For one thing, fetishizing skill is a fairly small component of contemporary popular music culture. …As a musician (disclosure!), I expect a musician’s judgment of another musician’s skill level to be more accurate and finer-grained than the judgment of a non-musician.
That’s only because contemporary popular/consumer culture has gone even further on that same slippery slope, in allowing the sheer force of familiarity and public image to substitute for even the most trifling amount of actual skill. But when a musician ‘judges’ the skill-level of a fellow participating musician in any contingent context, she is not thereby establishing or contributing to a single “well-defined” hierarchy of skill, nor is she making that hierarchy “more apparent” in any real sense. That’s entirely consumer culture’s doing.
That’s only because contemporary popular/consumer culture has gone even further on that same slippery slope, in allowing the sheer force of familiarity and public image to substitute for even the most trifling amount of actual skill. But when a musician ‘judges’ the skill-level of a fellow participating musician in any contingent context, she is not thereby establishing or contributing to a single “well-defined” hierarchy of skill, nor is she making that hierarchy “more apparent” in any real sense. That’s entirely consumer culture’s doing.