Welcome to one of the most active flamenco sites on the Internet. Guests can read most posts but if you want to participate click here to register.
This site is dedicated to the memory of Paco de Lucía, Ron Mitchell, Guy Williams, Linda Elvira, Philip John Lee, Craig Eros, Ben Woods, David Serva and Tom Blackshear who went ahead of us.
We receive 12,200 visitors a month from 200 countries and 1.7 million page impressions a year. To advertise on this site please contact us.
Sean, you've posted several of these videos to show how the purity / essence of flamenco is being lost over time, and that you don't approve of this dilution of a deep art form. I agree with you that it's sad to see the sophistication of older material being lost and watered down. I experience the same with Argentine tango where there is a movement of people that are now huge fans of electronic tango music (GoTan Project, etc.) and consider the tango music of the 1920's to the 1940's to be "old people music" or "what you'd hear in a black and white movie". I find the tango from that era to be all that I need because of how rich it is, and even though there's probably only a thousand songs more or less from that era, I never get bored of them.
However, those tango geniuses have died (D'Arienzo, Pugliese, etc.) and there are some new orchestras that try to keep that style alive but with some injection of modern sounds to result in a reasonably balanced music which I actually don't mind and at times really enjoy. I'd like to see flamenco go in that direction because the older days are gone and they won't come back.
Also, the humans of 2020 are not the same as those from the 1900's etc. and they won't come back either. With social media, cell phones, etc. and other technologies, people's brains and attention spans have been hijacked faster than the human brain has been able to evolve, and it's resulting in several problems and just a lack of focus to be able to generate or appreciate material like what you seem to like (as do I). At the end of the day, there are people who still need to sustain a living and their vitality from music/art, and regardless of how strong they are, these are difficult times, and being creative is getting harder over the years as more and more things have "already been done". Ultimately, music/art is work, and it needs to put food on the table, so "desperate men do desperate things" to avoid starving and to afford feeding their families.
I am grateful more and more that when I asked my guitar teacher and my English teacher when I was in my early 20's about what they thought of me becoming a professional guitarist or an English teacher, they both met me with "You're crazy. Go to medical school". I lost a number of my earlier years in life because of medical school and training, and they'll never come back, but thankfully now I have a reasonable financial base that affords me stability and peace of mind to be able to reduce my medical work hours and increase my artistic work hours in a balanced way to where it's not "too late" yet in my life to lead somewhat of a dual career but always with a fallback plan that is more or less guaranteed (i.e. seeing patients).