A Brief Note on Why I Stopped Playing Popular Genres

Part of why I left popular music and why I never responded to it in the way most people I'm friends with do is because it is clearly one of the most balkanizing, corrosive forces in modern life. Today's music ruins our social fabric rather than building it. If you want to understand how modern American life is so polarized, look at music before anything else. It separates us by geography, by generation, by demographic, by income disparity, no one in America knows any longer how to appreciate each other or talk to each other, and that process begins and ends with music. Everybody belongs to a musical niche, and the bubble it provides makes it increasingly difficult every year to absorb influences within the wider world of music, and the musicians who do can often barely get a following and what they can do has severe financial limitations. All anybody has in common is the most simplified, corporatized pop music, which is guaranteed to expose no one to anything new, and thus every interesting musical movement in popular culture seems to die out the moment after they create something of value because they so often don't know where to look if they want to learn something new and grow as artists. Jazz is better in this regard, because as musicians of such skill, they learned from us. But if other sorts of popular genre'd musicians want to understand how to build on their achievements, they need to accumulate more technical knowledge, and we can provide it for them. People will no doubt argue that it's already happening,  but it's only a pebble in the pool compared to what it could and should be. 

The world of music before 1970 was very very different. Classical musicians were suffused with new grist or the mill by popular music, popular musicians were suffused by classical techniques to a level well past what it is now.  For fifty years, the lives of American musicians have gotten more and more difficult, financially, spiritually, musically, socially, and prestige-wise, and it will take at very least another fifty years in America before people find a way to get anything like that knowledge back which the American music world had and shared with each other before 1970. Those two processes are incredibly interlinked, and the freedom of today's musical world comes at the most colossal price. Look at the superdepression of artists in today's world of pandemic, there is no examining it without realizing that there is a reason we have been hit on a level so few other jobs have. We are not important to people - everybody has their very few musicians and artists whom they cherish, but no niche can financially subsist without a wider financial pool from which to draw. Because there is no common ground, there is no synergy, and so little work to go around. The way to put a stop is deceptively simple, there has to be a more disciplined dialogue in which musicians rigorously keep up with all the latest developments in every genre, and when more connections across barriers are made, there are more financial opportunities. This has to happen, or else we are all going to die together.