Music seems to parallel art, architecture, fashion and literature, and the apparent decline in the quality of music becomes more comprehensible when viewed in concert with a larger context. It would appear that all of these vestigial expressions of the soul of today's mankind have generally lost a major amount of lustre when compared with the "standards" of yesteryear.

Perhaps changes in social and economic structure, combined with the shift from local to global orientation have impacted our ability to express our individuality ... maybe we have lost some of our individuality ... and maybe gained nothing in return.

We have experienced acts from the past which are indeed difficult to follow, especially on which to improve. After Beethoven, Monet, Rachmaninoff, Thomas Hardy, Eric Claption, Ray Charles, Billy Strayhorn, Patsy Cline, and the like, it is challenging to create something improvisational and original and have it pass muster and become a new standard, resting on new laurels instead of being a cheap knock-off of someone else's inspiration. Perhaps originality has been thoroughly exploited and there is nothing new to be created? For parallel example, where do we go beyond our current technology? We have trains, planes and automobiles, electricity, air conditioning, computers, smartphones, radio, television, video games, internet, robots, drones and nuclear bombs ... so what do we have to which to look forward? We have nonsensical chatter about living in colonies on the Moon or Mars, but we have yet to break the 70 MPH highway speed limit, our supersonic commercial jets are in graveyards and we are traveling at a slower pace than in the 1960s.

Although I do not foresee a major renaissance in culture any time soon, if one look closely, there are still those chosen few who offer quality, albeit that they are not always "original" in their expression. In "Country Music" and Pop, if one can wade past the fluff of the "can't miss" artists like Taylor Swift, Garth Brooks and Carrie Underwood, there are a few artists with real talent ... maybe Reba McIntyre and Miranda Lambert? In Jazz, I'm kind'a impressed by a couple of concoctions by Nicola Conte ('Black is the Graceful Veil') and Vassilis Tsobropolus ('The Spell'). I continue finding works of art which do not pale in the light of day, yet the frequency of such encounters has diminished noticeably. Maybe it's just that so much crap is thrown at us daily in ever-increasing amounts by the omnipresent media that it is hard to ferret out the true gems in life. Maybe we don't even get a chance to see them because they are the items of low mass consumerism and they get the bottom rung in terms of promotion.

Mass media has enabled the nameless, faceless slobs who have inherited Earth to live vicariously through the lives of others instead of mastering their own life, and as long as we continue to narrowly define the "winner" as the one who sells the most mediocrity, then entities like Taylor Swift and McDonalds are always going to be dubbed by the masses as superior to Kiri Te Kanawa and Filet Mignon.