Oh man, that reminds me of perhaps my most rock, solid prejudice: I hate “the blues.” My idea of hell is Being stuck in an eternal bar forced to watch performances by Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters etc.
I think I developed this prejudice, not simply from the fact that the music doesn’t appeal to me, but it’s also the level of reverence The Blues seems to command, where you have the blues musician making all those stank faces, callout from the audience at the deep profundity of the emotion… and the fact that when I was a regular attendee of high-end audio shows it was impossible to escape tracks from such Blues artists, inevitably leading to rooms filled with old audiophiles sitting in silence, nodding in tandem with the profundity they are experiencing. I just can’t get out of those room fast enough. And it’s still a staple of audiophile shows (though at least it seems to expand somewhat into electronica these days).
Sorry… back to audio prejudices….
Interesting (not your dislike of Blues) but the fact it is used as a reference in shows (never been to one). I can guess that maybe some acoustic Blues might be used as reference (in the same way those breathy female Jazz vocalists are) but that's really a slim slice of Blues.
I guess like most genres there are "figure head" artists that always float to the surface (in Jazz that would be Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane) and so are always hip (i.e. what you call reverence) but obviously they are the thin edge of any genre.
I aren't particularly taken with acoustic/country Blues, I am more electric focused and you don't have to "suffer" the usual suspects (BB King, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters)
In my music library I have 324 Blues artists (across 2500 albums) so plenty of others to choose from:
find Blues | cut -d'/' -f3 | sort -u | wc -l
324
In regard to Jazz, I have 2500 albums and not a single vocal is sung (outside of 10 Billie Holiday albums). I don't like wasting energy on finding the meaning in the spoken word... so I avoid them as much as I can. Blues, while it has words, I am there for the feeling of the music not any deep meaning from the lyrics ***.
In regard to "
inevitably leading to rooms filled with old audiophiles sitting in silence", my experience with a communal Blues environment is an electric band play loudly in a hole-in-the-wall bar, with drunks falling of chairs, bottles/glass flying across the bar room at random times and scuffles breaking out once or twice a night ****
But that was in my younger days. Now the only drunk is me, falling out of my listening chair in my room and any scuffles I have are with Her Indoors (which she always wins)
Peter
*** my favourite Blues lyric is from Son Seals:
I'm an alcoholic and sometimes I regret it
Especially when the liquor store wont give me no credit.
**** There was one local bar (The Cricketers Arms) that on Sunday's (during the 1980's Blues revival) had a parade of Blues bands where no one bothered to take their bottles back to the bar so by the end of the night, you were surfing across a sea of bottles (many broken) to get to the bar or to leave. Stout boots were the order of the day.
Ha. I found a photo of it, taken in 1970.
Three bars on three levels with what was called the "public bar" downstairs (meaning the working mans bar, full of rough and tumble). The middle bar (up the stairs but on the ground floor) was the music venue and indestructible being made of concrete and with basically having no windows, it was very dark. As I never went to the upstairs bar I have to assume it was for more a sophisticated type of clientele
Obviously from the Modernist/Brutalist 1960's/1970's era of concrete buildings.
