Wow!

Behold the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys! These guys are just *kids*! The banjo player is nine years old!

One of the saddest developments of the second half of the 20th century is that music has stopped being something that arises out of the soil and mulch of ordinary human life and has become a product manufactured and packaged by giant corporations and thrust at us as something we are required to like in order to accessorize our social needs. All music, even classical music, used to be folk music in the sense that it expressed the soul of a people. (And of course, most music was, like all art until very recently, suffused with religion). Large swaths of music today expresses only the soullessness of a people. I will never forget the remark of a friend who was watching a Madonna video in some restaurant and who casually turned to me saying, “Madonna: Beneath all that voluptuous flesh is the soul of an accountant.” And Madonna is G rated compared to a lot of the empty exploitive corporate merchants of death out there.

So I love that something like this group of kids is still able to erupt out of the American musical landscape (and, to be fair, that there is a lot of indie music out there making inroads to the plastic pre-fab crap marketed by hacks to focus groups).

Here’s their website if you hunger for more.