Cage's comments were often designed to either cause some sort of debate or establish his place in a polemic. The remarks he made in the aforementioned article seem largely ill-founded, overly general, and smack of a feeling of superiority. Cage's statement:

"The form of jazz suggests too frequently that people are talking - that is, in succession - like in a panel discussion or a group of individuals simply imposing their remarks without responsing to each other.

That point is true of bad jazz, or for that matter any ensemble where the point is interaction but the performers aren't paying attention. For one to say this about jazz as a rule is at best naive. At worst, ignorant.

If I am going to listen to a speech then I would like to hear some words. ... The person responsible for keeping the beat in jazz does not slow it down or speed it up, does he? Now, when we have something, do we always have to have this measurement of it?

Because the notion of swinging is based on a pulse -- how the rhythms feel over that pulse, in relationship to that pulse, in contrast to that pulse.

I think that, if you examine these things, which you think you like about jazz, and then apply them to your daily life - that is to say outside the field of jazz music altogether - you will discover that they are thing you really have no use for.

I have a lot of use for interaction between interesting people in my daily life, Johnny. I don't have a lot of use for paying $ to see people sitting at the piano and not playing.

... If [the main premise of jazz is the regular time], then I don't want any aprt of it because I don't see it as relating to anything I can use. I don't mean in music, I mean use in my life. The clock is okay ticking away second by second: It is useful if I have to catch a train, but I don't think that catching a train is one of the most interesting aspects of my living. I think those times that I am most full with the enjoyment of life are precisely those times when the ticking of the clock, the passing of time, is forgotten. So, likewise, with measurement. The reiterated beat in jazz reminds me of all those aspects of my life which don't seem to be the most interesting.

Saying any one premise of jazz is the main premise means everybody who makes jazz builds it by the same rules and designs it for the same purpose, from Charles Mingus through to Chuck Mangione. Which points right to ignorance of jazz on Cage's part.

Rock and roll is more interesting to me than jazz. ... The impression is gives is not one of discourse but of everybody in agreement ... There is no discussion. This business of one thing being free while something else is not free bothers me. Everyone seems to be together in rock and roll music. ... It's a curious thing, but the reason the beat doesn't oppress me as much in rock and roll as it does in jazz, I think, is because the volume is so high.  In other words, one's attention is taken away from the beat by the amplitude. The volume of sound is so great that it blurs, as it were, the fact of the beat. Any other ways that one might discover to blur the fact of the beat would increase, actually, the rhythmic interest, as least as far as I am concerned, of the music being made, whether it was jazz or not. ...

This smacks of somebody rationalizing his way to a system theory. Making a general statement about rock'n'roll that way leads me to ask "Which records are you talking about?", because the ways and means of the Jefferson Airplane are very different from those of the Beatles or the Byrds.

[W]hen time is organized by the regular beat, we ... lose essentially the rhythm."

Good thing James Brown didn't feel this way. sh np: Howlin' Wolf (the one with the rocking chair on the front)