Neil Portnow Importance of Celebrating Music

I think it continues to be vital. For one thing, we live in an age of very fast-paced change and expectations and attention span so people have a tendency to take many things for granted, including media. Whether it’s films or television or dance or music, the Arts in general. I think anything we can do that promotes the Arts on a level beyond just being crassly commercial is very important. Again, our show is seen in 170 countries around the world by hundreds of millions of people so it’s a great opportunity to get the message out about music, and about culture, and about art in a dignified and a classy kind of way.

In terms of the current state of music, I think the state of music from a creative standpoint is very healthy. Having been a musician as a kid growing up and having been in the industry for my whole career of thirty plus years, I think there’s always been a creative spark there. It has its ebbs and flows, it has its peaks and valleys, and it’s all very intertwined to me with the cultural situation within the country and within the world and a reflection, very often of the times, politically, sociologically. So again, just mirroring those kinds of times. You have times which are pretty vibrant and exciting and innovative, and forward thinking and then you have times which are kind of flat and maybe a little more dull and predictable but nevertheless it’s always changing and there’s always a cycle. In my mind there’s never going to be a time when that’s going to stop, it’s just a matter of if you take a snapshot at any particular year it may be a high point or a midpoint but it’s always a point that’s going forward. I think the creative climate is quite healthy. The most recent, I would say, evolution of a big scale it the hip-hop evolution, which is now, certainly not a fringe or a niche genre. It’s in the mainstream of American culture; it’s in the mainstream of world music at this point. For me the measuring stick of that is you know when you see Madison Avenue adopting anything, in terms of advertising, that it’s hit the mainstream. If you listen to the soundtrack to corporate America today, it’s pretty interesting how much of it is hip-hop oriented. You see the fashion statements that are made, not so much in LA or New York or the major fashion centers of America, but you go to the midsection of the country and you see fashion, which emanated from the hip-hop culture. That tells me it’s in the mainstream. But that’s a big change over the past 15 years or so. Where that all goes, who knows but I think it’s interesting to see it developing and certainly as there’s a little more political interest from young people in what’s going on in this country and around the world, you tend to see that having an influence on what happens in music as well.