it's an important debate - my belief, and I've said it on this forum before, is that there is a generation of musicians who can talk the talk but have musically little to say - they've go the musical psychobabble down, they love talking about process, but they've confused mannerism with style, gimmick with idea - sorta like the whole drone thing, and a lot of the free-folk I've heard falls under this, too - it's kinda like the good news/bad news part of the internet and the proliferation of cheap digital technology - when everybody can do it everybody WILL do it, and a lot of it is just plainly bad music - too many short cuts are taken, not enough self-education takes place, there is too much cultural name-dropping without a real understanding of what prior music says or means -
and I would venture to say that Braxton feels EXACTLY the same way that I do (he actually said same when I met with him last summer) -