In the Beginning

I've been to the Experience Music Project's Pop conference for five of the seven years it's been held. It's always a pleasure, by far my favorite event of this kind. I inevitably come away having learned about a lot of interesting music and its accompanying history. But I had the thought, while sitting in one of this afternoon's panels, that the cumulative experience of coming year after year has paid off less in specific knowledge, though I'm always grateful to be turned on to new material, than in a general lesson that has been imparted over and over and over: the search for origins, if pursued doggedly enough, ramifies to the point where the concept of originality loses its luster.