Aren't Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, and Chappelle Roan all zoomers lol.
I agree everything moves faster but it's still a 20 year gap, and in both cases you have parents playing that music for their kids as they grow up. Should they delve deeper? Yes. It seems like collectively the farthest back a lot of these young producers and artists will go is like....90s r&b. Jodeci samples and shyt like that.
You're also right about the weird way they don't interact with anything past a certain point. I saw a clip of an NBA rookie saying he tried to watch The Godfather but turned it off after 10 minutes because it was in black and white (????) and was too long. The lack of artistic and intellectual curiosity is stunning.
Everything is being designed to kill attention spans. One of the many things I enjoyed about the Kendrick/Drake rap battle was both not giving a fukk about that. Family Matters is a 7 minute song. Meet The Grahams is nearly 7 minutes, and Euphoria is over 5 minutes. Those are the longest songs a lot of kids have ever heard. Do I think that's gonna usher a return to an era where radio often played long songs like Purple Rain or Kashmir? No, but anything that shows these dumbass kids that other shyt is possible is good in my mind. You have to push envelopes because somebody is gonna catch it and carry it on.