Too often we decide something is wonderful just because it’s familiar. We think our family member should have gotten that job no matter what. We think no girl/boy is good enough for our precious little Billy/Suzy. We visit a huge city for the second time, and we want to go back to the same two restaurants we visited during the first trip. Regardless how well they did in medical school, doctors sometimes come highly recommended because they pray with patients. A dentist once came highly recommended to me because “he is such a nice man.” (And sure enough, as I endured my first visit with him, I discovered that he really is a nice man – and a terrible dentist.)
We start looking for our six degrees of separation right away. I lived in Houston for 14 years, and a stranger wanted to know if I knew their nephew, who lives 30 miles out of town. (Not likely to know him, no.) We also try to box something huge into our own limited understanding, such as thinking an entire state revolves around one city. During my years in Houston, a casual conversation with a Presbyterian stranger would usually go something like this:
“So, Joby, where are you from?”
“I’m from Statesville, North Carolina.”
“Oh, is that near Asheville???”
“Well, it’s 100 miles east of Asheville on I-40.”
“Oh, we have a house in Montreat [all Presbyterians do], and we just love Asheville. Where did you go to college?”
“Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina.”
“Oh, is that near Asheville???”
…and so it would go. The remaining questions had to do with snow skiing and other things an organ student would be ill-advised to attempt.
In the music world, talent can be overlooked in preference to the familiar, bigger name. It is sort of the artistic equivalent of the rich getting richer. The famous get more famous while the talented keep struggling to be heard (not to slight here the famous who are also talented). This is borne out by the enormous amount of drivel we hear in pop music today, which is also another example, I confess, of the familiar being “better.” (I prefer 80s rock/pop over anything I hear in today’s music.)
As artists, we are charged with responsibility for our own publicity and press. That is a half-time job, and few people will do it for us without taking all our profits. But as audience members, we are charged with the responsibility of listening to others' work and deciding for ourselves how wonderful it really is. You kind of have to ignore some of the press sometimes -- "renowned" is not that informative a word.
I once heard a fine(?) example of local, homegrown, trite love ballad songwriting. The emcee exclaimed during the rapturous applause, “Not bad for a 19-year-old, huh!” I couldn't help my inner response: “Neither was Julius Reubke.”