I'm not saying that colleges are denying anybody. I'm just trying to say that there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding the value of the GPA and what college may or may not provide in the long run. I'm sure I could get in to University of Washington or Central Washington University if I really wanted to. I've talked to my career counselor extensively on getting accepted and he said that my GPA may make it a little difficult for me to get in to a 4-year. He also said, however, that the classes I took reflect more than I may realize.
I think that misconception has been more widely dispelled in the academic world than you realize. I would also suggest that your choice of career (again) heavily depends upon you getting some kind of liberal arts education at a university, if at all possible. You should be looking for schools with a well rounded liberal arts program and preferably some way in which to seek a working experience in tandem. In that vein I would suggest writing centers, libraries, newspapers, or even marketing type positions. Many of these can be found through school systems themselves and can provide foot-in-door access.
I'm just giving my view on what I've heard many of my former classmates say; college makes everything better. That may hold some truth, but it's not a guarantee. I don't mind paying for an education. I do mind, however, the promise made with no guarantee. If I'm going to put my time, money, and effort into something, I want to make sure that I get back what I put in. That's what an investment is.
There is never any guarantee in today's world. And while this might sound a touch hypocritical given my original rant, I have to stand up for the liberal arts since that is what you've communicated to be your choice. You do seem to have an adequate notion of what you want out of your education and that, I think, is what is most important in order to make that informed decision (or investment, as you put it). I won't lie to you and say that getting into Washington or any other college, working at a paper, or even publishing a few articles is a fool-proof way of making it into the writing world; however, I can very much confirm for you that not doing any of those things will not allow you the opportunity at all.
As far as I can discern from the information given, you have two choices: Follow your ambitions, take the gamble, and seek your education. Or you can simply find another interest with a lesser opportunity cost and hopefully find the time to return to your passion at a later date. I won't claim to have the answer to the arithmetic of potential debt vs. potential reward, but I would have to doubt your enthusiasm for the profession of writing if you don't find the first choice the most compelling by far.
Edit: I hope all that didn't sound too demagogic or critical. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors either way.
The thing about college that bothers me the most I guess is that it is looked at a lot from a business standpoint. The more people you round up and get to believe college will solve all their problems then the more loans are taken out and the more money people can make from the students.
In a word, yes. As I said, the administrators now are not former professors, but rather trained business administrator types specifically driven to see the profitability of their institutions rise. Like many other boom industries over the years, this one is reaching meteoric heights on some rather spurious assumptions: The value of education is nearly infinite.
Debt has always been something that you incur rather early on in life but at some point the average goal switched from finish highschool settle down and buy a house and fall into debt, to finish high school go directly to college and into debt, then after years of paying that back attempt to get a house and get put into more debt.
It just seems like you're expected to be in some form of debt nearly every day of your life. Medical, housing, school, credit cards, there's always something.
And I'm quite sure banks and various other lending institutions are thrilled by this; however, I wouldn't draw the unnecessary connection between financial industry and education sector. As far as I can discern there isn't a collusion between the two, but rather an unhealthy symbiosis developed over many years.
I've heard people say that college is a debt sentence. When my parents and I were talking about college, they said that they'd take out loans and the such and I would have to move back in to help pay them off. I was okay with that, but it definitely went against what people expect of a twenty-five year old just coming out of college. The facade is that college is a golden ticket to prosperity and happiness; sometimes it is, but just because you put in money doesn't mean that you aren't going to have an extremely depressing life trying to pay all that off. I wanted to live my life debt-free which, in the beginning, turned me away from college.
Well, there are ways to minimize the debt burden on yourself and your family. I don't think the obviously over-sold notion that college is an automatic ticket to a comfortable middle-class job is true, but it certainly isn't impossible to make something of a degree either. Ultimately, if you want to be completely debt-free at all times, you will have to do some seriously hard work either earning scholarship/grant money or taking on two and three part-time jobs at once to save up the necessary funds.
I went through school (all of a dozen years to the PhD) with a series of scholarships and one or two part-time jobs at all times, so it can be done, although you will not get much sleep.
