Why People Who Criticize Music for "Lack of Originality" Are Idiots

I often read criticisms of musical artists which focus on a perceived "lack of orginality." I think those people are morons. Here's why:

Before the advent of the printing press, the very transmittal of knowledge required skillful copying. In fact, before world wide adoption of the printing press, many cultures would criticize anything that wasn't a direct copy of something already in existence.

Copying is more integral to the very idea of knowledge and art then is originality. What is the point of originality? 99% of "originality" driven by the ego of an individual who simply doesn't realize that their vision has no relationship to anyone other then themselves. On the other hand, if something "new" is disseminated, it's very dissemination REQUIRES copying- whether that be mechanical production of compact discs or other artists duplicating their sound. The fact is that the later "copying" validates the original, and thus serves as a positive force for the original artist.

This criticism has nothing to do with marketing music or record sales or anything like that, it's more about the way individuals regard the world around them. The trend in modernity is to focus on the new, the novel, like crows pecking at shiny objects. This is a recent and arguably harmful trend. For most of history, humans who actually thought about things like religion, law or art valued repetition and copying. In my opinion, that old approach is more "human" and closer to who we are as beings, then is the new.

The very rate at which those reading this blog adopt and discard new ideas is a problem that is exacerbated in every way by technology- and such has been the case since the printing press. For every positive new idea there are a dozen harmful ideas and a million irrelevant ideas. Same for music, same for books. We need less, of everything.

Those critics are nothing more then a sad echo of Herman Melville's morose clerk Bartleby the Scrivener, responding to each succesive artistic endeavor with a pouty sniff and a muttered "I would prefer not to."

So to those who criticize music for "not being original" or "sounding too much like x." I say- maybe it is your written opinion that the world does not need.