On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Shane Taylor wrote:
> I don't know. The White Stripes did a superb cover of Son House's Death
> Letter. But it seems like you have to wade through the muck for
> musicians like them. Maybe it's always been this way and the passage of
> time acts as a sieve. But sometimes I feel the tug of the same
> "primitive reaction" Justin notes above, despite the fact that there are
> volumes of fresh new greats of which I'm oblivious. I guess we recall
> mainly the best from the past and can't help but see the majority of crap
> in the present.
>
> -- Shane
Yep. George Massenburg (recording engineer) likes to tell the story about Linda Ronstadt's breathless respect for songwriters in "the good old days", when they created all those great songs. The old studio geezers just laughed: "there were lots of awful songs written then, everybody's just forgotten them."
Moral: at any one point in time, most of the popular music is pretty pathetic, but there always some interesting stuff going on. (Case in point: Bjork.)
--And on this "Hendrix as hiphop" conceit: by that logic, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker are "hiphop". Isn't that casting the net a bit wide?
Miles