I think the most efficient propaganda used is the idea that if you don't go to college, then you're sentenced to a life in a trailer park, working a shitty job, and never finding happiness. They hype up college to be the remedy to all those possible consequences. Then they talk about the "college experience" and they hype up the "value of knowledge" to make the idea of modern day colleges something more than the degree mills that they actually are. They make it out to be like a piece of paper symbolizes prosperity in life.
Depending on how well connected and evaluated the specific college of a specific university is, there are some which do grant a better chance at prosperity than others. Most of the students who take a general studies degree at community college aren't getting a thing; however, a graduate from the prestegious engineering program at a well-known science and technology university are quite likely to find an opportunity awaits the completion of their course work. The problem is that college in general is over-sold, but the larger issue is that any degree from any school is FAR over-sold.
As a potential writer you will find that a common practice is to only hire those with some kind of degree in hand. That isn't to say it is impossible to get a foothold without one, but you happen to have selected a genre of career that does not really lend itself to bypassing the post-secondary education rout. I would advise you look into schools with a strong journalism, editorial, creative writing, or literature program. I would also strongly advise you prepare to move a lot and quite probably pick up a new language or two.
I just think that people need to rethink what an "education" really is. Once you assign a monetary value to something as ethereal as "education," its value diminishes. Education is a time investment and should have never been about money in the first place. Taking away the money aspect of it all, students put in time and effort to gain knowledge (in a perfect world). Students have to pay money in order to obtain the mere privilege of putting in time and effort. There's something wrong with that.
Well, I think describing anything as "ethereal," is rather nonsensical. Even something as abstract as education carries with it some cost. Our society is not entirely socialist enough to grant post-secondary training as a right of all citizens, so there will be monetary concerns in lieu of such a break-through. After all, we professors might be over-paid (although administrative costs dominate the inflation of tuition price), but we still need to eat.
And, in my opinion, a GPA hardly means anything nowadays, not with what No Child Left Behind did to school curriculums. A GPA means something if you took AP classes or something marginally more difficult than basic algebra, history, and science. My senior year classes consisted of AP US government, AP literature, AP calculus, and advanced chemistry. If I had gotten a good GPA (which I didn't), I would've been viewed as a viable candidate for many scholarships. However, I didn't put in much effort to do all my homework and it reflected. I think I graduated with about a 2.5 or something.
The admission rubric does take into account the difficulty of advanced course work. To the best of my knowledge a 2.5 with AP classes would be weighted more highly than a 3.0 without. I will concur; however, that "no child," really benefited from that failed policy and in-fact many were left behind as they were shuffled up the grade latter in a rather dispassionate move to make the nation look smarter than it is.
I learned from those classes. Oh yeah. The idea that GPA reflects knowledge learned is a complete farce. There are people out there who don't care to do their homework because they think it's a waste of time. I was one of those people. I retained the knowledge I gained, but I couldn't give a shit about the work unless it was a big assignment or project. I did all my packets, essays, and all those huge projects that were grade-makers. I wrote beautiful essays, did very well on tests, and ended up getting 3s on my AP government and AP literature tests (I feel I did way better than that, but whatever). I learned something. A bad GPA doesn't reflect a person's capacity to learn. Anyone can take shit classes, do all the cute homework assignments, and walk out of the PBS equivalent of high school with a 4.0, get scholarships because of that GPA, and get into a very good school based on that alone.
I think you may be quite shocked to find this out, but gpa is not the end-all statistic you're making it out to be. In-fact I have several students (and graduate students) who did not attain the almighty 4.0 and still earned several lucrative scholarships. If you are indeed capable of writing an eloquent essay, the attainment of such a grant of aid should be quite trivially easy. There are literally thousands of groups with cash-in-hand, waiting to read just such an honest appeal.
The K-12 school systems are heavily flawed. Unless kids are offered better classes that have the freedom to form their own curriculum, our collective intelligence isn't going anywhere. And we need better teachers. I've had terrible teachers over the years and that's not just my opinion; when I look at how that teacher performed compared to a teacher who actually knew what they were doing, the difference is night and day. Some people were born to be teachers. Some people were born to give out assignments.
