Category: Get off my lawn!

A stream of consciousness: The decline of the Broadway musical

August 16, 2026 • 10:00 am

Yes, I can hear you thinking, “Here goes Professor Ceiling Cat again arguing that popular music reached its apogee in his youth and has gone downhill ever since.”

Well, you’re right. I do think that, but I think the same thing for all the arts save photography, literature and film. The decline of the arts, in my view, holds for painting, classical music, and poetry.

Here I’ll maintain that the Broadway musical is an example of this decline. Let me be explicit about what I’m saying: although musicals may have gotten more sophisticated with time (viz., “Hamilton”), the songs in musicals have gotten worse in recent days, having reached their peak between the early 1940s and the early 1960s. So I’m talking about the songs in plays, not the quality of the stories in or intricacies of those songs.

I realized this when I came across the song below, which I see as one of only three great Broadway-musical songs in the last fifty years. It is, of course, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” from the musical “Evita,” written Andrew Lloyd Webber (tune) and Tim Rice (lyrics; the musical is completely sung).  The song had a somewhat bumpy genesis, but, as Wikipedia reports,

Rice and Lloyd Webber’s research showed that Eva had not in reality delivered any major oration on the day of her husband Juan Perón’s inauguration ceremony, but not long after becoming Argentina’s new First Lady, she started making highly emotional speeches, the intensity of which they wanted to capture with “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”. The song was composed to appear at the opening and near the end of the show, initially as the spirit of the dead Eva exhorting the people of Argentina not to mourn her, and finally during Eva’s speech from the balcony of Casa Rosada.

The original was sung by Julie Covington on a “concept album” issued in 1976 (her version here), by Patti LuPone in the 1979 Broadway play (her version here) and by Madonna in the 1996 film version (her rendition here). None of these versions comes close to that of Karen Carpenter, which was suggested for me by YouTube. Covington’s version is too high and too light, and LuPone’s lacks lyrical force (LuPone was a belter, which is why she snagged so many Broadway roles). Madonna’s is the best of the so-so lot, but in my view lacks emotion.

This version by Karen Carpenter, who along with Barbra Streisand is one of the two great female singers of our time, is virtually unknown. I’m a huge Karen Carpenter fan, but I’d never heard this until the YouTube bot spat it out:

The song is beautiful, with several parts, including a speech, and, as far as I know, is something that Evita herself would have though, as it accurately reflects her life and her goals. I highly recommend the biography Evita: The Real Life of Eva Perón, by Nicholas Fraser and Marysa Navarro, It’s easy to become mesmerized by Eva’s short life—she died at 33 of cervical cancer—regardless of whether you think she was beneficial or injurious for Argentina (I hold the former view). But don’t get me started on Eva; all I can say is that I know of no other political figure save Margaret Thatcher who was so polarizing, but the attachment or dislike of Eva continues strongly, while most people have forgotten Thatcher. To see why, read Evita’s biography. 

Here’s Evita’s final speech in 1951 from the Casa Rosada; she was already dying when she gave it:

There are two other songs from musicals in recent times that I think are great: “Send in the clowns” (by Stephen Sondheim from the 1973 play “A little night music”), and “All I ask of you” (by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, from the 1986 play “The Phantom of the Opera”). See below for Babs’s versions:

And that’s it for recent times. I can’t think of another Broadway song that combines words and (especially) music in ways like the three songs above. And believe me, I’ve listened to “popular” Broadway songs of recent days, and have been disappointed. Have a listen, for example, to the much-touted song “My Shot” from “Hamilton” (here). It is heavily influenced by rap: good words and a good story but set to a totally lame tune. Overall, it’s dreck: it doesn’t work as a song. Have you heard anybody humming or singing it lately?

But I’ll stop here about recent musicals; if you know of fantastic songs from Broadway musicals appearing after 1980, by all means describe and defend them below.

Now I get to tout my favorites: the earlier musicals that have memorable songs. I give them in no particular order save when they came to mind. I’ll link to the musicals and list some of my favorite songs from them, linking to the best. I claim that no modern musical comes close to these in musical quality:

Brigadoon, by Lerner and Loewe (1947). This great musical is all but forgotten. The original cast album is far superior to the 1954 film that starred Gene Kelly. Great songs (i’ve highlighted YouTube versions from the original cast):

I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean
Come to Me, Bend to Me
There But For You Go I
From this Day On  (After time travel, the lovers part, apparently to be separated forever. Such a beautiful song.)

