Maybe now you are old, but are trying to convince yourself that your best years are still ahead of you. Your Claire Danes poster is still there but it’s Carrie instead of Angela. Your ultra-high-definition media sits on a 6TB NAS that you can access anywhere in the world instantly and you didn’t have to mow any lawns to afford it. The MP3 / WMA-capable in-dash CD player you have in the car doesn’t emote much but if it could you’re pretty sure it would be frowning spitefully at the AUX input below, and let’s not go into details but your music discovery process is long and nuanced and has more to do with Shazam than cassettes.

One quintessential hallmark of getting old is feeling like the kids have it too dang easy these days: free music is pushed upon us at every juncture from Starbucks to Spotify and white earbuds have displaced most of the magic of being able to listen to music on the go or the heartache of a favorite disc slowly succumbing to the abrasive forces of constant use. And things generally sound better: Neil Young and his ilk would have us believe the very soul of music has been lost in the popular transcoding rituals of 2013, but I don’t think Neil has stopped to think that even the lowliest Coby headset from a modern drugstore checkout lane might feel like something from the Audiophile magazine amidst the the standard black foam-clad reproduction technology of the early ‘90s.

And then there’s the aura of mystery surrounding our rock idols, mere humans propelled to godlike status through the raw power of rock and roll that we could only hear from through the dead-tree ancestors of Pitchfork and The Daily Swarm. That elevation was dealt a devastating blow in the early 2000s by The Osbournes and left for dead in the sea of Twitter diarrhea tapped out by Lil B in the early ‘010s (which was put on Time magazine’s bizarre list of the best Twitter feeds of 2013 last week). One only needs to wade through a Friday night on Rihanna’s Instagram to see that, no matter how rich and famous these people are, they are still just...people. The only pop entity that hasn’t resorted to the self-obsessed promotions of our age is a pair of French DJ’s that became robots during a freak studio accident in 2001.