Ted Gioia: belief

Transcript context

…But isn’t it that distortion and note bending have been picked up by, say, indie music, and they’re being done in more commercially appealing ways than the blues, and maybe the blues is a bit exhausted? I think for a while it was being assimilated in popular music, but I believe that has stopped in the last five, ten years. I would love to see some PhD student study hit records of different decades and figure out how frequently notes deviate from pitch, and how that’s changed over time. I think you would find an amazing reduction in that. So we’re going back to this mathematical vision of music as everything is perfectly in tune and perfectly organized and perfectly aligned rhythmically. There’s less syncopation in music. Everything is becoming regularized. Now probably, the advent of digital technologies leads to it, but I think we need a new African infusion in our music that shakes things up and gets us away from mathematics and back toward sound. And rap music is not that new infusion for you? Yes or no?…

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