Sike, I still like it
If the artist themself is a boomer then I think judging them by ‘the standards of their day’ is at least partially valid.
Perspective: Nobody gave a shit whether Louis Armstrong or the Andrews Sisters wrote their own material. Expecting audiences to value performers who also were songwriters was a boomer phenomenon, starting mid 1960s-ish. That wasn’t very long ago, and the technology of audio recording wasn’t around for very long before that. But royalties are paid to songwriters according to a legal framework designed for player piano reels, predating all that even.
We shouldn’t shame or look down upon in any way those who perform songs written by others, but trying to diminish the value in an artist composing their own work as “boomer” is fucking banal
So Garth Brooks is a creature of the Nashville country music industry. The Nashville machine has not followed the trend of promoting songwriting bands to anywhere near the same extend as the LA record labels have. Criticizing a country music entertainer for not writing his own songs is like criticizing a magpie for having white stripes. There is indeed great value in songwriting bands. To the artist (or whoever has contracted the rights to the artist’s recordings), it means double the royalties. To the record companies it helps diminish the power of ASCAP, which used to function much more like a proper union than it does today. The expectation that a band should write its own songs was first cultivated in the 60s in an audience of baby boomers, using baby boomer bands. It’s about as boomer as bell bottom jeans. That doesn’t mean it’s in any way bad for a band to write its own songs, but division of labor between songwriters and entertainers was the norm before that, and continues to be in many musical traditions.
…unless you consider the ~1915 Jelly Roll Morton piano rolls to be the first jazz recordings. But that’s semantics. As jazz became a popular music, the trend of performing popular songs in a jazz style became very common for working bands.
