denise:^
Well yes, they did torture us at coffeehouses every Friday night until at least some of them "got it right" and got sucked into the "star making machinery."

A mere 8 minutes? "Sad eyed lady of the lowlands" takes up a FULL SIDE of an LP. Self indulgent doesn't even begin to properly characterize it.

But I digress.
Let me give it another shot.

My remarks are not about specific criticism or specific singers.

I'm just making an extreme generalization. I've heard all this (not in detail, but the same KIND of thing) before.

I simply remember that our parents criticized our music for any number of reasons. But for all their passion and eloquence, we always knew the bottom line. They just didn't get it.

If Frank Sinatra defines "singing" them yes, Bob Dylan could not sing. The point being???? If "Your Hit Parade" represented the alpha and omega of "real" music, then Jefferson Airplane was not "real" music. And????

One sign that you just don't get it: You run through your litany of crushing criticisms to a believer and the response is simply, "Yeah, isn't it though."

My 20-something daughter and I had a very interesting discussion tonight about what it means to be a musician. She is willing to say that a person who does nothing but manipulate (NOT produce) and mix computer files ("samples") to produce a CD with tracks of what sounds like music to me is a musician. I found myself unwilling to go that far.

I'll call it a draw and say that we ended by agreeing (rather uneasily for me) that the whole concept of "musician" not to say "music" is changing before my very ears. It brought home to me the fact that something is happening here but I don't know what it is.