 Oklahoma! by Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943) Great songs:

Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’
I Cain’t Say No
Many a New Day
People Will Say We’re in Love
Pore Jud Is Daid

My Fair Lady by Lerner and Loewe (1956).  Many great songs:

Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?
With a Little Bit of Luck
I’m an Ordinary Man
The Rain in Spain
I Could Have Danced All Night
On the Street Where You Live
Just You Wait
Get Me to the Church on Time
I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face

Camelot by Lerner and Loewe (1960). Again, many great songs:

I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight
Camelot
C’est Moi
The Lusty Month of May
If Ever I Would Leave You
What Do the Simple Folk Do?
I Loved You Once In Silence

South Pacific by Rodgers and Hammerstein (1949)

Some Enchanted Evening
I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair
I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy
Younger than Springtime
You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught (a bold denunciation for its time about the teaching of racism)

West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim (1957)

Maria
Tonight
Gee, Officer Krupke
I Feel Pretty
Somewhere (I’ve put up Barbra Streisand’s live version as there’s nothing comparable to it. The preliminary music starts about 16 seconds in). 

Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein (1927)

Ol’ Man River
Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man

And I may have forgotten one or two, as I’m working from memory here.

Now some of these musicals came out when I was too young for them to have been part of my life, except that my parents had most of them on albums and I listened to them. Since none of my contemporaries listened to them, I will argue that I like them because of their quality, not because they were in the air when was I was growing up. I will further argue that I love jazz (up to and including Coltrane) despite not having heard a lick of it until I was in my forties. I love jazz because much of the stuff up to Coltrane was great, not because it was part of my youth.

I’ll end with two great songs that came out more recently than those above, as well as an earlier song recycled into a movie. Both are renditions by Barbra Streisand, for who else could do them justice?

First, “Send in the clowns” from “A Little Night Music” by Stephen Sondheim (1973):

Second “All I ask of you” (by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, from the 1986 play “The Phantom of the Opera”. This song gives me the shivers.

The song below, “My Man,” didn’t originate in a Broadway musical, but as a 1920 French song, “Mon Homme”,  by Maurice Yvain, Jacques-Charles and Albert Willemetz. Comedian, actor, and singer Fanny Brice (1891-1951) popularized the English version; which became one of her hallmark numbers. Brice’s version came out in 1921, and later appeared in the eponymous 1928 talkie (that version is here).

But the hallmark version, and a comsummate piece of both acting and singing is (again) Barbra Streisand’s version in the 1958 film “Funny Girl” (“My Man” did not appear in the earlier stage verssions). In the movie, Streisand sings it when she has to go onstage immediately after having broken up with the gambler Nicky Arnstein in her dressing room. That accounts for the slow and tearful beginning you’ll see below.  Eventually it segues into a fantastic ending, which is why I’m posting it here.

So be it; those are my views and have at me, maties.  I just realized that everybody mentioned in this video, including all the songwriters, Fanny Brice, and Barbra Streisand, were Jewish. The sole exception is Karen Carpenter and a few people like Andrew Lloyd Webber. So there: you just wouldn’t have classic Broadway without the Jews. It must have been a conspiracy to indoctrinate people and infect them with earworms. Joking aside, it’s amazing that, given their low percentage in the American population, the predominance of great musicals were written by Jews. I have no idea why.

To improve student mental health, University of Michigan decides to deep-six grades during the first semester

August 12, 2026 • 9:20 am

Now that colleges have morphed from institutions of higher learning to buy-a-diploma mills, colleges are increasingly catering to students’ desires. At many schools now, more than half the students get special accommodations during exams, like having rooms to themselves or extra time. (This is okay for some students, but more than half?).

At any rate, the University of Michigan has joined the ranks of schools that don’t show students their grades awarded during their first semester. (As you’ll see, they do get grades, but they’re secret and used in limited ways).

Click below to read the WSJ article on the deep-sixing of grades, or go here to read an archived version:

 

An excerpt (indented; my own comments are flush left):

The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.

Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.

The program, set to start in fall 2027, applies to students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which enrolls about half of Michigan’s roughly 8,000 first-year students.

A Michigan spokesman declined to comment about how the university reached the decision to enact the pilot. Although grades won’t be recorded on student transcripts or affect grade-point averages, professors will still assign them internally to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.

I’m wondering whether student anxiety will really abate because of this. What happens during the second semester, if you know you passed but don’t know where you stand? If you barely passed during your first semester and get a “pass”, you might want to work harder, but you won’t know where you stood initially in competition with your classmates. Also, the grades do count for scholarship and awards, so they aren’t irrelevant. Will your inability to know your “internal” grades possibly increase anxiety?

