Well, just bear in mind that for all the people who yearn for music from the early 2000s, there are just as many who yearn for stuff from the early-mid 90s. There's always some "golden era" to a given art form, and it varies wildly from one person to the next.

As much as fans of the underground love to slag minimal, some of the music in that scene (or at least not too far from it) has gotten me interested in dance music again like nothing else in the last 10 years. Plink-plonky shit can go away please, but then you have the artists in between like Extrawelt, Minilogue, Apparat, Johannes Heil, Modeselektor, and many more. Not minimal, not techno, not sure what they are.

Media as a whole has been devalued, and that is the real problem.

Look at modern summer blockbuster films. Sure, we always had some bad ones, but now people don't seem to give two ****s or a shite about the quality of "big" movies. Marketing ensures that they open big, make their costs back, and thus the equation has been solved.

People download tons of music now, and there is little of "the hunt" left. I remember searching for vinyl for weeks just to track down that B-Side remix. Now I can go to Soulseek and type in the name, boom there it is. True, the quality generally is poor compared to the real vinyl, but quality is another moot point these days. People will watch horribly pixellated video and that's become the status quo, so who's going to care that their MP3 is lacking highs?

Mediocrity is rewarded now, or at least it's given far too much of a chance when compared to excellence.

It's all part of a move towards homogenization, where we all consume our entertainment units and sit around our giant televisions.

Truthfully, the time has never been better for rebellion through music. There's so much to comment on.