John P. <JohnP@nospam.com> wrote:
> "Flinstoneyerfired" <mmurph@onlink.net> wrote in a message
>
>> There's a few different ways to approach that question. What I meant
>> by substantial is that the music seems to have had resonance with
>> people in some way- intellectually or emotionally. The man has been
>> dead since 1993- he's had very little press (mind you the Zappa does
>> Zappa tour has had an impact)- why are we talking about a man whose
>> musical peak may have occurred some time in the seventies? Simply
>> because there's something there to talk about, don't you think? Much
>> different than Amy Winehouse- she has yet to make her mark- she's
>> good copy/press fodder. We all like to see a good car wreck.
>
> There is no doubt Zappa intended, on many occasions, to create
> controversy. Do we discuss him 30 years later because his work was
> "substantial", or because it was controversial? Does the answer to
> that question matter, or does it only matter that we do discuss him?
>
> Zappa had a pretty clear message... is it a negative that people are
> more apt to discuss the controversy rather than the message?
Can you really separate the controversy from the message, though? Isn't
it part of the message, in a way?
> Which is one of the reasons I so much love the internet, and Usenet.
> Music has moved into a new era where there isn't a small handful of
> people who decide what we will hear. One has access to every type of
> music available from every artist who chooses to put his/her stuff
> out there. There's almost a downside to that, in that it has grown so
> large, one may miss something for simple lack of clicking on a single
> link among the millions available.
There's another downside also: lack of common ground.
I started playing guitar in 1963, and during the '60s rock musicians
were all basically hearing the same things. So if you ran into a
handful of musicians, chances were that you all knew many songs in
common. You'd get asked to sit in, and you could pull it off without
missing a beat.
The net provides the diversity that was missing somewhat then (although
stations played a variety of different sounding stuff on the radio), but
genres have fractionated to the extent that, of the subset of people
posting here who play any sort of *current* music, I'd be willing to bet
that there isn't much overlap among them. So the net is good, and the
net is bad. Overall good, I'd say, but there's some experiences that I
had the pleasure to be part of that the younger folks will miss out on.
