It's kind of like that with guitar heroes, too.
There was Jimmi Hendrix and Jimmy Page and later on Eddie Van Halen and then guys like Joe Satriani or maybe Ingwe Malmsteen ... etc. etc...
but today?
It's all been done, or maybe its that the base level of ability has risen to the point where there is nobody that really stands out from the pack like they used to.
Well things have gotten very expensive and take Seattle, for example, 15 years ago you could rent a decent apartment for like $300 a month or something and work on music while working part time at a coffee house or something like that.
Doesn't really work like that anymore, not to mention they cut school music programs a ton.
The recording industry used to work off of 'talent' that they discovered. There were these things called bands that were started by people without a lot of money who had time to play and develop their music and skills.
When 'talent' got rare, they started corporate music and put together a singer and some studio musicians and made music, but that hasn't gone over extremely well, so sales are down, down, down ... not just because of illegal downloads although that hasn't helped things any.
So you've got commercialization of music, people without a lot of money or time on their hands. You've got the same thing with martial arts, commercial schools, watered down stuff, people without money or time on their hands. What martial artists these days have 2-4 hours a day to train as adults?
So this is the problem. The U.S. has become too mass consumer a society with too many people at the top leeching off the people at the bottom. It used to be the average executive made like 30x the lowest paid employee. Now it's more like 300x the lowest paid employee.
People have longer commutes because of high housing costs and traffic is extremely bad, so they have even less time on their hands because of that.
All in all it kindof sucks. Wait, what was the question?
