Youngsters these days.

I personally believe “Ok Boomer,” is just another divide and conquer tactic. Right vs Left. Red vs. Blue. Boomer vs Millenial/Gen Z. My Team vs Your Team.

Google trends shows that “Ok boomer” virtually didn’t exist before October 2019 after it was popularized on TikTok and right around when a whole bunch of news articles came out.

A quick google search for news articles turns up:

New York Times: “Ok boomer marks the end of friendly generational relationships.”

Washington Post: “Ok boomer, the kids are fighting back.”

NBC: “Ok boomer is dividing generations.”

Is it really NBC? Or is the fact that you are reporting on it and reaching millions of viewers and bringing the term into mainstream and generating division what’s really going on? If you hadn’t reported on it, would it have remained an obscure TikTok reference because who the hell even knows what TikTok is?

The solution? Don’t use the term. The last thing we need is more things dividing us. We are way more similar than we are different (whatever team you’re on).

You have to consider a lot of youngsters are starting from scratch. They don’t have large CD or vinyl collections. From that point of view, you can either spend tens or hundreds of dollars a month building a (relatively small) collection or spend $10 per month to have access to pretty much every song ever made. From that perspective, it seems like a no brainer. And it sounds pretty good.

I’m not quite a youngster, but I’m definitely not an old guy. Haha. I am building a CD collection for a number of reasons:

1) CD’s simply sound better. In my experience and with my gear, CD playback sounds better than streaming in every scenario I have tried. Since my main priority is sound quality, CD is a no brainer.

2) I prefer to own music. There’s just too many things that can go wrong with streaming for me to use it as a viable format for my main rig. The internet’s down? Forgot your password? The app won’t load? The streaming companies servers are down? Whoops, you no longer have any music. Internet connection slow? Now the song is "skipping." Your favorite song got replaced with a poorly remastered version? Now your favorite song sounds like crap. That’s all completely unacceptable to me. I want to put a CD in the CD player and hear music. Period. No nonsense. I stream in my car and at work and on my phone. I’m not opposed to streaming, but it has no serious place in my main rig.

3) With CDs, I can pass my music collection on to my kids. The worst scenario I can think of is if I passed away and my kids asked my wife, "What music did dad listen to?" and instead of saying, "Go check out his music collection," she has to say, "We don’t know his password so all of his music playlists have vaporized." Music is too important to me for that to be a possible reality.

PS: Count me in that group that appreciates "Walkmans." I recently discovered that they can produce very good sound as long as you feed them clean, well regulated power.