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Mike,

You are correct that there are different talents. I don't look at these talents as if one were "better" than the other ("A" or "B"). They are just different.

There's a talent to artistically perform, and a talent to artistically communicate. Some people have both talents. Is Stevie Wonder really a better singer than Pavoratti? No, but he artistically communicates to a larger audience. Stevie Wonder is a much better artistic communicator. His art accesses a wider audience.

Chick Corea is an amazingly talented keyboard player, but most people would rather listen to Fats Waller.

To artistically communicate, you have the actuator and the receptor. They exist in a continuum of experience. Just as those two sentences lose some people, so does fine art...art for art's sake...lose some people. The artistic continuum of the sixties and seventies had, not a flow of amazingly talented musicians unrivalled today...what it had was a bunch of amazingly sophisticated listeners. This came about because of a "perfect storm" of the audience in the western world.

You had a newly affluent youth, who had more freedom than ever before in the history of the world. Also, you had a technology explosion that brought down the price of recorded music. Kids with their own spending money and permission to buy their own music...who owned their own radios and record players. When I was ten years old, the radio and record player were owned by my mom. Those things were too expensive for a kid. By the time I was fifteen, I even owned my own tape reocrder. And I was a "poor" kid by most standards in the U.S....totally unprecedented in the world. These kids also had a common cause in the U.S., they didn't want to get forced to join the army and go to Viet Nam. They began to protest, it was a youth movement. This coincided with the ascension of the Beatles who were reaping the cultural revolution of the young white audience accepting (or stealing ) the black style of music--Elvis...rock and roll. It was the natural teen revolt against their parents, only this time with teeth.

At the same time, there was a revolution on the college campuses. Just as rock revolted against jazz (the two pop forms) so did folk music revolt against bebop (the two intellectual forms). Folk eschewed the music for the message. I mean, how much further could bebop go? Just play faster, I guess. At some point the brain can't track that speed. So the colleges started mixing the beat poetry of Ferlinghetti with the cultural messages of Woody Guthrie and what did you get? Bob Dylan.

Now, the Beatles were singing "I'm a love a you baby, be bop woo woo" but they were blown away by Dylan's messages, so the confluence began. Rock became political and introspective in its lyrics, instead of just being musically revolutionary by breaking racial and generational barriers. So, the kids who were bonded by a political goal (stop the draft and end the war) found the only voice they had, the only widespread communication they had, came from the music. The kids listened intently and hung on every word. They also started smoking pot and taking acid, so it "blew their minds" when the music took a left turn from the simple beats and harmonies to the more sophisticated or the simply jarring. The audience...listening intently...was being educated in music. So when the same audience's major political goals were met (the end of the draft and the end of the Viet Nam War in '72) they kept listening to music with a newly sophisticated ear. For several years, the artistic perfomers were also the artistic communicators.

Then fast forward. Gradually the generational revolution started rearing its head. Punk. Thrash. Alternative. Grunge. A lot of things were boiling up. Just presenting pure anger and angst without a lot of fine performing. But, they were artistically communicating with an audience that was rebelling against Steely Dan's fans...the old farts. They were rebelling against the vanity of the stadium rockers and the metal satyrs. (Oh baby, come and get my love. When I get to your town, just line up and strip.) But still, no revolution. Until...

The Black Americans took the music back. Rap and Hip Hop took over the world. Even the so called "progressive" white musicians rebelled and decried against it. It was far more punk than punk. It made grunge look like a poor attempt at mimicking rock and roll. It was truly different and revolutionary. It reduced the artistic performance to a communal beat where the audience and the performers both equally were moved by a beat that didn't even need a player, just a machine. The primal beat in all of us was tapped and exploited. What Disco was tickling at, Rap scratched and clawed its way through. The musician was not important, only the music. The music could be programmed, the beat could be dialed in, the performers reacted and responded to it the same as the audience. The communication between the rapper and the rap audience became closer by the shared experience.

So now, all music is being affected by it. The artistic communication is becoming a shared experience. The talented priests of the music no longer have the keys to the holy book. Anyone can go to Sam Ash and buy them. It's the time of the artistic communicators.

Get used to it, gang, like any revolution, it will leave its mark until some artistic communicator comes along and reaches a common audience. I believe there will eventually be one.