Time & Perspective Quote by George Crumb

Crumb’s complaint isn’t just that newspapers covered rock; it’s that the cultural gatekeepers he grew up trusting had started treating pop novelty as civic knowledge. He names the New York Times and Time because they’re not niche tastemakers. They’re supposed to be the places where a society decides what counts as “serious” attention. When those platforms chase “the latest rock group,” the word latest does the real work: a jab at fashion, churn, and the media’s hunger for the new over the deep.

The line “which I’m sure is exciting to some people” is polite on the surface, but it’s a scalpel. Crumb isn’t denying rock’s power; he’s refusing to fight a culture war on rock’s terms. His target is editorial triage: finite column inches, finite curiosity. The subtext is an accusation that modern mass media doesn’t merely reflect taste, it manufactures it by narrowing the map. If coverage becomes a spotlight fixed on a few commercially legible genres, then whole ecosystems of listening - contemporary classical, experimental music, non-Western traditions, even the harder-to-package corners of jazz - get coded as irrelevant.

Context matters: Crumb came of age in a 20th-century American scene where avant-garde composers were still wrestling for public legitimacy, often buoyed by universities and foundations more than record sales. As rock ascended to the position once held by symphonies and opera as the default “music story,” composers like Crumb saw not just a shift in popularity but a shift in what institutions considered culturally literate. His gripe is about attention as power: who gets to be heard, archived, reviewed, and taken seriously.