This was today’s quote on my Google homepage:

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

— John Cage

No doubt Mr. Cage forgot more about music any day before breakfast than I’ll ever know. But I have to challenge the premise here. I note that Mr. Cage passed away in 1992, before the rise of the vacuous thumping which is known as rap or hip-hop. Smart lad to slip betimes away; he got out while the gettin’ was good. I think that in today’s context, a musical ego cuts one off from a good deal of mindless suffering.

A lot of the unmitigated crap I hear limping through traffic and booming past my home isn’t music at all. It’s just mindless, guttural chest thumping, without melody, and with a canned rhythm. And don’t even try to tell me it’s “street poetry.” That’s like saying my driveway, which is 12 feet long, is the road to Ohio. It’s part of the process of a trip to Ohio, but hardly significant, just as the lyrics in such expression bear some distant relationship to English. Poetry goes somewhere … my driveway, and rap and hip-hop “music” don’t go very far at all. It ain’t art.