Current popular entertainment shows that as a culture, we are suffering from mass psychosis
My family and I were at a restaurant recently where they had an older gentleman playing guitar and singing "Easy Listening" hits of the 1960s-1970s. As a Gen-Xer, this is not at all my music of choice. I do remember my parents' generation liking this kind of music. Songs like "Tie a Yellow Ribbon", "Galveston", "I Can See Clearly Now", "If You Could Read My Mind", etc.
So at first I was like "Oh great... Elevator music." But anyhow, as I sat there eating and listening to this man singing, the realization came to me that these were all melodic, pleasant songs with a gentle, positive message. These songs relaxed you and made you feel at ease. No overt sexuality, no crudity, no violence or despair were heard in the lyrics. These songs expressed positive, human emotion in a rational way.
On the way home, the radio in the car sang a different tune. After hearing the easy listening songs, the current stuff was very jarring: Crass rap and pop, with vulgar, explicitly sexual and materialistic lyrics, Heavy Metal that makes you want to go smash things and kick asses with harsh, growling vocals and buzz-saw guitars, Post-grunge depression that makes you want to slit your wrists. Insipid New-Country about getting drunk... All the modern genres had a negative message that endorses violence, greed, despair and crass sexuality. It was mainly harsh, atonal music that either irritates or aggravates you.
I thought about this quite a bit. I decided to explore and contrast other forms of popular entertainment. Movies for one. I watched several movies from the 50s, 60s and 70s. These older movies were coherent, they took their time to develop plots and characters, they had a beautiful, vivid color palette. The actors and actresses had genuine charisma and appeal. The movies of that era told real, human stories. Watching these movies felt like an experience.
Modern movies are chaotic, rushed and sometimes incoherent by comparison. They rely on CGI, have minimal characterization, and nondescript, interchangeable stars. The settings are bleak and depressing and grim, usually the films have a dingy, ugly color filter. The stories are dull and lack human interest and rely on special effects and jumps from action sequence to action sequence to hold the audience. Most of the modern films are an escape into fantasy or SF or Superheroes instead of stories about real people in plausible situations.
TV as well. Modern shows rely on grotesque violence, offbeat and overt sexuality and weird humor and sordid "Reality Shows" as opposed to the far more civilized and restrained shows of the past.
Even the way most people dress and speak today is crass and ugly compared to the way people did back then. I noticed this at parent night at my kid's school. Back then, people looked civilized, collared shirts, dresses, neat hair, etc. Now, many people look and speak like they are trying to be tattooed, pierced post-apocalyptic mutants or gang-bangers, and these are supposedly responsible parents!
All this, in my eyes, points to a culture-wide deep psychological disturbance in humanity that has developed over the last several decades. It reminds me of those sequences of artworks that show the artist's psychological degeneration as their mental illness progresses. Our culture has become obsessed with negativity, violence, crass sexuality and vulgarity. If you pulled someone out of the 50s, 60s or 70s and suddenly placed them in today's world, it would horrify them. They would think humanity had gone stark, raving mad.
It makes me wonder where we are going to be in another couple of decades if this cultural degeneration continues.