Ah, the old "old music is better that new music" chestnut...
As someone who grew up with punk (the real one, not the watered down ****e people call punk nowadays) I can see where you're coming from.
What Beeb said is right, there is never ever good music on the radio ever (well not since the brilliant John Peel passed away R.I.P), so forget about that.
Fact is, music moves in cycles....a movement comes a long, usually with a great band or so at the cutting edge of it, then record companies see the teenagers going crazy for it and start signing anyone who sounds vaguely similar. It's always happened and it always will.
For every great punk band, you had 10 that were rubbish. Then people got tired of it and most of the 80s were "soft" by comparison.
Even the Clash went soft, John Lydon fomed PIL, who had some great moments...but were soft by comparison with the Sex Pistols.
In England at least the 80's alternative music was dominated by bands like The Cure, The Smiths, Joy Division/New Order etc etc. None of them really angry bands....even The Jesus And Mary Chain weren't particularly aggressive (although, Automatic is still a BRILLIANT album).
Then things swung again, and we got a new generation of bands in England who didn't give a ****, The Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses. They didn't have the anger of punk, the music was totally different but the ethos was there....the "we really don't give a ****" attitude....and people really went for it because of that. Some great bands came out of America at the time, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jnr, The Pixies...and then of course Nirvana. Same thing, same attitude...people who'd grown up with punk and had that same attitude.
Of course when Nirvana went global, every bloke with a guitar and a pullover with holes in it in Seattle got a record deal...and there was truly a lot of crap coming out.
That's where I kind of sidestepped out of guitar music because while I loved a lot of those bands, there was the realisation that there wasn't anything new happening there. Electronic music seemed to me to be where all the innovation was coming from. If you look at some of the people behind mid 90s electronica in England and it was all the people who'd grown up loving punk. People like Andy Weatherall, David Holmes, the Orbital brothers etc.
For me, bands like The Chemical Brothers "Hey Boy Hey Girl" and "Galvanise" have the energy that reminds me of punk, much more than the so called punk bands I hear now. Most guitar music just sounds like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy etc...
...But then again, I am old. At some point we all get bored by listening to re-hashes of the same thing over and over again.
Bands like Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party (I guess the strongest alternative movement in England nowadays) are all well and good...but I can hear where every note came from. It's like "Thats sounds like The Stranglers and that sounds like The Fall and that riff was taken from The Clash and that drum is Bauhaus" etc etc.
You know what you have to do don't you?
Get your guitar, get your mates, get out and change it.
The music scene is crying out for something new.