musical competitions

does anybody else find the notion of musical competitions a little weird? i just got a press release talking about the three-time national flatpicking champion. and there's the blues guitar competitions. five time winner! it just seems like the kind of thing that's not really a contest. keeping score when it comes to music seems a little like going to a professional basketball game where they don't. i know that there's a grand history of competition w/r/t to classical music in terms of auditions and things like that. there's the shred-off at the end of the movie crossroads, where ralph macchio ironically beats the pants off steve vai by returning to his classical roots after eschweing them for most of the picture. it just goes to show you: soul may be great, but it can't beat steve vai. for that you need fireworks.

but take freestlye or dj battles. there's a certain camaraderie there and i think off-the-cuff freestlye battles can be immensely entertaining if they're good, but it seems like when you make them institutional it loses something. is it just the inherent juxtaposition of rules and combat?

the international songwriting competition. of course, some songs are better than others, but it seems wrong to then extrapolate that out to a contest. symptom of our american desire to quantify everything? desire to have some authority tell us what's good for us?