I find it difficulty to take the notion that students could design their own grade-school curriculum seriously. As you mentioned on more than one occasion thus-far, you were not particularly fond of homework or studying (many students are of like mind on this - as I'm sure you're aware). I think it would be tragic to see students allowed to take a bunch of nonsense physical education courses while being allowed to bypass literature, history, mathematics, sciences, etc.
As for the performance of teachers, I think there is a very nasty tendency for administrators, parents, and students alike to shuffle most of the blame onto regular educators. Yes, I have seen and been under the tutelage of some very obviously "bad," teachers in my lifetime; however, I would not use this as a write-off to excuse poor policy, lack of parenting, and systemic lack of resources. Many of the best teachers in grammar school lack the funding to be supplied with chalk and printed copies of their exams. You honestly have to love the job in some form or fashion to take on such a burden.
Grades are inflated and I wish I could tell you it were not systemic, but it most certainly is the case for most every secondary school and especially those with rather open acceptance policies. I refused to take part in the generous curving process in my career and it slowed the process of my becoming tenured in a very dramatic fashion. Administrators the country over (possibly the world over, but I've only worked in the US with a brief stint in the UK) have gone from academics to financially driven managers. School at some point in the 80s underwent a very obvious metamorphosis from process of enrichment to method of rubber-stamping socio-economic status. Wealthy kids get the inside-road to ivy league institutes and attain the highest stamp. Relatively poor first-generation college students in community schools attain the lowest stamp.
So the education becomes more widely desired. Everyone wants that rubber stamp to riches. Public education accelerates the mythos that if everyone simply got more education then nobody would be poor. We would simply automate all the jobs we didn't want and the world would be populated by a bunch of highly intellectual engineers, doctors, and the like. Obviously utopia failed to emerge. What did emerge; however, by the 90s was a post-secondary system in high-gear flooding the job market with over-trained and under-evaluated individuals. There were not enough specialist jobs to give out and even if there were, nobody was going to hang the new bridge-building project over to an architect from DeVry who got his degree in a year over chatroom lecture.
It's hard to say exactly how this process will reverse itself or simply evolve the education and job training systems we now take for granted into something more efficient (or less, parish the thought), but I will re-iterate that it is of the utmost importance to like what you do for a living. Chances are it will not pay dividends. Chances are you will not become rich. Chances are you will be quite poverty stricken at some point in your life. These are not simply hand-waiving claims, they are statistical and economical realities. The more one is willing to either hang onto their beloved niche and make it into a steady living, the better off they are.
Never for a moment listen to the fatuous and self-serving employers who tell everyone going into college to become "flexible," and to attain all the wondrous serf-like traits that they so desire in a peasant employee. There is something to be said for a career change and there is certainly a comfortable safety in having a back-up plan or new experience, but simply chasing the almighty dollar from one hack job to the next is a means of gaining life-long depression, not wealth.
Oh, and to hit on the specific point of writing. If indeed that is your passion, I would recommend you subscribe and submit regularly to some form of periodical. Print media may be a dying breed, but it is certainly a more effective way of being discovered for a paying job than is plastering your work across the internet by way of blog (although this has been the success of some). As the late, great Christopher Hitches would say; however, a writer is not one who simply likes or loves to write. A writer is one who simply cannot imagine life without writing. I wish you the best of luck in that career path, for it is fraught with much more uncertainty than most. I won't be the first or last to admit that it was my dream too to become a writer and I ended up with a teaching job to keep a roof over my head.
College is overrated. You will hear this one and only one time from me, a career professor and here are the situations and reasons why:
1. Degree Mills: The bachelor is currently worth fairly close to nothing. Work experience is more highly prized and post-graduate education is assumed or greatly desired anywhere that degree training is relevant.
2. Contracted Economy: The work-force grows and the number of employers has shrunk. Vegas made a very appropriate assumption in suggesting that this was a good time to start a business (although certainly no guarantee of success).
