There are plenty of good shows I’ve seen from street performers. Just stay out of the thoroughfare and don’t harass people and we’ll be fine. There are certainly a lot of talent-less fuck wit archetypes I could come up with though. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• Teenager who just discovered contact juggling
• Hipster on a unicycle who makes his own mustache wax. No juggling, no nothing, just a dude with a very groomed mustache
• Burn out who thinks if you replace metal riffs with minor chords they’re excellent soulful ballads
• Concerningly skinny geek doing geek shit. Like actual geeks, not mislabeled nerds
• College age stoner who thinks that people want to watch him play hacky sack
• Raver trying to justify their light up hula hoop purchases by performing for sober people while no music is playing

I hate most of the musicians too. I think that there is a pretty wide variety of reasons that the world would benefit from greater education in music. It won’t be for everybody, but neither is trigonometry and that’s pretty common in education curriculums.

The bar is extremely fucking low here. People are just way too easily impressed by someone being able to play an instrument at ALL. They can’t tell when a multi-stringed instrument is out of tune (and neither can the fucking busker), and they certainly can’t pick out the good from the bad.

Then you get these goddamn mediocre as shit buskers all chuffed up on their Dunning-Kruger high. I imagine the thought is something like: “People clapped and cheered, there’s money in my hat. I must be amazing at this!”. I am completely fucking unimpressed by your ability to play three simple chords on your dollar store toy piano while absolutely disrespecting a Johnny Cash cover of a NiN song.