Bieber v Beatles - it's no contest

You've been driving through the countryside with your family for three hours and the radio has fizzled into static.

Next thing you know, Mum is rummaging through the glove box looking for a CD and, all of a sudden, the entire car is alive with the sound of the Beatles. "I am the eggman, they are the eggmen. I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob!"

And you and your brother sit in the back, your arms crossed, scowling out the window and mumbling, "I hate this song".

Well, I've been there, and I know how it feels. The agony of having to pretend you despise every one of the songs your parents put on, while deep inside you're wishing they would stop the car and turn up the volume so you could dance through one of the roadside paddocks.

The fact of the matter is that the poetry of these old songs makes them impossible to dislike. They sure knew how to write lyrics back in the day.

I think I speak for us all when I say I'm jealous my parents grew up listening to Queen and the Beatles, while we're stuck with Rihanna and Justin Bieber, artists who barely even sing their own songs, let alone write them.

One of the things that draws us to songs is the rhythm of the lyrics.
If you look at the song We Will Rock You by Queen, the music of the words is amazing from the very first verse.

Songs these days certainly don't measure up to this standard most of the time, which is why it's sometimes nice to take a break from the commercially produced junk-food music we're bombarded with and listen to some of the golden oldies.

Good lyrics are brilliant because they allow us to tap into other people's emotions. Songwriters often write lyrics in a burst of emotion-driven inspiration, and we, the listeners, are lucky enough to be allowed into the writer's head.

Although the music plays a part in adding emotion to the song, lyrics are key. Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton is a song about his son's death, which automatically makes it a sad song, but the way Clapton wrote it makes it very special.

Songs with this level of emotion are rare these days, so we have to take a journey back in time if we really want to be brought to tears.

Lyrics are poetry, and poetry is a far-reaching and intergenerational genre of writing. In Shakespearean times, people used to read and listen to poetry for entertainment, which is similar to what we do when we turn on the radio. Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare, a poem about undying love, "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds", has remained a famous poem, as people can still relate to the idea of everlasting love.

Most of the time the concepts dealt with in poetry are not superficial things that lose their meaning over time, which is why it's okay to enjoy the music our parents grew up with.

Next time you're on a family road trip and Mum starts blasting out the Beach Boys, instead of looking incredibly distressed, perhaps you should start singing along under your breath.

It might catch on. Your parents will feel privileged to have produced offspring who can appreciate the music from their glory days. It's fine to enjoy the same music as them and, if you're lucky, you might start a full-blown family sing-along.

Bailey Henderson, Year 12, St Cuthbert's College