When Songs Remember Who We Were

Every generation believes the music of their youth was the last great era, that somehow melody died shortly after they stopped paying attention to new artists. I catch myself dismissing current Bengali pop while defending the objectively similar songs that soundtracked my twenties with fierce nostalgia.

We mistake the music of our youth for the youth we experienced while hearing it.

The songs from my college years weren’t inherently better—they were just present during the time when everything felt possible, when emotions were more intense, when music seemed to contain solutions to problems I hadn’t yet learned were permanent. That Artcell album wasn’t superior to current Bangladeshi rock; it was just playing when I was becoming myself, when identity felt fluid and thrilling, when heartbreak was new and devastating rather than familiar and manageable.

We’re nostalgic not for superior music but for superior versions of ourselves.

Current music feels shallow because we hear it with adult ears that have learned to expect disappointment, while our youth’s soundtrack plays in memory filtered through the emotional intensity of being young. The new song about first love sounds cliché because I’ve experienced love enough times to recognize the pattern. But the old song about first love—which used the same clichés—feels profound because it’s encoded with my actual first love, when everything was original because it was happening to me for the first time.

Musical criticism is often autobiography disguised as aesthetic judgment.

When I say “music was better in 2005,” what I mean is “I was more alive in 2005.” The songs haven’t changed—they’re still the same recordings. But I’ve changed. I’m no longer the person for whom those songs were written, no longer experiencing the emotions they describe with beginner’s intensity. Current music speaks to current young people the way my music spoke to me, but I can’t access it the same way because I’m no longer young.

My father dismissed my music exactly as I dismiss my son’s. He’d hear my college bands and shake his head: “This isn’t music. In my time, we had real melody, real lyrics.” And he was right that the music of his youth spoke to him more deeply—but not because it was objectively superior. Because he heard it when he was young, when music mattered more, when songs felt like revelations rather than entertainment.

My son will someday defend the music of his childhood with the same irrational passion I bring to defending mine, dismissing whatever his children love as evidence that culture has declined since his formative years. He’ll talk about the artists of 2025 the way I talk about the artists of 2005, with the absolute conviction that his generation got the good stuff and everything after is derivative decline.

Every generation inherits the illusion that their soundtrack was history’s peak.

This isn’t delusional—it’s neurological. The music we hear during adolescence and early adulthood gets encoded differently than music we encounter later. Our brains are more plastic during youth, more open to novelty, more capable of forming deep emotional associations. Songs we hear at fifteen get wired into our neural architecture in ways that songs we hear at forty simply don’t.

Plus, youth itself amplifies everything. First heartbreak, first rebellion, first independence—these aren’t just emotional experiences, they’re world-defining moments when we’re figuring out who we are. The music playing during these moments becomes inseparable from the experiences. It’s not that the music was better; it’s that the life it soundtracked was more intense because everything was happening for the first time.

We judge past music by its emotional impact and current music by its artistic merit.

When I evaluate my college music, I’m not hearing the actual songs—I’m feeling what those songs meant during the time I first heard them. Every chord change contains a memory. Every lyric connects to a specific night, a specific person, a specific version of myself I’ll never be again.

But when I hear current music, I’m hearing only the music—stripped of personal history, evaluated purely on its sonic qualities. And of course it falls short. How could any song compete with music that’s encoded with youth itself, with transformation and intensity and the feeling that life was beginning rather than progressing?

Why does the music of youth always feel like the last good music?

Because we can’t re-enter youth. We can’t hear new music with twenty-year-old ears. We can’t bring beginner’s intensity to familiar emotional territory. The music of our youth feels like the peak not because music declined after we aged out of its target demographic, but because our capacity to be transformed by music declined as we accumulated experience.

What if every generation’s soundtrack is perfect for that generation’s particular need to feel understood, rebellious, or alive?

Then the teenagers listening to music I don’t understand are having exactly the experience I had—feeling seen, feeling defiant, feeling like finally someone made sounds that capture what it’s like to be them, now, in this moment. Their music serves them the same way my music served me, even though I can’t access it the same way because I’m not them, I’m not young, I’m not experiencing what they’re experiencing.

This doesn’t mean all music is equally good. Technical skill, innovation, craftsmanship—these exist and can be evaluated. But the feeling that “music was better when I was young” isn’t usually about these qualities. It’s about the listener, not the music. It’s autobiography masquerading as criticism, nostalgia pretending to be judgment, the ache of aging disguised as aesthetic decline.

The music of my youth was the last great era—for me. For my son, the music of his youth will be the last great era—for him. And his children will someday insist that music peaked in 2045 or whenever they’re teenagers, dismissing 2065 pop as evidence that culture has finally, definitively, completely declined since their obviously superior generation.

We’re all wrong. And we’re all right. The music of youth is the best music because youth itself makes everything better—more intense, more meaningful, more permanent in memory. Not because the songs were superior, but because the person hearing them was still becoming, still open, still capable of being changed by combinations of sound that seemed to speak directly to something essential and otherwise inarticulable.

The music hasn’t declined. We’ve just grown up. And growing up means learning to hear music with ears that have heard too much, felt too much, survived too much to be transported the way we once were by three chords and the truth.

But somewhere, right now, a teenager is hearing a song that will define them, that will become inseparable from who they’re becoming, that they’ll defend forty years from now with the absolute conviction that music died shortly after this perfect moment when everything felt possible and songs seemed to contain solutions to problems they haven’t yet learned are permanent.

And they’ll be right. Just like we were right. Just like every generation is right about the music that soundtracked their becoming, even though we’re all wrong about the music that’s soundtracking everyone else’s.