I hear it on CDr I can hear no difference whatsoever between what I played and what comes out of the disc. So it seems just more likely to me that vinyls just ADD something to the sound, kind of like an aural exciter or something, rather than being a more faithful reproduction of the original sound.
That said, I thoroughly agree with you regarding the HORROR of seeing how young people today give no value nor meaning to anything at all (both material and, even worse, non material), as they can have anything so easily and with no effort...
I guess I probably have a grumpy old man inside of me, too (I'll turn 43 this year), but I still think that if you get something too easily, that will never have any value at all for you, or at least very little.
Regarding music, they have so much of it (and mostly illegal, as moral values are definitely going out of the window, too) that they just do not stop to really listen to it, they give themselves no time to love it. They listen to the first 15 seconds of a track and decide whether they like it or not, they don't even listen to the whole track! If they don't like it, they erase it, if they like it they will listen to it 3 or 4 times and move on to yet another one of the 2786546723839764 tracks they have downloaded.
When we finally managed to buy an album, we listened to it tens of times, we slowly discovered that even the tracks we didn't like at first had something to say. We got to understand it, to love it.
That doesn't happen anymore, all is just quantity, emotions are a thing of the past. What is really scary is that the blank, emotionless look on the faces of the girls you saw, is very often equally blank in the souls of young people today. Thank god for the few exceptions.

41 Max, your only cutting your teeth, how about those of us that were weaned on t.d. during the early seventies!, yer only a youngster. Nice article but what's an mp3?ha ha
You are allowed to look at the younger female, and its sometimes very nice but it can play havoc with your heart! :roll: :roll:

Soulless music for a soulless generation. That's what the mainstream record companies are producing. I've seen the blank stare of people listening to cookie cutter music on the bus as well. (As a side note, it's great to hear someone who takes the bus to work rather than driving)
I've spoken to people about how really good music can move me to tears, and they just don't get it. They assume that a given track is "really good" because it has a catchy beat or hook. They don't understand that music can be SO much more, that it can hold so much emotion.

I enjoyed reading your piece.