It’s just a noise.

People who say that music was best in a certain decade, you know that they are wrong, don’t you?

Unutterably, brain-meltingly, quantifiably wrong. It’s okay to be wrong sometimes though. I should know, I do it all of the time. Come on in, the confusion is just the right temperature.

They simply are wrong though. They are looking at the past through a vaseline smear of nostalgia, and conveniently forgetting the cack that was also around at the time.

You will almost certainly know more about one particular decade of music. It usually coincides with your teenage years, partly as you have the time to pay attention more to music, but also because the mass of feelings and urges going through your body are something that you struggle to understand. There is no hope that you could articulate to someone else how you feel. You feel disconnected and alone.

Then you hear that song, you know, the one that delved into your feelings in a way nothing had before. You connected with it and listened repeatedly to it’s every nuance, every refrain, every note, every word.

So you have a connection with the music of that period, but that doesn’t mean all other music is not as good.

Here is a little experiment, think of your favourite song that was in the charts. Now go and internet search what else was in the charts at the same time.

Go on, I will wait.

I would wager that there is almost certainly a track around it that you could not stand at the time, or some piece of novelty fluff. Worse still, maybe there is a singing soap opera star or a fucking puppet.

Which decade was I talking about?

Only you know the answer to that, as it could have been any of them since the ’60s onwards.

As you get older, you get less time to focus on new music, that does not mean that there is not great stuff being made out there, it just means you probably haven’t heard it.

You know when you were young and you loved that the older people didn’t get what you were listening to?

Ha, you are the old person now! The only way to stop that happening is to open your mind and listen outside of your comfort zone.

Listen to new music, read new books, watch new films, play new video games and tell people about it. Talk to the people that you care about.

Actually, that is the take away from this, if there is one. Talk to people, and more importantly, listen to people.

If this potential virus situation can teach us anything, it is to remember that we are just animals, and a part of the ecosystem as much as the virus is.

One day we won’t be here. None of us. That is how these things work, and this is as good a time as any to take a moment to remember that and be thankful for what we have had and what we can have again. If we are lucky.

There will be a time in the distant future when the sun comes up on the wet, dew-covered meadows, the wind gently nudging at the leaves of the trees, like an overly familiar cat.

And on that day, maybe a new alien form of intelligence will happen upon your favourite song and think. Hey, this really gets to me.

Maybe those humans weren’t all bad.

And you know what reader? We aren’t all bad, any more than Richard Branson is all cheese.