[NewMusic] Bassist Paul Rogers on improvised music

[weasel walter]

>We need to educate people properly,  we need to nurture originality and
individuality, not applaud the 
> imitative and mediocre! Things have steadily declined now to the 
> point where great musicians have given up playing original music 
> because there's no money or support - and what kind of society is 
> that? Artists are important, they reflect their society."

his answer is right there - the dominant culture (i.e. artists that are
mainstream) does indeed reflect their society - a cavalcade of the
imitative and mediocre. the public gets what the public deserves: a shit
sandwich. 

i eventually gave up trying to make the highly complex composed group
music i was doing for the exact reason he notes - no significant money or
support. the futility of constantly banging my head against the wall
trying to survive mentally and financially doing that was becoming too
painful for me so i just stopped. 

my rationale for stopping eventually drifted  around to the old "that's
life" excuse. if i can't figure out how to do what i want to do, the
reality of it is that it's my tough luck, not society's onus. i imagine
there are some people that would probably like to get paid to eat ice
cream sudaes, but the current job market doesn't really support that
position either. people voted with their wallets and the verdict is "we,
society, don't want or need your highly complex composed group music." 
ok then! thanks for nothing assholes. ha ha ha. 

regardless, there are other things (even musical) to do with one's life
than waste time being a martyr. in the case of the music i don't make any
more, one might argue either that a tree fell in a forest and nobody
heard it, or that it's somehow a loss for society, but i think in a 100
years nobody's going to remember much of what happened anyhow, so fuck
it. 

i could have been a contender. 

ww