Wit & Attitude Quote by Billy Higgins

Higgins is talking like a working musician who’s watched the pipeline break in real time: not just fewer kids learning instruments, but fewer being fed anything that teaches listening, nuance, or patience. The line hits because it’s deliberately blunt - “stuff” and “idiots” are anti-elegant words aimed at an anti-elegant reality. He’s not performing a polite lament about education; he’s diagnosing a culture that treats young attention as a commodity and calls it progress.

The intent is protective and pragmatic. Higgins came up in a world where craft was transmitted person-to-person: bandstands, mentors, records you wore out, public schools that still had some infrastructure for the arts. When he says “feed,” the subtext is about diet: what kids consume becomes what they’re capable of desiring. If you normalize the quick hit - simplified entertainment, underfunded music programs, culture as background noise - you don’t just get different tastes, you get different cognitive muscles. Art becomes less a practice than a product.

The “next millennium” phrase matters, too. It’s late-20th-century anxiety with a jazz musician’s long view: a sense that cultural damage compounds quietly, then shows up as a generational flattening. Higgins isn’t arguing that the kids are doomed; he’s accusing the adults and institutions doing the feeding. It’s a warning wrapped in a sneer: starve art education now, and you’ll be shocked when the future can’t hear what you lost.