for all we know, justin bieber could develop into the next stevie wonder. but we'll probablly never know b/c if a few of his albums flop the label will drop him.
and beyond that, there is no scene to cultivate the type of talent that you saw in the 60s or 70s.
take motown, for instance. all those session musicians... they were jazz musicians. so when those guys took stevie under his wing, to show him different chords or whatever.... stevie was soaking in the experience of A LOT of talent.
and MJ, he was watching all of this. so when he, who was already a groomed talent when he got to motown... got a little older and was watching stevie record those classic albums... he soaked all of that in, too.
when you think about an ensembal like p-funk... that combined doo wop vocal chops, but then combined that with james brown's horns and rhythm section, and combine that with the fact that you also had classiclaly trained musicians.. and combine THAT with the fact that all of these musicians were regularly hanigng out and jamming w/ other musicians in the local area.... it becomes clear that an enesembel like that couldn't happen today.
and that's really not the artists of today's fault. there is no scene where musicians just get together like that and jam.
the closest thing we had to that was in the early days of hip hop, when rappers were just playing small clubs together, soaking in all the talent.
and the music that came out of that reflected that scene.
anyway, that was just a very long winded way of saying that i agree with you. lol