But at the same time, you told me when we talked last week that this is yet another clichéd sentiment, that music was at one time the center of the culture and that the internet has ruined that. You said that things like The Beatles and Michael Jackson and Nirvana were huge exceptions.
I just think — when you mention those names, I think what you’re referring to is how people talk about how there was this monoculture where everybody was in tune to the same music at the same time. I mean, I’ve been hearing about fragmentation ever since I started hearing about music. I cared more about baseball than music through high school. I’m kind of a weirdo in that way, where I didn’t really start buying records, like, constantly, until my freshman year in college. That’s basically when I started reading music criticism and stuff like that.
     But ever since I started, I’ve heard people talk about how the music world is becoming more fragmented. Again, that’s something — and I’ve seen criticism from long before then, probably to the late ’60s, that would talk that way.
    But, it’s like, if you think about it, in the early ’60s, the same people who bought Kingston Trio albums probably weren’t necessarily buying girl-group albums. You know? I mean, what I really wonder is whether the same people who bought Kingston Trio albums bought early Beach Boys albums because they kinda dressed the same.
    They both covered “Sloop John B.” I get the idea that it was two different audiences. That you had a college audience buying the folk revival bands, and suntan high-school frat-boy audience — these are clichés — buying Beach Boy albums, early on. Pre-Pet Sounds or whatever. I’d have to check but I feel like I read once that the biggest selling album of the ’60s was The Sound of Music soundtrack. Lots of people in the wider culture hated The Beatles. They hated their long hair. And it was like news when Leonard Bernstein embraced [them]. And I’m no Beatles expert.
    A lot of people hated Michael Jackson! I mean, it wasn’t long after the whole ‘disco sucks’ thing, which I lived through in the late ’70s. I remember when those disco records were set on fire by rock bands [fans?] at the Tigers-White Sox game…
— A sprawling interview (is there any other kind?) with Chuck Eddy at No Don’t Die, a site devoted to video games.