I believe that music probably emerged accidentally from our language ability. I have been thinking for a long time about the way our brains seem to generate patterns and compare them to incoming perceptions from the external world in order to identify what we are experiencing. There is significant survival advantage in being able to process spoken language rapidly and accurately. Those early hominids who were better able to understand and act on information exchanged during a hunt for large and dangerous prey would tend to live longer and leave more offspring with this ability to populate the future. This survival advantage would include other auditory signal processing like identifying the sounds of predators, for example. So we soon ended up with a great capacity for identifying patterns of tones and rhythm, a capacity that would also be the basis for music. Only about 4% of humans have significant impairment of their ability to appreciate music, and some forms of this amusical, if you will, impairment appear to be inheritable, so clearly genetically based. There is good evidence of implicit musical capability in the brain: Studies show that “the human brain unintentionally extrapolates expectations about impending auditory input. Even in non-musicians, the extrapolated expectations are consistent with music theory.”

I recently discovered that others have thought about the evolution of music in this way also and therefore refer to music as “auditory cheesecake:” We evolved a huge appetite for sugar and fat when those nutrients were scarce in our diet but valuable to obtain, so needed high motivation (an affinity for the taste of these nutrients) to assure we identified sources and consumed them. That evolved taste for sugar and fat drives us to consume cheesecake, something that never existed in nature---except perhaps in the Garden of Eden (grin). So too might we consider our taste for music to have emerged from our capacity to process the sounds of language.

Some argue that we have to be taught to appreciate music in a way that is not required to appreciate cheesecake. However, from my experience this is not true---I always enjoyed hearing music, never really recalling a period of my life when there was not music of some sort occurring. Creating music does require learning and that ability varies.

There is plenty of reinforcement of our capacity to appreciate music. It is estimated that approximately 40% of the lyrics of popular music relate to sex in one way or another. Players of music seems to attract more mating attention (if not simply because of the pleasure of music in and of itself, it certainly is a gauge of the reproductive desirability of the player, requiring confidence before a group, coordination, dexterity, memory skills, physical fitness), something many of us admit is at least a fringe benefit, if not outright motivation for playing. Shakespeare said in one of his plays, “If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it.”

I’ve noted elsewhere that there seems to be a tribal reinforcement of group membership at work in music at times, e.g., in rap, military cadences, martial and ceremonial occasions. This would include the idea of the preservation of history by oral transmission in lyric poetry, taught from elder to young and passed on in each generation. The use of long distance instruments like trumpets and drums for communications in battle might have paved the way for Louis Armstrong and Buddy Rich. I do believe, though, that the earliest instruments were percussion (clapping hands, objects clacked together, drums of hide stretched over wood, etc.) and voice, followed by simple wind instruments, carved wood or ivory flutes (which have been dated to 35,000 to 43,000 years old).

I think we of the rock genre may be the modern troubadours, creating and performing songs of love and life, idealized and raw, but always with intensity.

See The Economist for an article sourcing some of the quotes and statistical references I used:

http://www.economist.com/node/12795510

See also Wikipedia for a good article on prehistoric instruments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_music

And a great Wikipedia article on the cognitive neuroscience of music:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_neuroscience_of_music

It seem to me that today's "country" sounds more like rock, but I would say less like 70's rock, which featured a lot of very good players back in the day when you actually became popular partly because of your performance talent rather than the degree to which your physical appearance attracted men and women, i.e., I don't think the players are very good, exceptions would include Brad Paisley, who is one hell of a guitar player, as well as a real country music writer, performer (Whiskey Lullaby gotta put tears in anyone's eye). As my friend and colleague (played in Dog Canyon band with Bill in 1971) Bill Welsh told me, “Little Jimmy Dickens [he was about 4 feet tall in boots] would not make it in country today.”

True it is that humans, being primates (as well as souls, but that is a another matter) interact socially with one another using myriad visual cues---the regal alpha baboon looking serenely at the horizon as he is groomed by his adoring mate and respected by his troop (for the moment) no doubt is confident that everything is as it should be (and that is possibly why they have not developed television or other characteristics of an advanced civilization, grin). My observations here are not entirely sour grapes as it were, i.e., there have always been those who admired me on substance as well as appearance (perhaps a select group, grin). I am complaining more about what seems to me to have been a transformation of culture after about 1974 such that appearance of things began to triumph over substance to a degree not previously seen. This may be partly the natural outcome of the rejection of values that occurred in the 60's, leaving in its wake only the herd and its collective narcissism.

I watched a 2010 documentary where some new jack groups played at Abbey Road studios. One of the band members (a guitarist and vocalist) explicitly stated the new philosophy: "I don't play all that well, nor do I wish to, since that would constrain my creativity" (paraphrasing). This may be less true in current country than popular music (I can't even call it rock at this point), since you do have the country session guys making it into the bands, providing the technical talent to buttress the "talent" (the studio term for the vocalist that is selling the song to the purchasing public).

I don’t believe that "good" is a matter of popular vote though. If you define good in terms of sales then you are talking more about successful rather than a gauge by competent practitioners of the range and depth of capability and creativity an individual brings to the table with his instrument, voice, composition.

As far as the hypothetical battle between "old rockers" and current professional country players, this would be difficult to quantify, e.g., in my opinion there aren't any country players who could keep up with Jimmy Page or Steve Howe (and no one can keep up with Al Di Meola, but that is a matter of superhuman capability), but Billy Gibbons, or Eric Clapton or Mark Knopfler would be easy enough to follow note for note for any lead guitarist, whatever the genre. It is important to note that reproducing licks does not necessarily mean that they could be independently created. It is foolish to sneer at a guitarist simply because you find it easy to play what they play---the genius comes what notes you play, not how they are played.

The popularity of rap does not affect my understanding of how you properly rate the technical virtuosity of a musician, or my own personal reaction to this genre or any other (if I walk the road less travelled, still it is my own road). The popularity of rap is merely an indication that tribal reinforcement is still a purpose of music, loosely defined (normally I would consider music to require both rhythm and melody, but I am biased by my culture I suppose), i.e., rap tells the story of boys in the hood and thereby imparts some significance that would not otherwise be there (there have always been rougher parts of town, but few sang of it---Elvis was a bit sentimental in his take of the ghetto, grin).

The perception of art is highly subjective. Anything humans think about or experience is conditioned by their own life's experience and personality. This is true even in areas like science, where we purport to produce explanations that stand up to test by others, test by reason and possibly experiment. I say purport because when it comes down to fundamental beliefs, even professional scientists can be myopic. For example, the scientific community was outraged that a study (Feeling the Future...) which establishes that humans may at times sense future events before they happen was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The current scientific establishment believes (with religious fervor, ironically) that "the brain is just a computer made of meat" and that "we are all zombies; nobody is conscious." Any scientist who challenges those assumptions is attacked out of hand---because of the irrational bias of the scientific community on this subject. I do believe, however, that if we work at it, we can at least be aware of our biases---and the influence of the ego, which, for obviously good reasons in terms of survival, "may need to impress, dominate or control and sees others as either threats or tools."