Drummers getting the axe

Beat at their own game by Geoff Boucher (Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2003)

This article is, on the face of it, about how the rise of drum machines and other technology sidelined session musicians, but I am more interested by its depiction of musicians' lives more generally: those that work in car dealerships, survive on a pension, work for sitcoms or are simply forgotten. There are those who embraced new technology and adapted, others who could not or would not change and were left by the wayside. I like this because it shows us again how the life of the average musician is entwined with that of all other average people, a fact often forgotten because of the abundance of glossy images, gold and platinum plaques and TV shows that seem to place a select few stars outside of our world.

The parallels are of course easy to draw between musicians superseded by TR-808s and auto-workers displaced by factory machines. Similarly, the following generations of musicians grew up in a machine-tooled environment and see the new required skill-set as natural, be it The Roots's ?uestlove being both a drummer, a producer (in the hip-hop sense) and a DJ or some kid casually reproducing drum'n'bass beats that first sprang from machines.

I came across this article here, a round-up of good 2003 music writing.