Last night, in continuation of my Stones bender, I watched the Maysles Brothers' 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter , about the disastrous Altamont Free Concert in December of 1969. Peering over the top of my laptop screen (I've got 40 hours' worth of easy-money data entry to finish before I move to NYC on Monday) I got interested not in the Stones or the Hells' Angels and their murderous pool cues but in how weirdly everyone in the audience looked like people I know—the way they dress, mostly, with their tight jeans and their Bob Dylan jackets (now we call that "vintage"). It's cultural nostalgia—we're nostalgic for a time when everything seemed like art.

In the 60's, the popular music scene was populated by authentic geniuses. Now, popular music is trite practically by definition. I'm not totally down on my own generation, because I know we're innovators—we gave the world Facebook, right? But our innovations seem isolating and flattening to me. In the 60s it was music, and it was simultaneously angry and desperate and most of all thoughtful, and it just pains me a little to see us (me, my friends) take to our social refuge on the Internet, instead of spending our artistic energy exalting our geniuses and criticizing our heroes (it bothers me that Bono is considered one of the musician-prophets of our generation—he sang at the Presidential inauguration, OK?). I wasn't around in the 60s, of course, but I do know that Abbey Road was the best-selling record of all time when it came out.

The Altamont metaphor is, of course, that the 60's peace movement died and then everyone went and got a job. Here's what I think: People ran out of good bands to listen to.