3. Public Knowledge: Almost all the information our species has, collectively, is online somewhere. Given a strong enough desire to learn about something, you can readily self-teach more than ever.
Having said all that, it is untenable that -most- [potential] students should choose this path. It would lead to a reversal of situations where degrees are over-valued, employers too numerous, and information closely guarded. I think we may indeed be trending this way with the most recent generation understanding the failures of post-secondary institutions.
I also think that a well-rounded education does make better persons, but given the option of recommending someone to attend a rather expensive four year institution or telling them to find out about their topics of interest at khanacademy.org (or some such) is a no-brainer. It is more imrpotant than ever to truly grasp what one wants out of their education before making an investment into it.
Right you are proletaria, and the names you list also show the huge diversity in styles and sounds that made great music great. I'm not so surprised at the cookie cutter bands out there today, but I am stunned at how many singers sound so similar. I didn't think it possible, but the list in the mainstream is shamefully huge. The other thing I find sad is the lack of patience found in the top rated music as well, everything is so rushed.
I wouldn't be so quick to pin the problem on a lack of sound diversity because, as far as I remember, many of the bands you and I both mentioned made a habit of borrowing each others' ideas, sounds, and style. What I think sets this generation, and I use that phrase ever-so-loosely since it spans a few decades, of music apart from the giants of my time is the fact it's now all so uninspiring.
In the post-war (second world war) era, there was so much gravitas coming from the blues community and the fledgling rock/folk types like Cash. They elevated the issues of racial tension that really tapped our civil right's struggles. They pulled no punches mocking political figures and decrying the inadequacy of some legal failings of the day. They even made light of the red scare when it was in full swing. To date, I do not believe any musician has displayed that kind of courage and it really does come across. The last time I can recall a modern band with a serious social/political thrust to their music it was the ho-hum repetitive ballads of Green Day bemoaning the situation of upper-middle-class children.
During the 60's and 70's, the era with which I feel the most kinship, our music was almost entirely driven by the blooming civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the upset with the Kennedy administration (many people forget that back then, criticism of politicians wasn't so partisan: we called republicans and democrats on their injustices with an even hand), Nixon, and our international parade of government toppling to deny communists the same pleasure. I think the closes modern equivalent was the very early rap music scene where the social injustice of the inner city post white-flight was really brought to the forground in a new sound. I was never a fan of Run DMC or Ice Cube, but I could still listen to some of their music and appreciate the feeling that went into making it was legitimate.
As the 70's rolled on into the 80's and 90's things began to dilute in a hurry. Once Collins, Springsteen, and the like had more or less exhausted their re-vamp of the folk-era in rock format the convservative moral majority had begun to make serious inroads into censorship. Music, admittedly, by this point had become more "vulgar," in the most literal sense, but I think that was more a means of establishing new identities than simply shocking the audience. However; this excuse was used and reckoned to a veritable drum-beat by the convseratives and by the late 90's music on the radio had been bleached and pressure washed to such an extent that new sounds simply couldn't arise with the same volume they had in the past. Metal was, I think, the best response music came up with to this, but American metal music went insane while the Europeans really defined it into a rail against cold-war American enterprise abroad.
Fast forward to the present day where censorship has become more relaxed and I think the issue is now with people and artists finding a common theme. There had been so much time in that era of white-washed 90's rock where we thought nobody would ever bring back a new 1969 that it appeared to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Techno revived the lumpen-awful that was disco. New rap bastardized the revolution that was the original hip-hop. Then, to top it all off, the "alternative," beat became the worst of both worlds: Inherently meaningless, aimed at an affluent audience, and celebrating/protesting nothing in particular.
tl;dr: There are very few bands these days with a voice. They are concerned with their sound or identifying themselves in some esoteric way, but at the end of the day it's easier than ever to simply emulate than it was before. What will bring about the next wave of "good," music is anyone's guess, but I suspect that it will require people in the music industry to tap back into the pleasure and the unrest of society and stop trying to lead it by the nose. The very term "pop," as in "popular," music makes me want to smash recording studio equipment.