And why does the risk of mental problems decrease after the first semester? After all, you’re going to get real, “external” grades from then on.

This tactic is not unique:

Schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have implemented similar “grade-covering” programs in past years.

The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes. University of California math and science professors have urged UC regents to reinstate entrance exams because so many freshmen were unprepared.

Of course poor preparedness is the fault of secondary schools like high schools, but entrance exams can help.  The SATs or equivalent tests are even better, and, in combination with high-school grades, are the best predictor of how well a student does in college—and later life.

But in a perverse move designed to coddle students (they have numerous excuses), many schools no longer require such tests for admission (the University of Chicago makes them optional), or prohibits you from submitting scores at all.  This kind of coddling is also instantiated in grade inflation. Harvard has taken ineffectual steps to remedy this, but at least they require SATs or ACTs for admission. Michigan doesn’t.

In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.

At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.

Kenneth Lowande, a former Michigan political science professor who left for Rice University, said he didn’t think the new policy would make much of a difference because grade inflation had made grades largely irrelevant. Michigan no longer mandates the SAT or ACT for undergraduate admissions.

“Grades have lost their value as an indication of quality or excellence,” Lowande said.

That’s true if you gauge quality relative to others. If everyone is excellent, of course, grades do indicate quality, but that’s not the case. What we have is an Alice In Wonderland “All Must Have Prizes” mentality based on coddling. And the students love it:

Michigan students lauded the new policy. Student body president Summit Louth said he had spoken to around 50 classmates and they were either happy or jealous the policy didn’t exist when they were freshmen. Poor mental health is closely tied to academic stress and anxiety among students, Louth said.

Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.

How does Louth know that?

Derek Peterson, a history professor and former chair of the faculty government, said he believes the move is generally beneficial because it will give students a chance to explore subjects more freely.

If that’s the idea, why give grades at all? Why not give written evaluations that can be put in students’ transcripts? That might be difficult for large courses, but several schools, according to Grok, have completely dispensed with letter grades:

Schools That Dispense with (or Heavily Minimize) Traditional Grades

. . . . several colleges (mostly small liberal arts institutions) fully or largely replace letter grades with narrative evaluations (detailed written assessments of a student’s performance, strengths, weaknesses, and growth). Examples include:

  • Hampshire College — Narrative evaluations only; no letter grades or traditional majors.
  • The Evergreen State College — Narrative evaluations; no letter grades or GPAs.
  • Alverno College — Ability-based assessment with detailed feedback; no traditional letter grades.
  • New College of Florida — Narrative evaluations / performance reviews.
  • Antioch College / Antioch University — Narrative evaluations (sometimes alongside or instead of grades).
  • Sarah Lawrence College — Strong emphasis on narrative evaluations (letter grades are recorded but secondary).
  • St. John’s College — Seminar-based “Don Rag” discussions; letter grades are recorded but available only by request.

Narrative evaluations would seem to be better anyway for small courses, but in light of the difficulty of grad schools or employers reading a bunch of narratives, I still favor traditional grades, but with caps like Harvard’s. If that policy is made public, students can’t beef about it when they arrive.

There comes a time in life when the free rides stop.  Employers don’t dispense with evaluation of employees early in their tenure on the grounds of mental health.  And college, where you can seek counseling if you’re upset or distressed, is the place for it to start—if you haven’t already gotten grades in high school!  This may sound curmudgeonly, but part of the art of living is to realize that you are not the best at everything, and to either accept that or try to better yourself. After all, grades are not the totality of existence.

Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Songs of All Time”

June 10, 2026 • 11:30 am

I came upon this list while lost in the depths of Wikipedia; it’s an entry for “Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” a list that has been revised several times. And of course I had to read the article (which gives only the top ten assessed at various times) and comment.

Here’s how it was made:

“The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” is a recurring song ranking compiled by the American magazine Rolling Stone. It is based on weighted votes from selected musicians, critics, and industry figures. The first list was published in December 2004 in a special issue of the magazine, issue number 963, a year after the magazine published its list of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time“. In 2010, Rolling Stone published a revised edition, drawing on the original and a later survey of songs released up until the early 2000s.[2]

Another updated edition of the list was published in 2021, with more than half the entries not having appeared on either of the two previous editions; it was based on a new survey and did not factor in the surveys conducted for the previous lists. The 2021 list was based on a poll of more than 250 artists, musicians, producers, critics, journalists, and industry figures. They each sent in a ranked list of their top 50 songs, and Rolling Stone tabulated the results.[3] In 2024, a revised version of the list was published, with the addition of songs from the 2020s.

