Art & Creativity Quote by Jim Messina

Messina’s line captures a familiar pop-history pivot: the moment a genre becomes less a living scene than a comforting costume. The dismissive tenderness of “nice little folk record” does double duty. It’s affectionate enough to keep the collaborator relationship intact, but it also shrinks folk into something quaint, safe, almost hobbyist. By the time he says “folk music had come to an end,” he’s not announcing the literal death of acoustic guitars; he’s claiming that folk’s mainstream cultural function - protest, communal storytelling, the idea of authenticity as a counterweight to commercial pop - had already been absorbed, packaged, and moved on.

The real engine of the quote is Messina positioning himself as a translator between eras. “The next step, the next generation” isn’t just advice; it’s a mandate to evolve in public, to chase relevance without seeming to chase it. Coming out of the late-60s/early-70s churn where folk-rock, country-rock, and singer-songwriter polish were rapidly becoming the new radio language, Messina is advocating an upgrade in production, songwriting posture, and market positioning. Folk, in this reading, isn’t an aesthetic so much as a ceiling.

Subtextually, it’s also a power move: the producer-musician framing the artist’s initial instinct as naïve and his own as historically savvy. Messina casts himself as the guy who can hear the cultural clock ticking - and who expects Kenny to stop looking backward for purity and start sounding like the future.