We used to have a blues program on NPR in the 90s, not sure if it was "Blues After Hours" but the host was a black man with a really thick rural accent, he was hard to understand at times. But one morning, he was asking, "Why have the black boys laid the blues down?" He went on that most of the people picking the blues up were "white boys" (and increasingly girls--some pretty good white girls playing blues guitar these days) and he said there was nothing wrong with whites picking up the blues, "I just want to know why the black boys layin' it down." Some here might have heard the same broadcast.

So, it doesn't seem to me that blues is doing just fine. It's like the ragtime festivals, sure, you go there and everybody there loves ragtime and there's even little kids playing it on pianos and guitars and what not and that's great--but it is certainly NOT representative of the population or even close to it.

Will ragtime and blues survive? Yeeeeees. But they will survive in little pockets here and there but largely absent from the mainstream and it's the mainstream I'm primarily concerned with. Catholics always tell me that they were taught that "the road to hell is wide" and I think this is a prime example.

And the same goes for rock music. You know it's getting bad when you go on youtube to see some clip of a great rock song and the comments say something like, "My dad used to listen to this and these guys really rock. How come we don't have music like this anymore?" You didn't hear that in the 70s about Sinatra or something. Kids then had no interest in the older generation's music because there was so much going on in their own. Now? And this isn't just one or two clips, it's rampant.

On an Iggy Pop clip, somebody said if it wasn't for Iggy, we wouldn't have the stuff we have today to which someone else said, "Don't say that, we don't have anything today."

Something has to give. This can't go on. You can't satisfy the entire public with Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift all the time. And you can't team Bieber up with B. B. King and think you'll do anything other than make it worse. Something has to give.