2011-05-22
Explanation
This single-panel comic is titled "Every conversation about music by everyone over the age of twenty-five." A man earnestly tells a woman: "I hate what teens listen to. Pop music peaked at the exact moment when I was most emotionally vulnerable to trite love songs."
The joke cuts through the common complaint that modern music is inferior to the music of one's youth by exposing the real reason behind the sentiment. People tend to form deep emotional connections with the music they heard during adolescence and young adulthood, when they were experiencing intense emotions for the first time. Rather than any objective decline in musical quality, the nostalgia and emotional imprinting of youth creates a bias that makes everything that came after feel inferior. The comic is notable for having the character actually articulate this self-aware explanation, making the humor meta -- he understands exactly why he feels the way he does and yet presumably still holds the opinion.