I had this one explained to me by a student today. He was wearing a YOLO t-shirt. I don't think I could have hit my face harder with my palm.
You just need to figure out an acronym for history to teach them youngsters. You will start a new wave of teaching and become rich which then results to buying items in D3, so for the sake of D3 farming you must make history teachable by text....
I think that I would sooner take up religion than buy pixels in an online game, but that is a nifty idea for teaching these short-hand(icapped) kids.
I think that misconception has been more widely dispelled in the academic world than you realize. I would also suggest that your choice of career (again) heavily depends upon you getting some kind of liberal arts education at a university, if at all possible. You should be looking for schools with a well rounded liberal arts program and preferably some way in which to seek a working experience in tandem. In that vein I would suggest writing centers, libraries, newspapers, or even marketing type positions. Many of these can be found through school systems themselves and can provide foot-in-door access.
There is never any guarantee in today's world. And while this might sound a touch hypocritical given my original rant, I have to stand up for the liberal arts since that is what you've communicated to be your choice. You do seem to have an adequate notion of what you want out of your education and that, I think, is what is most important in order to make that informed decision (or investment, as you put it). I won't lie to you and say that getting into Washington or any other college, working at a paper, or even publishing a few articles is a fool-proof way of making it into the writing world; however, I can very much confirm for you that not doing any of those things will not allow you the opportunity at all.
As far as I can discern from the information given, you have two choices: Follow your ambitions, take the gamble, and seek your education. Or you can simply find another interest with a lesser opportunity cost and hopefully find the time to return to your passion at a later date. I won't claim to have the answer to the arithmetic of potential debt vs. potential reward, but I would have to doubt your enthusiasm for the profession of writing if you don't find the first choice the most compelling by far.
Edit: I hope all that didn't sound too demagogic or critical. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors either way.
In a word, yes. As I said, the administrators now are not former professors, but rather trained business administrator types specifically driven to see the profitability of their institutions rise. Like many other boom industries over the years, this one is reaching meteoric heights on some rather spurious assumptions: The value of education is nearly infinite.
And I'm quite sure banks and various other lending institutions are thrilled by this; however, I wouldn't draw the unnecessary connection between financial industry and education sector. As far as I can discern there isn't a collusion between the two, but rather an unhealthy symbiosis developed over many years.
Well, there are ways to minimize the debt burden on yourself and your family. I don't think the obviously over-sold notion that college is an automatic ticket to a comfortable middle-class job is true, but it certainly isn't impossible to make something of a degree either. Ultimately, if you want to be completely debt-free at all times, you will have to do some seriously hard work either earning scholarship/grant money or taking on two and three part-time jobs at once to save up the necessary funds.
I went through school (all of a dozen years to the PhD) with a series of scholarships and one or two part-time jobs at all times, so it can be done, although you will not get much sleep.
Depending on how well connected and evaluated the specific college of a specific university is, there are some which do grant a better chance at prosperity than others. Most of the students who take a general studies degree at community college aren't getting a thing; however, a graduate from the prestegious engineering program at a well-known science and technology university are quite likely to find an opportunity awaits the completion of their course work. The problem is that college in general is over-sold, but the larger issue is that any degree from any school is FAR over-sold.
As a potential writer you will find that a common practice is to only hire those with some kind of degree in hand. That isn't to say it is impossible to get a foothold without one, but you happen to have selected a genre of career that does not really lend itself to bypassing the post-secondary education rout. I would advise you look into schools with a strong journalism, editorial, creative writing, or literature program. I would also strongly advise you prepare to move a lot and quite probably pick up a new language or two.
Well, I think describing anything as "ethereal," is rather nonsensical. Even something as abstract as education carries with it some cost. Our society is not entirely socialist enough to grant post-secondary training as a right of all citizens, so there will be monetary concerns in lieu of such a break-through. After all, we professors might be over-paid (although administrative costs dominate the inflation of tuition price), but we still need to eat.
