Art & Creativity Quote by Kevin Eubanks

There is a quiet alarm baked into Eubanks's phrasing: not that music is dying, but that certain kinds of musical authority are being algorithmically outvoted. “Serious musicians” is a loaded label, and he knows it. It signals craft, depth, and a commitment to the long game, while also inviting the eye-roll of a culture trained to distrust gatekeeping. The line works because it walks that tightrope: it’s both a defense of musicianship and a critique of the systems that decide what gets heard.

The key move is “have a voice.” He’s not claiming serious players can’t make music; he’s saying they’re being denied the conditions that turn work into presence: bandwidth, platforms, budgets, attention. In a streaming-and-scroll economy, voice increasingly means visibility, and visibility is purchased through marketing cycles, viral formats, and brand-ready narratives. Seriousness, by contrast, often reads as slow, demanding, and hard to clip into 15 seconds.

Eubanks’s context matters. As a guitarist with deep jazz credentials and a long mainstream perch on late-night TV, he’s seen both sides: the tradition where mastery earns esteem, and the entertainment apparatus where relevance is manufactured. His complaint isn’t nostalgia for smoky clubs; it’s frustration with a marketplace that rewards immediacy over interpretation. The subtext is pointed: when the loudest “voice” wins, music risks becoming content, and musicians risk becoming influencers who happen to play.