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Music

The Onion Are Ghettotech Experts, Apparently

They recently published an article from the perspective of an old man complaining about teens and their newfangled beats.

There's a saying that goes "If it's too loud, you're too old," and despite how straightforwardly unkind it might be, many people can relate to the sentiment. Intergenerational conflict often arises around what "really counts" as good music and which newfangled sounds are considered just a bunch of phooey. Satirical website The Onion recently published an article riffing on this very theme called "I'm Tired Of These Punks Coming Through My Neighborhood Blasting Their Late-1990s, Ghettotech, DJ Godfather–Inflected Hip-Hop," and the results are not only hilarious, but also surprisingly informative about the history of the Detroit-born genre.

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The piece is written from the perspective of a crotchety elderly man named Eugene Mullins, who has both a bone to pick with some ghettotech-slinging, loudness-prone teens and troublemakers, as well as the knowledge needed to back it all up. "You'd think after working 40 years and raising a family, I'd deserve one single night now and then without some riffraff gunning it down my block with a tricked-out stereo blaring Bitch Ass Darius B-sides or classic tracks off Disco D's genre-epitomizing album Straight Out Tha Trunk," he says, name checking some popular tracks and artists from the genre.

Eventually, his polemic gets a bit heated. "On and on they go every night with that same repetitive TR-808–driven nonsense! What am I supposed to do, just sit here and take this regional electronic music subgenre inspired by legendary Detroit radio DJ the Electrifying Mojo? No siree, not me."

At the end of the day, all he really wanted was some new jack swing—poor guy.

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