Music is not something anyone can dislike, although rap may be a candidate for that singular distinction. Rap is art, of course, because its most violent and shocking aspects are mirror images that reflect the threat of inhumanity, a threat that followed people out of the caves and remains there in our peripheral vision.

We're coming down this week from a Bluegrass music high, wondering why we like it so much. The fiddling contest that has the unique edge of offering the governor's cup for the state is held in a valley where every breeze is a blessing and in the hottest, steamiest time of the year. There's the occasional whiff of sulfur springs (or that's what we hope it is!) and the bonus of profuse sweating simply adds to the "atmosphere." The challenge is to rise above all that and appear unwilted.

Why would about 2,000 people put themselves through this, not to mention the absence of parking that we've come to expect to be within 15 feet of our seats?

The answer's complicated. And that's a hint.

Done right, Bluegrass music is complicated, as complicated as any of the old European composers ever were. It is difficult to play. Ask any sweaty musician at Rough River! The heat and humidity do strange things to delicate instruments, sometimes real damage. It is also difficult to listen to; it requires almost rapt attention, but it gets that from audiences simply because it is difficult. Players and listeners know that the music expresses every emotion known to humans, and it's real.

The reality of the music is a major part of its appeal. When it began with Bill Monroe, The Stanley Brothers and others, it was hillbilly -- too down to earth, too hokey. It competed with music of the country. But as country music has become citified -- squeezed through wires, transistors and mother boards -- Bluegrass has come into its own. While country used to be cool, it has gotten too big for its britches, just another light show, too loud and too politically correct. It's background now, under control and suited up.

Bluegrass, on the other hand, has hung onto its roots. In this real music is the secret of life. That secret is that life passes you by if you only watch it or stand around and comment on it as an ignorant critic. The route to happiness does not come out of a wall plug; it isn't something that needs batteries. How does one say it? The difference is like being in bed with somebody wonderful versus watching two people in bed on the tube. You can be satisfied with one, frustrated by the other.

It was probably inevitable that country music would take the rhinestone route it's taking. Life in the country has become pretty much like life in the city, because people in the country think behaving like city people is better and city people think living in the country is some kind of bucolic haven. Since both ideas are wrong, we can chalk up the result as McCountry and McCity, a state of not being able to tell a car radio station in Wyoming from one in Arkansas.

But Bluegrass holds its own on its own. Its pace, tenor sound -- that high, lonesome sound of a freight train on a foggy night -- and the lyrics that speak to every emotion work to keep the music vital. There is happiness, the blues, human perfection, plain old bumbling, human dark evil, love, hate, humor, hope, no hope, heaven and hell. In short, the music goes to the heart of being on earth and having a heart that beats and needs cordless contact with other humans.

It's hard to say whether or not a contest is the best thing for Bluegrass. It lets people hear the music, experience the stirrings the songs create, both in the player and the listener. Yet, winning the governor's cup simply means you were pretty good at a particular time in a particular place and while you were in a particular mood. It doesn't mean you're good every day everywhere.

And listeners are too eager these days to label other people based on nothing more substantial than listening to them for three minutes out of a lifetime. Bluegrass musicians who went away from Rough River without a governor's cup aren't losers. Tomorrow or while the crowd's trash gets picked up, they could take that cup as easy as pie. Some fantastic fiddle players lost last weekend.

If the contest was up where there was a breeze, say from a bandshell built on a barge in a cove on the lake that was protected from boat traffic... And October's statistically the area's driest month... And the trees are showing color... And there's that lonesome, melancholy mood that comes with fall, that would go so well with Bluegrass!