The admission rubric does take into account the difficulty of advanced course work. To the best of my knowledge a 2.5 with AP classes would be weighted more highly than a 3.0 without. I will concur; however, that "no child," really benefited from that failed policy and in-fact many were left behind as they were shuffled up the grade latter in a rather dispassionate move to make the nation look smarter than it is.
I think you may be quite shocked to find this out, but gpa is not the end-all statistic you're making it out to be. In-fact I have several students (and graduate students) who did not attain the almighty 4.0 and still earned several lucrative scholarships. If you are indeed capable of writing an eloquent essay, the attainment of such a grant of aid should be quite trivially easy. There are literally thousands of groups with cash-in-hand, waiting to read just such an honest appeal.
I find it difficulty to take the notion that students could design their own grade-school curriculum seriously. As you mentioned on more than one occasion thus-far, you were not particularly fond of homework or studying (many students are of like mind on this - as I'm sure you're aware). I think it would be tragic to see students allowed to take a bunch of nonsense physical education courses while being allowed to bypass literature, history, mathematics, sciences, etc.
As for the performance of teachers, I think there is a very nasty tendency for administrators, parents, and students alike to shuffle most of the blame onto regular educators. Yes, I have seen and been under the tutelage of some very obviously "bad," teachers in my lifetime; however, I would not use this as a write-off to excuse poor policy, lack of parenting, and systemic lack of resources. Many of the best teachers in grammar school lack the funding to be supplied with chalk and printed copies of their exams. You honestly have to love the job in some form or fashion to take on such a burden.
So the education becomes more widely desired. Everyone wants that rubber stamp to riches. Public education accelerates the mythos that if everyone simply got more education then nobody would be poor. We would simply automate all the jobs we didn't want and the world would be populated by a bunch of highly intellectual engineers, doctors, and the like. Obviously utopia failed to emerge. What did emerge; however, by the 90s was a post-secondary system in high-gear flooding the job market with over-trained and under-evaluated individuals. There were not enough specialist jobs to give out and even if there were, nobody was going to hang the new bridge-building project over to an architect from DeVry who got his degree in a year over chatroom lecture.
It's hard to say exactly how this process will reverse itself or simply evolve the education and job training systems we now take for granted into something more efficient (or less, parish the thought), but I will re-iterate that it is of the utmost importance to like what you do for a living. Chances are it will not pay dividends. Chances are you will not become rich. Chances are you will be quite poverty stricken at some point in your life. These are not simply hand-waiving claims, they are statistical and economical realities. The more one is willing to either hang onto their beloved niche and make it into a steady living, the better off they are.
Never for a moment listen to the fatuous and self-serving employers who tell everyone going into college to become "flexible," and to attain all the wondrous serf-like traits that they so desire in a peasant employee. There is something to be said for a career change and there is certainly a comfortable safety in having a back-up plan or new experience, but simply chasing the almighty dollar from one hack job to the next is a means of gaining life-long depression, not wealth.
Oh, and to hit on the specific point of writing. If indeed that is your passion, I would recommend you subscribe and submit regularly to some form of periodical. Print media may be a dying breed, but it is certainly a more effective way of being discovered for a paying job than is plastering your work across the internet by way of blog (although this has been the success of some). As the late, great Christopher Hitches would say; however, a writer is not one who simply likes or loves to write. A writer is one who simply cannot imagine life without writing. I wish you the best of luck in that career path, for it is fraught with much more uncertainty than most. I won't be the first or last to admit that it was my dream too to become a writer and I ended up with a teaching job to keep a roof over my head.
1. Degree Mills: The bachelor is currently worth fairly close to nothing. Work experience is more highly prized and post-graduate education is assumed or greatly desired anywhere that degree training is relevant.
2. Contracted Economy: The work-force grows and the number of employers has shrunk. Vegas made a very appropriate assumption in suggesting that this was a good time to start a business (although certainly no guarantee of success).
3. Public Knowledge: Almost all the information our species has, collectively, is online somewhere. Given a strong enough desire to learn about something, you can readily self-teach more than ever.