For some reason they’ve combined the 2004 with the 2010 revision, and also the 2021 and 2024 revisions. Here are the top ten songs from the two lists:

Well of course I have my opinion, which is subjective, but I’ll give it anyway.

On the first list, if you’re going to mention a Dylan song as #1, “Like a Rolling Stone” is a good choice. However, in my view the best rock song in history was “Layla”, minus the slow piano part. Right behind it is the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” Neither of these songs are on either list. I’m not a big Rolling Stones fan, but many are, so I won’t comment on “Satisfaction”.  “Imagine” is a very good song, but there are many Beatles songs I like better. I’ve mentioned one but there’s “Yesterday,” “Blackbird,” the medley on the second side of “Abbey Road,” and so on. Of all of Marvin Gaye’s songs, I’d put “What’s Going On” on the list, as it is, but if you’re talking about soul songs, there are many better, especially “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke, which I see as the greatest soul song of all time.  But if you aren’t wedded to political songs, I think “Ooo Baby Baby” is better than “What’s Going On,” though it’s simpler. And then you get into the great soul songs like “Try a Little Tenderness” (which I prefer over “Dock of the Bay”), “Ask the Lonely”, “I Was Made to Love Her” (or, in the Wonder genre, “Isn’t She Lovely”), “Since I Lost My Baby,” and so on.

Aretha’s “Respect” is a great song, but is it the fifth best (popular) song ever recorded? You tell me. In fact, I prefer her version of the Carole King song “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” (mind you, I haven’t looked at the rest of the list; I’m judging only the top ten).

The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” is an excellent song, but the placement here is a clunker: clearly their best song is “God Only Knows”, and its omission is a scandal. It’s their best song and clearly better than “Good Vibrations.”  Paul McCartney judged “God Only Knows” as one of the best songs of all time, and he didn’t mention “Good Vibrations”.  Chuck Berry was a real innovator, and belongs on the list, but I like “Maybelline” better than “Johnny B. Good”. Again, remember that this is a matter of taste.

As for the Beatles, yes, “Hey Jude” is a great song, but I can think of many Beatles songs that should rank higher, and have named three above.  Let me add “In My Life” to make it an even four.

I have listened to Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” many times, trying to find out what so many people see in it.  I see little of value, but many people like Nirvana’s style. At any rate, my list would not include that song at all.  And for crying out loud, how could they pass up Ray Charles’s “Georgia On My Mind,” a sad and heartbreaking ballad, in favor of “What’d I Say”? Oy gewalt!

I have little to say about the second list save the necessary inclusion of “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke (listen to it here.) I see it as not only the best soul song, but the best civil rights song with the possible exception of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Public Enemy’s song, along with those of Outkast and Missy Elliott, are not worthy of mention in the top 200, much less the top ten.  And I’d replace the Fleetwood Mac song with “Rhiannon” or (my favorite) “Landslide”.  All in all, both lists seem to me deficient, though they have flashes of good taste.

A few more things from the article:

It is, as Karen Blixen might have said “fit and decorous” that the Beatles have nearly twice as many songs as any other group or artist. And although “Are You Experienced” is a world-class album, the Beatles’ “Revolver” (to my mind their best album, has at least five songs that should be on the list.  To each their own.

Finally, here are the songs on the 2004 list given by decade, proving that my teenage and college years encompassed the best rock and pop music (the numbers vary by list,  but on all the lists the Sixties and Seventies lead the pack for having the best songs. I conclude that, yes, my adolescence and young manhood happened to occur when the best music was being made, so it’s not just that we all think the best music is the music made during our youth.

Rick Beato: Taylor Swift vs. The Beatles

April 1, 2026 • 11:45 am

You can call me a curmudgeon for saying that rock and pop music today are dreadful compared to that of their years of apogee (yes, my teenage years!), but you’d have to call Rick Beato a curmudgeon as well. And he knows a ton about music, being a musician himself, a producer, a music analyst, and a teacher. So he surely has more musical cred than I. Nevertheless, we generally share opinions about music, in particular the view modern rock and pop is tedious, repetitive, and boring. And I’ll argue strenuously that it’s not just because I like the music of my youth, and other generations like the music of their youth. Nope, metrics like musical complexity, the frequency of autotuning, and so on support the decline of rock and pop.

