Art & Creativity Quote by Bing Crosby

A crooner whose whole brand was warm familiarity, Bing Crosby lands this like a quiet slap: popular music, he argues, didn’t merely change - it backslid. The phrasing matters. “In this country” narrows the target to American taste-making, and “one of the few things” frames the complaint as an exception to a century fetishized for progress. That’s the sting: modernity is supposed to move forward, yet the radio dial, in Crosby’s telling, runs on a kind of cultural moonwalk.

The intent isn’t just “kids these days.” Crosby is defending an older idea of craft and professionalism: melody you can hum, diction you can understand, bandleading as discipline, not noise. Coming from a singer who helped define mass entertainment via microphones, records, and radio, the line carries a sly self-implication: he benefited from the machinery of popular culture, then watched it accelerate beyond his control. That tension - between innovation in delivery and skepticism about content - is the quote’s engine.

Subtextually, “giant strides” is a backhanded compliment to the very forces he distrusts. He’s acknowledging how powerfully the culture moved, just not toward his preferred values. Context helps: Crosby’s adult life spans jazz’s mainstreaming, the rise of rock and roll, and the youthquake of the 1960s. By then, pop wasn’t aspiring to the nightclub or the family living room; it was staking out rebellion, volume, and identity. Crosby’s critique reads less like snobbery than like a generational diagnosis: when music becomes a badge, not just a song, the old standards stop being standards.