Having said all that, it is untenable that -most- [potential] students should choose this path. It would lead to a reversal of situations where degrees are over-valued, employers too numerous, and information closely guarded. I think we may indeed be trending this way with the most recent generation understanding the failures of post-secondary institutions.
I also think that a well-rounded education does make better persons, but given the option of recommending someone to attend a rather expensive four year institution or telling them to find out about their topics of interest at khanacademy.org (or some such) is a no-brainer. It is more imrpotant than ever to truly grasp what one wants out of their education before making an investment into it.
--------------------------------------------------------------
My advice would be more generalized: to find an interest and then try to shoe-horn it into a career.
RELIGION RELIGION RELIGION RELIGION RELIGION RELIGION
Nope, he's not here.
I see what you did there
I wouldn't be so quick to pin the problem on a lack of sound diversity because, as far as I remember, many of the bands you and I both mentioned made a habit of borrowing each others' ideas, sounds, and style. What I think sets this generation, and I use that phrase ever-so-loosely since it spans a few decades, of music apart from the giants of my time is the fact it's now all so uninspiring.
In the post-war (second world war) era, there was so much gravitas coming from the blues community and the fledgling rock/folk types like Cash. They elevated the issues of racial tension that really tapped our civil right's struggles. They pulled no punches mocking political figures and decrying the inadequacy of some legal failings of the day. They even made light of the red scare when it was in full swing. To date, I do not believe any musician has displayed that kind of courage and it really does come across. The last time I can recall a modern band with a serious social/political thrust to their music it was the ho-hum repetitive ballads of Green Day bemoaning the situation of upper-middle-class children.
During the 60's and 70's, the era with which I feel the most kinship, our music was almost entirely driven by the blooming civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the upset with the Kennedy administration (many people forget that back then, criticism of politicians wasn't so partisan: we called republicans and democrats on their injustices with an even hand), Nixon, and our international parade of government toppling to deny communists the same pleasure. I think the closes modern equivalent was the very early rap music scene where the social injustice of the inner city post white-flight was really brought to the forground in a new sound. I was never a fan of Run DMC or Ice Cube, but I could still listen to some of their music and appreciate the feeling that went into making it was legitimate.
As the 70's rolled on into the 80's and 90's things began to dilute in a hurry. Once Collins, Springsteen, and the like had more or less exhausted their re-vamp of the folk-era in rock format the convservative moral majority had begun to make serious inroads into censorship. Music, admittedly, by this point had become more "vulgar," in the most literal sense, but I think that was more a means of establishing new identities than simply shocking the audience. However; this excuse was used and reckoned to a veritable drum-beat by the convseratives and by the late 90's music on the radio had been bleached and pressure washed to such an extent that new sounds simply couldn't arise with the same volume they had in the past. Metal was, I think, the best response music came up with to this, but American metal music went insane while the Europeans really defined it into a rail against cold-war American enterprise abroad.
Fast forward to the present day where censorship has become more relaxed and I think the issue is now with people and artists finding a common theme. There had been so much time in that era of white-washed 90's rock where we thought nobody would ever bring back a new 1969 that it appeared to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Techno revived the lumpen-awful that was disco. New rap bastardized the revolution that was the original hip-hop. Then, to top it all off, the "alternative," beat became the worst of both worlds: Inherently meaningless, aimed at an affluent audience, and celebrating/protesting nothing in particular.
tl;dr: There are very few bands these days with a voice. They are concerned with their sound or identifying themselves in some esoteric way, but at the end of the day it's easier than ever to simply emulate than it was before. What will bring about the next wave of "good," music is anyone's guess, but I suspect that it will require people in the music industry to tap back into the pleasure and the unrest of society and stop trying to lead it by the nose. The very term "pop," as in "popular," music makes me want to smash recording studio equipment.
I think that I would sooner take up religion than buy pixels in an online game, but that is a nifty idea for teaching these short-hand(icapped) kids.
I had this one explained to me by a student today. He was wearing a YOLO t-shirt. I don't think I could have hit my face harder with my palm.