It pops up constantly. It never truly goes away. This week, it came at me again in an email from my friend Ken Corsbie, living in North Carolina, as he relayed a collection of complaints from folks in his generation; their problem was dissatisfaction with the state of popular music today, and the language was on the strong side. “Musicians today have become lazy; they’re producing garbage.” “Hip hop is not music; it’s just noise.” “Melody has disappeared; today we have four or five words repeated over and over; how could that be a song?”
Vehemently as it is expressed, the subject really does not engage musicians because they know what is going on, and what is going on is simply the process