Dear Music,

On Wednesday, someone asked me what music I listen to, and I suddenly felt old. “Eighties salsa and pre-2003 hip hop,” I answered lamely. I intentionally left out the freestyle. I then realized I was lying, I was saying what music I would be willing to listen to, but in actuality, I listen to not much. It was sad to admit that music and I are no longer cool like that.

Music has always served as the mile markers of my life. Memories of sixth grade are always to the soundtrack of Mary’s Real Love, SWV and Boy II Men. I cannot divorce freshmen year of high school from Killing me Softly, and always fought with my high school boyfriend to the tunes of Jay-Z, Nas and Biggie. I learned to dance salsa to Marc Anthony and Los Adolecentes, and swayed my hips at every sweet sixteen to El Venao and La Tanga. In college, I woke up to Talib Kweli’s Just to Get By, studied to Antony Santos, and partied to anything with a beat, anywhere there was a table I could climb on.

The early and mid-twenties meant newly minted licenses and access to clubs, and acting a damn fool to Beyonce’s Crazy In Love. But, Clubbing to Find Cuties has morphed into Clubbing with My Man, which later morphed into Clubbing with a Purpose, where you don’t come out of your house unless it is someone’s birthday, and going out to eat before is a requisite and really the main event. In the rare occasion when I do venture out to a club, we get there by ten to find parking, by eleven I still haven’t heard a song I am familiar with, by midnight my feet hurt and I lament not going to a lounge, and by one I am limping back to the car, sniggering at the hot little mamas with their cellulite-less bodies, on their way in. Before we even hit the Holland, I am snoring loudly and feel like crap for the next three days.

In the mornings I wake up to the tune of the Today Show and come home listening to Wendy, then throw on MSNBC as I cook. I can’t remember the last time I bought a CD, hit up limewire, or watched music videos, as I dismiss most of it as crappy anyways. Spanish music has also taken similar downward spiral with reggaeton. Let’s be real, you can compose syncopation to dry hump to in a club, but let’s not be so quick to call everything music or everyone artists. Most twenty and thirty-somethings I know are waiting for the return of better hip hop, as though Pun, Biggie and Tupac are going to supernaturally swoop in and swing nursery-rhyming Lil Wayne by his dreads into the middle of the ocean. I saw him on SNL a few weeks back and wanted to hurl at his skinny-jean-size-0 sag. But yet, there was a big to-do about a fabled “gay rapper”? I don’t understand.

I am done holding my breath. Music, I am just not that into you.