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The story
A post about watching a middle-school girl’s voice-and-guitar livestream and being shocked she’d never heard of BUMP OF CHICKEN kicked off a discussion about generational gaps in music taste on 5ch’s Live News board (Nanademo Jikkyou G). Posters piled on with more examples: 2000s kids who never heard of BOØWY or Rebecca, middle schoolers who call Kenshi Yonezu and King Gnu their “childhood songs.” Some pointed out that the way older posters see Shogo Hamada and Koji Tamaki as “artists from way back” is exactly how today’s high schoolers now see BUMP, RADWIMPS, and Orange Range. Meanwhile, plenty pushed back against the generalization that “middle-aged guys can’t get into music by younger artists,” so opinions ended up split.
Honestly, that’s shocking.
Source: youtube.com / original clip here
What people said
Kids these days don't go that deep though.
I listen to BOØWY though.
I do listen to BOØWY.
Re: #9
When I played it for her just now, she said she didn't know it. Apparently she barely knew "Tentai Kansoku" (Stargazing) though.
My Hair is Bad and Back Number were already popular back when I was in middle school, 10 years ago.
The bands topping the streaming charts these days are Mrs. GREEN APPLE, Back Number, King Gnu, and Sakanaction. As for that earnest "Rockin'on-style" guitar band scene BUMP belongs to, Macaroni Enpitsu does seem genuinely popular — beyond that, no clue.
Wait, is King Gnu a "childhood song" for them too? To me that feels like it just came out.
Hey now, I'm only 32.
Ever heard of The Dark Ducks (a Japanese vocal quartet popular in the 1950s–60s)?
You're an old man, dude.
Spitz and Noriyuki Makihara, though, are songs that do live on. What's the difference?
The latter hasn't really lasted either. Now if you said Southern All Stars or Yumi Matsutoya, sure.
Nobody really listens to Makihara anymore, right? He didn't catch a wave like Tatsuro Yamashita did with the city pop boom, and he's not a long-running icon like Yumi Matsutoya or Miyuki Nakajima either.
Spitz has a big point in its favor — their recent Conan theme song "Utsukushii Hire" (Beautiful Fin) was a hit. "Cherry" still gets sung all the time, and I think "Sora mo Toberu Hazu" (I Should Be Able to Fly Too) is still in school textbooks.
Back in 2005, when I was in middle school, Orange Range and stuff were huge. But something 20 years old at the time, like Bass–Kakefu–Okada (the legendary Hanshin Tigers batting lineup), felt like ancient history, and even Evangelion at 10 years old already had that "old-school otaku" image.
Thinking about it that way, something 20 years old now, like "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya," must be a classic to kids today, and even something from just 10 years ago (was there anything big then?) probably feels like the distant past to them.
Sounds like you and I are both from the same birth year, Heisei 5 (1993). Try flipping it around: we think of Shogo Hamada and Koji Tamaki as artists who've been around forever and feel old, right? Well, to today's high schoolers, BUMP OF CHICKEN, RADWIMPS, and Orange Range are all in that same category now. The times just keep sliding along — it's only natural if they don't even know them. We don't really know much about 80s music either, right? Same thing.
Ten years ago it was "Your Name." To kids today, that's already a classic.
Oh, "Your Name"… yeah, I guess it has been about that long. Feels like everything shifted again between pre- and post-COVID too, though.
Stop, that genuinely hurts. I was only 21 or 22 when that came out.
But isn't our generation actually pretty knowledgeable about older-era music too? Mr. Children, Southern All Stars, B'z — we know all of those no problem.
Granted, Shogo Hamada and Tamaki, I only know their names.
That's because we're the TV generation. TV would just play songs from 10 years earlier as a matter of course.
If your family drove a lot, you'd end up hearing all the old nostalgic tunes your parents played in the car too.
If some middle-aged dude said "whoa, this is seriously so emotional" about Mrs. GREEN APPLE's "Lilac," you'd all clown on him anyway, wouldn't you lol
Why's everyone suddenly playing devil's advocate? Gross.
I'm 35, and while I don't listen to Mrs. GREEN APPLE, I listen to plenty of other young bands just fine. Though the fact you had to narrow it down to just Mrs. GREEN APPLE kind of shows you're not that confident in your own theory.
Why do people like this always assume "it's true for me, so it must be true for everyone"?
Honestly the only young female artist I listen to is Aimyon anyway — and when I looked it up, she's 31, so there's only a 3-year gap between us.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
So-called “Rockin’on-style” bands like BUMP OF CHICKEN, Mr. Children, and ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION won over young listeners from the 2000s through the early 2010s, but the artists middle schoolers actually listen to now — My Hair is Bad, Creephyp, Back Number, Macaroni Enpitsu — belong to the streaming generation, and this generational split kept coming up throughout the thread. What divided opinion was just how fast a sense of “dated-ness” sets in: many were startled by the observation that even “Your Name.,” only ten years old, already counts as a classic to today’s young people. Posters also contrasted artists like Spitz and Southern All Stars, whose songs are still sung today, with ones like Noriyuki Makihara, who had hits at the time but haven’t held up as well for later generations. Worth noting: the claim that “middle-aged men can’t get into music by younger artists” was just one poster’s personal theory, not something the whole thread agreed on — an easy point to misread.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Live News G) thread “I’m watching a middle school girl’s voice-and-guitar livestream right now and I’m shocked she doesn’t even know BUMP OF CHICKEN.”
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