"Because the stuff that they feed kids now, they'll have a bunch of idiots in the next millennium as far as art and culture is concerned"
About this Quote
A master of swing and subtlety hears a future dulled by what passes for nourishment. Billy Higgins is railing against a cultural diet engineered for speed, profit, and passivity. The phrase the stuff they feed kids now treats media, schooling, and commercial entertainment like junk food: engineered to be addictive, cheap to produce, and stripped of the complexity that builds taste. He worries that the result will not be a lack of intelligence in general, but a stunting of artistic literacy, the capacity to discern, feel, and think through culture.
As a drummer who helped launch Ornette Colemans revolution and anchored countless Blue Note sessions, Higgins knew how demanding and generous music could be. Jazz thrives on apprenticeship, communal listening, and patience; it rewards attention that develops over time. By the late 20th century he was watching arts education erode, radio consolidate, and television and advertising crowd out local scenes. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, budget cuts to school music programs, and an entertainment industry ruled by marketing all signaled to him that kids were being offered spectacle over craft, product over process.
The blunt word idiots carries an older resonance too. In ancient Greek, an idiotes was a private person disengaged from public life. Higgins is warning that when a society withholds deep, varied, and challenging art from the young, it raises citizens who are culturally isolated, unable to participate meaningfully in a shared conversation. The cost is not only bad taste; it is a thinner civic imagination.
He did more than warn. In Los Angeless Leimert Park, he co-founded the World Stage to pass on the skills, history, and joy of improvised music. The remark is prescriptive as much as critical: feed children better. Give them access to elders, instruments, rehearsal space, and difficult beauty. Without that diet, the next millennium will inherit technical savvy and cultural malnutrition.
As a drummer who helped launch Ornette Colemans revolution and anchored countless Blue Note sessions, Higgins knew how demanding and generous music could be. Jazz thrives on apprenticeship, communal listening, and patience; it rewards attention that develops over time. By the late 20th century he was watching arts education erode, radio consolidate, and television and advertising crowd out local scenes. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, budget cuts to school music programs, and an entertainment industry ruled by marketing all signaled to him that kids were being offered spectacle over craft, product over process.
The blunt word idiots carries an older resonance too. In ancient Greek, an idiotes was a private person disengaged from public life. Higgins is warning that when a society withholds deep, varied, and challenging art from the young, it raises citizens who are culturally isolated, unable to participate meaningfully in a shared conversation. The cost is not only bad taste; it is a thinner civic imagination.
He did more than warn. In Los Angeless Leimert Park, he co-founded the World Stage to pass on the skills, history, and joy of improvised music. The remark is prescriptive as much as critical: feed children better. Give them access to elders, instruments, rehearsal space, and difficult beauty. Without that diet, the next millennium will inherit technical savvy and cultural malnutrition.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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