I agree about Eminem, though even he's been around a while now. Is it possible to have the same impact now or is everything so fragmented, what word was used here, nicheification (sp?) that you can't have the same communal experiences, in the same was as people no longer all sit down to watch the latest episode of the popular TV programme at the same time and discuss it in the office/playground the next morning. Economics seems to be driving experiencing music to being a more transient, in-the-moment thing of live performance or the latest big thing on Spotify or whatever rather than the culture of previous generations of owning, collecting, analysing and cataloguing and even maybe ultimately fossilising past music. The big tribes in music if we have any now are the hordes who make the pilgrimage to Ibiza every summer or to the zillions of festivals. Though maybe if I listened to radio 1 more I would know something about real pop stars these days. I suppose a lot of what makes an immediate impact is part of some wider cultural phenomenon than simple musical quality, so stuff like the X-Factor or Lady Gaga probably counts as those, who use music as a vehicle for their work but that is not their main raison d'être.

There's the nostalgia extremes of, on the one hand, "Everything was so much better in my day, all this modern stuff is a worthless racket" and the other extreme of the only thing that matters is what's new and the past is irrelevant and somewhere in between, seems a sensible balance of accepting that we are all products of the culture we grew up with, including those parts we didn't experience for ourselves before we were born, and appreciating what that has given us, but we can't languish in past glories at the expense of getting on with our own lives today.