Musical merit? Or just noise?

I was watching Ellen the other day and she said you know you're getting old when you start using words like "newfangled." Reminded me of this one time when Red Green mentioned that today's music wasn't "too loud, it just sucked."

I'm not sure when it happened, but at one point in my life I stopped listening to what was popular. For a time, I didn't even own a radio. It was at a party a few months ago when someone put in a disc I was unfamiliar with (probably because I'd also given up walking into record stores too). It turns out that maybe I had dismissed hip-hop and alternative-rock a little too easily. Maybe I was being unfair. In fact, on a whim, when I saw it on a shelf yesterday, I decided "what the hey... let's buy this."

The album is titled "Collision Course" - you may have heard of these names: Jay-Z and Linkin Park. It's a 6-song EP that comes with a DVD documenting how in only 1 day, these two artists got together and basically jammed until they had something presentable and put on a small concert. And what's funny now is that after watching it, it occurs to me that these guys take their work pretty seriously. Now is that any less respectable than, say, hearing about the production process of a progressive-rock band?

Or maybe I'm just not as "old" as I was feeling 24 hours ago. ^_~