I don't understand how a musician can play 90 minutes on stage and then not dedicate a little bit of time to hang out at their merch table. It's not like digging a ditch or something; you're standing there thanking people for coming out to see you.
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything---including "my" thoughts and actions---were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites.
You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter. You may create a face, an image out of a stone, because you have learned the technique, and not be a master creator. Creation comes first, not technique.
The youngsters coming up now just go through the motions necessary to make the play. They should bounce around a little, show some life and zip. It adds a little action and gives the fans something to look at rather than the monotonous routine, no matter how perfectly the play is made.
And, in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity. The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in chameleon-like style master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime. We won't know them by their name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet. Until then, there's a lot of work to be done.