August 17, 2007

Freeing Popular Music From Baby Boomers

To the Editor:

David Shumway makes some important observations about how popular-music culture has changed significantly since the 1960s ("Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone?," The Chronicle Review, June 22). The fragmentation of popular music into discrete niches has meant that fewer performers are able to transcend their specific genres to attain a kind of cultural consensus that seemed possible in the past.

Yet Shumway's tired lament reveals less about why this change has