Originally Posted by
Tom Coletti
A lot of people seem to have some concern over what us millennials are doing with music so as a mid-20-something I can assure you that we have no intention of ruining everything. We don't really know what music is going to turn into either, but with that being said, it may be helpful to consider a few things from our vantage point:
There's an unfathomable amount of musical information available to us now, and bluegrass is a just small piece buried in the pile of info. If we do find bluegrass, we probably dug through so many other genres of music along the way that we'll be instinctively coloring our bluegrass experience with the other genres we've experienced.
A lot of people start with something mainstream because it's near the top of the pile. While listening to something like, say, country-pop, they may hear something in the instrumentation they like, then perhaps dig a bit deeper to the Avett Brothers or Mumford, then Punch Brothers, everyone who's played with Punch Brothers, etc., and then they've opened the door to all sorts of festivals, workshops, and everything else on the road to 'grass with some encouragement. But merely chiding them about "not being bluegrass" might make them feel unwelcome or inadequate, and they may associate that bad experience with the genre and stop digging there.
It's really easy to single out some kid listening to whatever's popular this week and talk about how music isn't what it was, but that ignores the possibility that said popular thing is someone's start down the path that one day lands them across from you at the next jam circle. They'll play stuff a bit differently than the traditional way, most likely, but the traditional way of playing still exists. Nobody ruined it or took it away, it just got company.
Some might say "well that's fine, just call it something else," but to some degree, language and its uses change as much as music does. Vernacular updates and takes on new words to express new ideas, or new meanings or connotations to recontexualize old ones, so the reason the "bluegrass" label has stuck to these derivative styles of music may be partly because the mental image formed when someone says "bluegrass" has expanded to include those derivatives in their minds.
I don't know where bluegrass is headed or why or how, but it's going somewhere and people are having fun with it. That's all that matters to me.
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