Mud & Ice Cream! - A Prescription Bluegrass Editorial!

As a child, my playmate and I 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 when it comes to avoiding a citation. 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 quite a lot of people do occasionally blur the lines on highway speed it doesn't make it right.

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?

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.

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 when it happens naturally in the creative process, it can be a new and exciting delight. But when it's a forced mix of two drastically different styles, I'm afraid that what we often get is mud and ice cream.