Modern music is fine.

I think one of the least self-aware thoughts someone can express - and that I hear often - is that “music now isn’t as good as it was in <decade of my youth>”, then they’ll go on to name the top five acts of that decade. Go back in time and listen to the track that was at number 53 in the charts on some boring week in mid-August in that decade and it’ll almost certainly be absolutely tepid mediocrepeice made by a forgotten artist and no better than the song that was playing on the radio that caused the comment in the first place. By the time that Josephine was coaxed onto that Flying Machine pop music had long been established as a commercial product to be produced at industrial scales. No-one alive today grew up in a generation that had exclusive access to “real music”, and if anyone tries to use that phrase to describe Motown in particular you have my permission to stab them in their eyes with a spoon.