Faith & Spirit Quote by Mickey Hart

Mickey Hart is quietly torching the default prestige system of music: speed, difficulty, pedigree. By saying “best music is impossible to define,” he isn’t dodging judgment so much as shifting the courtroom. The usual evidence - virtuosity, training, technical complexity - can prove competence, even brilliance, but not meaning. Hart’s jab lands because it targets a familiar cultural reflex: we treat hard-to-play as automatically profound, then outsource our taste to experts.

The subtext is almost political. “Virtuoso” is a gatekeeping word; it smuggles in institutions, conservatories, canons, and the idea that some listeners are more qualified to feel. Hart counters with a criterion that sounds squishier but is actually tougher: “reflect the soul of a people.” That’s a demand for social function, for music that carries memory, labor, ritual, grief, joy - music that can’t be separated from the community that made it. He’s arguing that greatness isn’t an individual flex; it’s a shared frequency.

Context matters: Hart is a percussionist steeped in the Grateful Dead’s everything-is-material ethos and in global drumming traditions where rhythm is communal infrastructure, not a soloist’s Olympic event. His line reads like an artist who’s spent decades watching audiences become congregations. Great music, for him, isn’t the cleanest execution; it’s the piece that tells you who “we” are, even if “we” can’t put it into words.