In the ten-minute video below, Beato compares the Beatles with Taylor Swift, and you can guess who comes off worse. (The “kids” may disagree, but they also are largely ignorant of the Beatles.) I have to say that I’ve listened to a fair amount of Taylor Swift, trying arduously to find out what it is about her music that’s made her the world’s biggest pop sensation. It can’t be her tunes, which are unmemorable, so perhaps it’s her lyrics about the bad guys she’s been involved with—something that surely resonates with her (mostly) female fans.

In this video Beato reacts to a 2024 NYT article (archived here) that discussed whether Taylor Swift is bigger now than the Beatles were in the past. That article concludes that both were huge and, if you use the right metrics, Swift can be seen as even bigger than the Beatles:

The length of Swift’s career has allowed her into the Beatles’ vaunted ballpark by giving her the chance to evolve her sound, grow her loyal audience and take full advantage of technological advances.

Yet as wild as it is for the Beatles to have accomplished so much in so little time, Swift’s longevity might be considered equally impressive in pop music, which often overvalues the new and — especially among female artists — the young.

Swift is of course still active, so we can’t measure something that I consider important: will their music be listened to twenty years hence? And how will it be regarded several decades after Swift or the Beatles stopped making music? We’ll have to wait, of course, for the answers to those questions, and I’ll be underground.

However, in this video, Beato details his experiences with Swift, having attended a number of her concerts and having a deep acquaintance with her music, as he has with the Beatles. But Beato is concentrating on quality, not sales or chart position.  He notes that many of Taylor Swift’s melodies were written by a large number of people who change over time, compared to only three for the Beatles (Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison). And it shows in the lame melodies (Beato likes Swift’s lyrics better than “her” tunes.) Further, Swift’s instrumentation itself was largely produced and performed \ by people other than Swift—something that, says Beato, is simply “how pop music is made” these days.

Although one would think that the Beatles don’t need to be extolled by Beato, since he’s done it so many times before, but he does mention great melodies of Beatles songs like “Lady Madonna,” or “I am the Walrus.”  (I could mention a gazillion more.) In contrast to Swift, he argues, the Beatles did not repeat ideas, and “they came up with all those ideas themselves.” He winds up calling Swift a “content creator”, who picks the brains of other people when she wants to change her music.

Beato asks for comments on his opinion, and I welcome yours below. But I doubt I’ll change my opinion that rock and pop music peaked several decades ago, and has gone downhill ever since. Swift’s immense popularity only proves that.

I have never heard a Taylor Swift song that comes close to the quality of this Beatles classic, and it isn’t all that complex compared to their later work. George Martin’s interpolation at 1:42, however, is a piece of genius:

The song was recorded on 18 October 1965, and it was complete except for the instrumental bridge. At that time, Lennon had not decided what instrument to use, but he subsequently asked George Martin to play a piano solo, suggesting “something Baroque-sounding”. Martin wrote a Bach-influenced piece that he found he could not play at the song’s tempo. On 22 October, the solo was recorded with the tape running at half speed, so when played back at normal pace the piano was twice as fast and an octave higher, solving the performance challenge and also giving the solo a unique timbre, reminiscent of a harpsichord.

Words and phrases I detest

February 19, 2026 • 10:50 am

I haven’t been very assiduous in collecting annoying phrases lately, so I have only two. Readers are invited to add their selections:

“Medaled”.  This is everywhere in the Olympic reporting, and of course it means “get a medal”. But which medal? If you’re reporting on how many medals a country has gotten in total, you can say “America now has 24 medals”.  You don’t say “America has medaled 24 times.” The past-tense verb is used instead to apply to individuals or teams within a sport (figure skaters or gymnasts, for example). For example, you can say that “Mikaela Shiffrin has medaled three times”, but that leaves out the fact that these are gold medals. Curiously, you don’t say that someone “gold medaled,” though that is more informative.

If you’re going to say “medaled”, then you should say that Watson and Crick “Nobeled” in 1962 and Percival Everett “Pulitzered” for fiction last year.  The verb “medaled” is not only annoying, but uniformative.

“Do better”.  This is a favorite of social-justice warriors when impugning or correcting someone who made an ideological misstep.

An AI definition:

To “do better” in social justice, focus on sustained action over performative gestures: educate yourself with credible, diverse sources, actively support minority-owned businesses, and donate time or money to grassroots organizations. Amplify marginalized voices, advocate for systemic policy changes (like voting rights), and practice empathy and deep listening in difficult conversations.

