&gt;<i>How could you possibly know what had a deep emotional impact on anyone other than yourself or possibly the people you interact with most closely in life?</i><p>By being a human, involved with culture, and plain being able to see and place cultural artifacts upon certain contexts.<p>How do we know that a war has left &quot;deep emotional impact&quot; to lots of people other than ourselves or &quot;possibly the people we interact with most closely in life&quot;? Because we do, we know what war is, we know what it does to people, etc.<p>In the same way, we know what novelty pop hits are. As opposed to regular pop hits that mostly capture some teens attention for a few years (e.g. Bieber or NKOTB back in the day) and more involved pop that goes deeper.<p>&gt;<i>Here&#x27;s an alternate proposal for you: You&#x27;ve grown as a person, and all the deep emotional impacts that music might be able to make on you have been made. To those still growing, you aren&#x27;t able to assess the impact, because you now view the world through the eyes of an adult.</i><p>I&#x27;m quite atypical in this regard, as despite being mid-late-30s, I follow lots of music and still have deep emotional impact from all kinds of stuff, from techno to regular chart pop to some obscure garage-psychedelic or jazz record (I really like from The Residents to Westbam, Deep Freeze Mice and Mingus, and can even hum something like Redfoo&#x27;s songs).<p>But even as a teenager, I can tell you that there were lots of novelty hits I went for that meant really nothing for me (or anyone else that forgot about them after their peak) and stuff that had deeper impact, which was of a different kind (could still be pop: it just wasn&#x27;t a novelty track like, say, Cotton Eye Joe or The Scatman).