I'm undecided on the issue. Sometimes it seems that they have but other times my faith gets restored.

I am distressed by the popularity of rap, which I think is largely garbage. I mean, I like the DJs who can operate the turn-tables with lightning speed and all that--it's not easy to do (I tried it once). But I'm not talking about that kind of stuff. I'm talking about the rap that is made strictly to sell millions of copies to idiots who wouldn't know real music if it sodomized them in the shower.

This stuff where you hear this chintzy group of electronic tones that just repeats over and over and over again to a beat so overblown that it shakes the pictures off your walls when some asshole drives by at 3 am blasting it from his car. It has no substance, no soul. How could anyone like it? Kids tell me that I'm just too old and maybe I am but I listen to a very wide variety of music and I am a huge fan of noise and avant-garde artists which most people can't stand. I'm not some out-of-touch old fart who can't change. It's just that this shit isn't music and it has no substance. Anybody could do it because it doesn't take talent.

And this stuff they call R&B today, where did this shit come from?? That's not R&B. R&B is Big Joe Turner, Roy Brown, Louis Jordan, Todd Rhodes, Bill Doggett, LaVern Baker, Amos Milburn, the Ravens, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Junior Parker, Fats Domino, Ruth Brown, Johnny Ace, Big Jay McNeely, Ray Charles, T-Bone Walker, Bo Diddley, Hank Ballard, etc. This new shit doesn't move me at all. It sounds like crap, quite frankly. Real R&B is booty-shaking stuff. I won't waste 2 seconds watching booty shaking to a rhythm box mechanized beat. There's nothing sexy there.

However, with that said, I still see blacks who like the old blues and not always older folks. I know a black guitarist who idolizes Hendrix (actually I know 2) but this one guy, I've known a long time and he said once that while he'd rather listen to Hendrix than the Beatles, he'd definitely take the Beatles over 50 Cent any day of the week.

But then I've heard black blues musicians and DJs and what not complain that blacks have deserted the blues scene and there's some truth in that. You go to a blues show and the audience is mostly white--often entirely white.

Hendrix, after all, was HUGELY popular among white kids and largely distrusted by blacks in his day. There are blacks now who get into him but he was largely distrusted by blacks in his day which he never understood because he was a black man playing the black man's music and it blew his mind that blacks looked down on him for what he was doing.

T-Bone Walker spent the last decade or so of his career wondering where the hell his black audience scampered off to. He wondered if had said or did something to offend them because one day they were just gone and suddenly his audience is white kids who had learned about him and regarded him as a legend (which he was and is). He didn't mind that but he could never figure out why his black audience died on him so suddenly and completely.

Is it just that times changed and tastes changed with them or is there a hostility of many blacks towards blues (and I don't mean the religious folk who thought of it as the Devil's music)?

What are your thoughts and experiences on this matter?