musicianship?

Janitor at Punk School? Isn't that dangerously close to being Noodles from The Offspring?

Someone played me some Yngwie Malmsteen once. I was appalled.

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.