Shouted rap songs with extremely simple metrical and rhyme schemes that use no or minimal profanity. Low bit-rate digital sampling controlled from an MPC and vinyl scratching. Too much chorus on the guitars. Thin, treble-heavy solid state distortion sound….

Anyway, thanks for the comment. I like it when people care enough to disagree with me in long, thoughtful form.

The degree of difficulty only has so much to do with it. There are a lot of things in life for which I have no particular use that I recognize are difficult to do. Art is about choices; proficiency gives the artist more options but whether one salutes the artist’s work or not more often than not depends upon agreement with the artist’s choice of options. I’m not trying to be standardized, homogenized and mechanized, so I’m not at all thrilled with the choices made by most of what occurs in hip-hop, techno, etc. I don’t care how much skill it takes to create something that leaves me cold, it still leaves me cold for very specific reasons.

I “get it”; I just don’t care. And. why should I? I grew up on some of the most redundant stuff imaginable but it still had soul. This stuff doesn’t. That stuff grooved. This stuff doesn’t; it just has a beat. There’s a world of music, repetitive, minimalist and otherwise that has a certain “engendered feeling” that most of this stuff simply lacks. I would go along with your evloving skill set hypothesis if what you’re talking about existed in a vacuum, but it doesn’t. There’s just too much basis for comparison on the same grounds that you’re using to tout it.

As for the abysmal sales of jazz (and the disappearance of a lot of other things), everything goes extinct at some point. Oh well, that’s capitalism. The market tends to underproduce social good and overproduce pollution. That’s why McDonalds is so big – their product is the output of trained culinarians by the way, so even that crap isn’t easy.