BLURRING THE LINES - A PRESCRIPTION BLUEGRASS EDITORIAL

As a child, my playmate once put ice cream and mud together and then tried to serve it as pie. We both thought we were creative geniuses but when she gave it to her mother, that combination didn't go over too well.

I once worked for an employer who liked to blur the lines between a full paycheck and a partial paycheck. I didn't like it a bit. I asked him if it would be OK for me to blur the lines on my 40 hour week. He didn't like that at all.

Most states have a bit of fudge room on the speed limit, but that is a grace and not an absolute. If you're doing 75 mph in a 70 mph zone … most of the time you're going to be safe, but if that's not the only line you've blurred, the officer making the stop can still write a speeding ticket along with any other violations he finds. So just because most of us do occasionally blur the lines on speed it doesn't make it right.

"There are times when blurring the lines a little bit doesn't hurt much and then there are times when anything but the exact is unacceptable."

When I decided to put up a fence, I wanted to follow the contour of the land and make the fence look aesthetically natural. My neighbor however, thought that was just a bit too much blurring of the lines and insisted on a surveyor to mark the actual property line where he wanted the fence located. Guess who won the battle of the line-blurring there? In college I blurred the lines one day in a group discussion and stated my opinion on something that I didn't think was fair treatment. It was one of those “we don't know who the guilty party is, so we'll punish everyone” type of situations. It was about an incident at the college radio station and it hurt me deeply since, although I was not the guilty party, I paid the deepest price. Naturally I was upset, disappointed and angry. I couldn't contain it and said something in class one night when the discussion turned to that subject. I guess I more than blurred the lines there, I crossed over the line and at the end of the semester when every single person in the class but me got an “A” and I got a “C” for the same work, I knew the instructor (who was also the radio station manager wielding out the unfair punishment) was exercising his power to blur the lines in his favor this time.

It seems in music everyone wants to blur the lines under the name of artistic freedom. This is nothing new. In the art world painters and sculptors don't really care whether they're branded as “Impressionists” or “Art Nouveau” or “Fine Art” or “Decorative” and many have blurred the lines between styles in the attempt to create something different and something salable. What they care about is creating something that is appreciated.

It seems in music we've lost some of that focus in the name of making money with the art. It's not always about creating something that is appreciated as much as it is about making a statement that “this can be done, like it or not.” Sometimes it's about trying to manipulate styles and combine things that should never be put together.

Blurring the lines in music happens all the time, and it happens naturally in the creative process. But when it's a forced mix of two drastically different styles, I'm afraid that what you get is mud and ice cream.

The soundtrack from “Oklahoma” done with bluegrass instruments, electric guitar, keyboards and drums and labeled “Broadgrass” (for Broadway and Bluegrass we suppose) is what we were fed this week for our listening pallet. I'd rather have the mud!