So the phrase in itself can refer to doing real good, but all too often it’s performative.  As an example, one could say, in light of the preceding article: PEN America, “Do better and focus on Israel’s genocide.”  I find the phrase patronizing and usually uttered by the entitled. It’s also rude.

Here’s one example from HuffPo, of course (the rag still exists!): “Men: We have to do better.” Sorry, but I’m doing the best I can, and resent the implication that all men are harassers or abusers of women (read the thing).

Your turn.

Rick Beato further mourns the decline of rock and pop music

February 12, 2026 • 11:45 am

Yep, here I go again pointing out the decline in the quality of rock and pop music. But this time I’m joined by the music maven Rick Beato, who has always had the same opinion.  In this video he compares music from 1984 vs. 2026, juxtaposing the Grammy nominees for Song of the Year from both years. Save for one song, he finds the 2026 nominees lame, so there’s no contest. Music, he argues implictly, has gone downhill in the past four decades.

I’ll list the nominees and make some comments below. The winner for both years is is at the top. My own comments are flush left.

1984

Song of the Year

Had I voted, there would be no hesitation in my dubbing “Billie Jean” as Song of the Year, but all of these songs, as Beato agrees, are good and memorable. They will last, and will still be popular years from now (they’re still listened to 42 years later!).

*******************

2026 (winner was announced on Feb. 1)

Song of the Year

Beato finds “Wildflower” the best for this year; it is, he says, a “great song”. (This is Eilish’s tenth Grammy.)  While I don’t think it’s great, it is very good, and miles above all the other nominees. And it won. I’ll put it below. He simply dismisses the other seven songs, though a few have some merit, like being “well produced.”

The reasons Beato finds this year’s songs worse are that they are in general lame, derivative, often include many songwriters (too many writers spoil the song), and sometimes include sampling from older songs.

In contrast, only one of the 1984 songs has more than one writer, and all include the singer as a composer.  (Note that one is by Bad Bunny, and Beato can’t understand the words!)  Beato’s takeaway is that nobody will remember songs written by so many people, and nobody will remember these latest songs more than three years from now.

Beato:

Here is “Wildflower,” live with Billie Eilish (the official release is here, and the lyrics are here). The only accompaniments are a guitar, bass, two sets of drums, and three backup singers.

Why don’t people talk on the phone anymore?

September 9, 2025 • 11:30 am
Source

I’m sure everybody over 50 has noticed the trend of younger people—and by “younger”, I mean even up to age 40—avoiding making phone calls. Instead, people email or text, and the younger they are, the more they use text. I’m sure there are kids who never talk to anybody on the phone, except perhaps their parents when they have to.

I’ve long noticed this trend, but I can’t explain it.  There are certain conveniences to emailing and texting, like getting your thoughts off into the ether immediately instead of waiting for someone to answer the phone. But texting or emailing doesn’t guarantee an immediate response, especially with emails, which at least require some thought on one’s part instead of a kneejerk response. The less thought you need in a medium, the more the younger people use it.

And that leads to one of my (probably incorrect) explanations for this trend.  The reason I prefer the phone over text is that phones allow for continuous conversations, which are more unpredictable, which can be way more fun, and allow more social connection (and bonding) with others. Talking on the phone also conveys nuance through the tone of your voice—nuance that’s not only absent in written communication, but can be misinterpreted in texts and emails and cause trouble. (This is why the younger generation uses emoticons: to avoid miscommunication that wouldn’t occur in phone calls.)

But using the phone requires you to implement a number of social skills—those involved in direct interpersonal interaction—that you don’t need in short written communications. And that’s apparently too much trouble for a lot of people.

This is my theory, which is mine, but I’m sure it’s been suggested before, and I’m ignorant of the literature on exactly why younger people love to text and intermediate-age people to email.  It’s clear, though, that teachers and others see a detrimental effect of incessant texting on social interaction among younger folks. That’s why Jon Haidt, supported by every teacher on the planet, wants to keep cellphones out of school.  That way you can still talk to your classmates, but you can’t text anybody you want and avoid social interaction.

The title above is actually my question to readers: why, do you think, people of many ages are inexorably moving towards short electronic written communication and avoiding either vocal communication or face-to-face communication?

Here’s a short video of Sherry Turkle, whom I’ve met a few times, telling us why conversation is better than texting. She’s mainly talking about face-to-face conversation rather than phone conversations, but some of the advantages apply to telephone conversation vs. texting.

This is part of what Sherry works on as an academic at MIT, and so her views deserve a hearing.