The story is no different.
It is the story of blues, New Orleans Jazz, Jitterbug, Be-Bop, Rhythm and Blues, Rock 'n' Roll, Motown, the Liverpool Sound, Heavy metal, Prog Rock, Punk, Hip-hop. After that, the story seems to be little different, and not nearly so interesting.

It would be hard to find anything truly innovative, anything close to its source, anything capable of blossoming into something different, away from the mainstream, that originated in material wealth.

From a point of view of social evolution, if the human race had started out, without the need to bother to feed itself, (in other words, if we had all been born wealthy, since the time of Adam); then we would still be swinging around in the trees, throwing bananas at each other. The fact is wealth lives on the back of poverty, and it is poverty which drives the will to advance. Because nobody wants to grub around for a living, if they don't have to.

Music is in amongst those motives; it gives voice to people who wouldn't otherwise have one.

All of these 'Styles' for the want of a better word, mentioned at the beginning, started out as a genuine expression of something that had a desperate need to be expressed at that time. They all seem to start from backgrounds of some poverty. The music has honesty, because it doesn't know how to be anything else. That's why it is there.

Hip-hop didn't start in somebody's penthouse flat. The Liverpool movement was founded in the lowest levels of society; New Orleans was noted for its red light districts and gratuitous violence.

So what's new? And what happens to emasculate the dynamics of the music? What is it that puts in fakes for the real thing, somewhere along the way?

Money. The Music Business is exactly that. It's not interested in raising the art forms it sells; it only exists to make money. And mostly the people who make it are not the performers, or even the celebrities. However well-heeled those people might look, in the shadows are people who gross incomes that beggar the imagination.

As John Lennon once noted; the Beatles might have made a lot of cash, but there were a lot more people making a lot more off the Beatles backs; people who had contributed nothing to the arduous development of the sound, nor slogged for twelve hours at a time for years, in the low bars in Hamburg.

How is that different?

It seems to me that, far from being criticised for destroying some imagined future, the originators of Rap,(and Blues, and Be-bop, and Rock 'n' Roll etc. etc. etc.), should be praised for their courage, in stating that the present was somebody else's future, and it is just not good enough for us to be wanting a similar future.

Learn more about this author, Roger Pattison.
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