It used to really bother me that songs use the same chord patterns, writers often regurgitate the same ideas, and especially that people say something 10% as brilliant as Aristotle and don’t realize he completed that thought 2400 years ago.
While the Aristotle thing will continue to annoy me, there’s another notion at play here.
Each generation must invent its own language for the same thing. To the generation before it won’t appeal, but that generation’s language doesn’t quite appeal either. 99 Red Balloons becomes No Handlebars, “another brick in the wall” becomes “waitin’ on the world to change,” and so on.
And that’s okay. But don’t drink the sauce.
Much like organizations that slowly decay after the founder moves on (Boy Scouts being a great recent example), it’s important to find the new anthem, the new expression, but it isn’t the words themselves as much as the process of arriving at them that matters.
