As a Brit who generally seems to like a lot of unskilful music, I
feel I have to point out that if you're as unmusical as me you simply
CAN'T TELL when someone is a 'good' or 'bad' instrumentalist, so my
preferences might well be purely accidental. I think they're not,
though - the pop discourse I grew up on had a big influence on me in
two ways. First off was people telling me the music I liked was crap
because it was unmusical and too easy (eg. synthpop, programmed
music, pop) - so to counter this there was a second strain of
thinking picked up from the NME whereby musicianship was somehow
suspicious or laughable outside certain carefully constrained non-
rock contexts.
That second strain of thinking I gradually realised was itself a
conservative holdover from an era long past - but deprogramming takes
a lot of time and effort. I'm probably never going to want to take
quality musicianship as anything other than a 'neutral' quality - can
make for good music, can make for bad - because the evidence of my
ears is overwhelmingly that low-quality musicianship or 'easy'
compositional/creative practises can move me so much.
― Tom, Monday, 8 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link