WARNING

Late at night, scrolling on my phone, shuffle landed on a song from over twenty years ago. I stopped and listened to the whole thing, then rewound and heard it again. That same night, I skipped past three new songs within thirty seconds each.

It is easy to slide from this comparison to a lazy conclusion: music today just isn’t as good. I used to think so too, until I realized the comparison itself is unfair.

When we say “old songs,” we really mean the small handful that time has filtered. Twenty years ago there was plenty of badly made music too — nobody mentions it now, radio doesn’t play it, algorithms don’t push it; it simply died quietly. What survived are the few dug out of the whole ruins. Comparing every new song released today against those survivors is like comparing a fresh graduate’s complete homework against a writer’s collected best-of. Of course the former loses. Statisticians call this survivorship bias, and in the music world it works every single year.

Once that sank in, I listen to old songs more honestly: not “the past was better,” but “the past was filtered harder.”

Still, stopping the argument right there is its own kind of laziness. Bias doesn’t explain everything. Having compared seriously, I find old songs do have two things today’s assembly line rarely produces.

First, the melody runs ahead of the lyrics. Lo Ta-yu wrote “the flowing water carries away the story of time” (“The Story of Time”); you may not remember every line of the words, but after two listens you can hum the tune. Melody is a song’s skeleton — once it stands, the words have somewhere to hang. Modern songs often work backwards: first the hook, the mood, the fifteen-second clip that can be cut for short video, and the melody is assembled around those requirements. Lively on first contact, impossible to remember.

Second, the nerve to leave space. Old arrangements often contain whole instrumental passages, breathing gaps, emotion stacked layer by layer. Modern production is afraid you’ll swipe away, so it fills every second from the start and would move the chorus to second seven if it could. Full is not the same as rich: twelve dishes at one meal are not necessarily more memorable than three.

So my conclusion is a compromise: old songs sound better because half is a bias of the ear, half is time’s ruthless filtering. Admit the first half and we stop mistaking nostalgia for taste; admit the second and we need not write off everything new — it simply hasn’t passed through that filter yet.

This has changed how I listen. One: dig into the deep cuts of old albums, not just the hits — among the survivors are buried second singles. Two: give new songs thirty more seconds of patience, taking a little judging power back from the “first ear.” Time is the best music critic, but it marks its papers very slowly. Until the grades come out, we can at least see our own prejudices clearly.

卜世 撰