The Logic Off Topic list

>As for sociology and the relevance of class to music business success, well,
>you can count the beans, the heads and the ancestry all you want, but for me
>what counts is personal skill, attitude and motivation, which you can
>develop in all kinds of family environments. If I was looking for partners
>for a project or people to employ for a session I would be thinking 'Can
>this guy's playing cut it? How does he handle disagreements? Is he
>reliable?' and I wouldn't care one small bag of monkey vomit what per capita
>income his father had or the sort of school he went to. It is inevitable in
>the music business that you go for the people that you know, as so much
>relies on personal relationships. The people who have the technical and
>personal skills _and_ bother to get to know the right people _and_ manage to
>get the strokes of luck make it, and you can't apply the same procedures as
>if you were hiring clerical staff for a government department.

Yes sure but it is a fact that it is easier to communicate with 
people from your own cultural background.  By choice I mainly work 
with Japanese artists because I don't want to relegate myself to one 
of the cliques of the much too ghettoized foreign community here in 
Tokyo.  I get along just great with most of the Japanese people I 
work with and members of the various groups in the foreign community 
as well but it is always interesting for me when occasionally I do 
work with an American like myself and suddenly am reminded about all 
the unspoken understandings you have when you are dealing with 
someone from your own background.