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Glice made a good point about hip hop having little to no-relation to blues. I wish I still had the recording of an incredibly entertaining interview of Nina Simone where she goes off on a rant about hip hop being a worthless representation of African-Americans, which is brilliant and very insightful when all her ill-informed views are patronised and made fun of by.....an African-American interviewer.
I think this continuous hammering the point about the blues is only so widespread because it's mostly a media debate that stems, rightly, from American guilt in regard to its success at pop music and harrowing relationship with black people, rather than something which has that much resonance and influence outside of it, including, ironically, Africa itself.
This litany of the blues having an influence on all forms of popular music is untrue a lot of the time if we aknowledge that wildly different takes on pop exist outside of the Westen world, what with the filtering of local traditions and languages through top ten hits that become so massive and lucrative in so many other countries? What has a lot of Bollywood pop, for instance, got to do with the blues?
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