We went from Mozart to this? When a huge part of your population streams across the border from primitive societies, this is what you get- jungle drums. I'm being serious. In America, a man can be living int he jungles of South America in a hut one day, and the next, he can be walking the streets of Los Angeles.
Thousands of years ago, the Romans had a society that was marvelous. But many people who come to this country have never seen civilization. This is simply the music, if you can call it, of the uncivilized.
I was visiting the Queen Mary the other day, and onboard the ship in the museum, they had a placard on the wall advertising that while on the ship, you could call most of the "civilized world", and this ad came from the 1950's or so. They were still referring to parts of the world as the "civilized world." Amazing.
A columnist famed for her genius IQ was asked by a reader why modern art had replaced traditional art. THe columnist replied that people were no longer willing to dedicate the needed time and effort to perfecting technique - the old masters labored for decades and invested their lives in their art. The modern art ‘masters’ want their fame and money NOW and they never intend to develop true mastery - it takes too long. SO they decide shocking, offending, or industrial ‘works’ (did you see the film clip where the skill saw cut in a plaster wall, probably done by a workman mounting other paintings, was itself on sale for tens of thousands of dollars in a chic art gallery?)SHOULD be art, and we SHOULD want repulsive, ugly, canvases and sculptures throughout our houses to ‘reject’ bourgeois culture.
I think the same thing happened to music. This lust for ‘egalitarianism’ (people without talent should be as popular and well compensated as people who spend their lives mastering opera or the violin) brought out this attack on music. And dance became gangsta moves because not everyone is graceful and can keep time, but even a baby can mimic gangsta moves which are intentionally jerky and visually displeasing. And poetry - not everyone is Keats, so poetry must be reinvented as a-tonal, a-rhthmic ‘free verse’ - really any Tweet is now considered poetry. We are lucky that we have musical recordings, paintings, books, poems, and dances that have been preserved for us (for now) beause the young don’t even know they exist or why they matter.