| Re: Grass Roots
This is why I'm very serious about becoming among other things a good street musician. Kids are not seeing/hearing live music. It's not played at home, the radio is. Kids get yelled at for "making noise" if they try to make their own music at home. Kids are not seeing instruments played. Band for a lot of kids is a contest to see how little work they can get away with, not how much they can do.
The only chance a kid may get to hear and be inspired by live music may be hearing/seeing a busker, that's right, that "bum" who plays cornet in a coffee house or the guy playing slide guitar in the park. Or the accordionist who plays Xmas carols near the doorway to the supermarket.
As kids we sneaked off to do "funny stuff" which meant singing funny songs not meant for adult ears, and spoofing TV commercials. Some of us were virtuosos at drumming but not on real drums, those were forbidden as "noisy". Instead it was drumming on stuff, whistling, various noisemakers like maybe a kazoo or one of those bird-lure things.
Yeah yeah I know there are tons of affluent folks sending their kids to violin and oboe and clarinet lessons, I'm talking about the great mass of the American people.
I can't in American terms say something is dying because what's dying doesn't have a dollar value. But if you can think outside of the dollar system, something definately is. |