Parenting & Family Quote by Billy Higgins

There’s a drummer’s sting in Billy Higgins’s line: it swings like a compliment to the world, then lands like an accusation. “So much beautiful music” sets up abundance, not scarcity. The robbery isn’t about supply; it’s about access. Higgins is pointing at the invisible hands between art and ears - gatekeepers, markets, schooling, media, even well-meaning adults - that decide what young people get to hear and, by extension, what they get to imagine.

As a working jazz musician who lived through the genre’s shift from popular dance music to something increasingly sidelined, Higgins isn’t being nostalgic for a golden age. He’s naming a cultural narrowing: the way programming, radio formats, and industry incentives funnel kids toward the loudest, most easily sold options, while the deeper catalog becomes a private language for the initiated. “Robbed” is intentionally hot. It reframes aesthetic deprivation as theft, a moral crime, not a matter of taste. The subtext: when you deny kids a wide sonic vocabulary - the complexity of jazz, the ache of blues, the patience of classical, the weirdness of experimental sounds - you’re also denying them models of feeling and thinking that don’t fit the algorithm.

The line also carries a musician’s protective tenderness. Higgins isn’t scolding kids; he’s defending them. He’s arguing that cultural inheritance is a right, and that letting it slip into obscurity isn’t just unfortunate. It’s a quiet, daily kind of violence against curiosity.