The distance in time between '77 punk and right now is the same as the distance between '77 Punk and the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I replied.
@ACNewman distance between now and Please Please Me is same as distance between 1963 and Archduke Ferdinand being alive
Obviously the big takeaway is holy crap I'm old (I was born 9 years after Please Please Me, but still), but I think there's a broader point about us olds not getting just how distant stuff is for The Kids Today. More than that, I also think there was a kind of continuity between people born, roughly, from the beginning of WWII until about 1993. The discontinuity here is the internet, a society transforming technology change.
I probably started listening to The Beatles (aside from randomly hearing them on the radio) in 1986 or so, when I was 14. Some 14 year old kid today listening to The Beatles would be equivalent to my 1986 self getting into music from 1939 or so. Those "old movies" weren't actually all that old, some of them anyway, when I was a teenager, but I sure did think they were old, even movies from the 70s! Imagine what they look like to The Kids Today. Probably every action/horror/mystery/thriller movie fails the "cell phone plausibility test," in that if characters had cell phones the entire plot would be ludicrous.
Anyway, point is the kids don't live in the world of oldsters. Oldsters is old.
Still rockin'.