Thanks for proving my point. You aren't hearing 80% of what's there if you truly think that. "Oh he plays fast, he must be a generic shredder". The guy is never resting on his laurels and just playing over simple 3 or 4 chord patterns. His compositions are pretty involved and interesting and CATCHY, and that is the real draw. The amazing playing just facilitates and adds to that. I mean, listen to the video above starting at 3:30. That is funky as hell. Dude wrote that at 20. And of course shredding didn't even really exist in his time, so if he sounds "generic" to your untrained ears, it's only because so many behind him tried to copy what he did. But that fusion era of the late 60s through mid/late 70s was an extremely fertile time for music when a TON of amazing interesting and creative stuff was being done. Elliot Smith clone #983 from 2017 is probably already forgotten about 3 weeks into 2018.
That may be true, but maybe you're not knowledgeable enough to realize the ratios have vastly changed. I'm guessing you're either pretty young, or just very limited in what you listen to (or very temporal). Having 20% of mainstream music be awesome instead of 10% still means there was twice as much great mainstream music.
Good thing I didn't say that.
I mean, if you mean "difficult" as in physically laborious, then maybe not. But I think it's difficult to find good music now because you have to wade through so much crap to find one good band, and guess what, since that band operates entirely on their own disposable income from their day jobs in most cases, they are good for maybe 1 or at most 2 albums, and then the realities of "real life" creep in, and they either break up or just otherwise take forever to put something else out. But I lived through the late 80s and early 90s, when MTV along with whatever else it was playing, would feed me a steady diet of great music. Radio too. It was an entirely passive experience, except trying to catch the end card or DJ announcement to find out what THAT was just now. I saw the Would? video precisely 1 time early in the morning as I was getting ready for school in 91 (I would eat my cereal and turn on MTV). After that I was hooked and knew AIC was a band to check out, which was cemented when the Them Bones video came out a few months later. Oh guess what else would get played at the same time? Temple of the Dog, Metallica, GnR, Nirvana, etc... Like damn near every band they would play either was or became a legendary band that we all still talk about today. If you didn't live through that or don't have the perceptual depth to appreciate it, you could never possibly understand. But I did, and I have the depth to understand that the 70s must've been EVEN CRAZIER, because the 60s and 70s weren't so much rebelling against what came before, as just expanding and exploring for the sake of exploration, adventure, and creativity that was just clearly in the air back then. Maybe they needed to Vietnam and Nixon to spur that free thinking and rejection of authority and arbitrary rules. Even though things today are demonstrably MUCH worse, I'm not sure that spirit is there in quite the same way, or at least not allowed or encouraged to flourish as it was then. The 90s were more of a reaction to the horrible aquanet metal stuff of poison and the like and the ubiquitous gated drums and sadly misused and maligned DX7, but also a sidechain continuation of the punk reveolution of the late 70s as well as some of the singer songwriter stuff from back then like Joni Mitchell, etc... (REM, etc...).
So maybe it's not "hard" if you don't consider listening intently to 1000 bands to find a handful of good ones "hard', but 25 or 50 years ago, you literally could not avoid finding new great bands. And you didn't have to avoid radio if you wanted to keep your sanity (well, some songs certainly got overplayed still, but most of what was played was at least good to begin with, before being worn out).
I mean, after a pretty solid 25+ years of pretty intensive and open minded musical exploration, I am STILL finding great stuff from the 60s and 70s that I hadn't gotten around to yet. It's literally an endless mine of treasure. Sure, today I find the occasional nugget, but to pretend it's the same as before is silly. And I am not averse to new music. I love stuff like Kimbra, Bent Knee, Mastodon, Foals, etc... But they largely stand tall in a sea of mediocrity that surrounds them.
Ambition is trying to do something interesting and different and not just retread stuff that's been done a million times before.
First of all, Al actually helped CREATE fusion as we know it. So as a 63 year old, I don't think he's to be expected to create more genres from scratch for our entertainment. So of course he continues to work more or less within the style he helped create, because that's where his creative instincts have lead him. I admittedly haven't kept up with some of his newer stuff (although I've seen him twice in the last few years and his playing is still excellent), the first 25 years of his career (which he's now 45 years into) has probably 15 albums or so of fairly varied material, ranging from blazing fusion like the majority of his first 2 or 3 albums, to many flamenco or tango inspired acoustic oriented pieces (the whole guitar trio thing, his Piazzolla stuff, World Sinfonia, etc...), to his more modern/contemporary jazz/world albums like Kiss My Axe and Flesh on Flesh, down to the completely introspective Cielo e Terra. So if one thinks Al is a "generic shredder", I can say with authority you haven't really listened.
As far as hiphop, there is some good stuff out there, surely. But the music is not ambitious by definition. Almost entirely, it consists of a 4 or 8 bar "beat" often with some sample of a hit song from THE 60s THROUGH THE 90s, married to a drum machine, with a guy rhyming over it. It's been that way for basically 35 years. Hiphop is nearly as old as fusion, and as near as I can tell, almost everyone in that field is still trying to reach what these 2 guys already did.
Ambitious career-wise sure. They almost fetishize "the hustle" (and there's probably some racial politics and history there beyond the scope of this conversation), but musically? Rarely that I've seen.
