For you Steve, I'll talk out my south-end any day
. I know it upsets you that Fleetwood Mac's blues years aren't my favorite... but I really do enjoy the music from that era of the band. To me, the Rumours era will always define what Fleetwood Mac is to me, and for that I won't change my opinion or apologize
. And I wouldn't expect you to change your opinion or apologize on your opinions and tastes either.
What I meant is Blues is long dead as a form of
relevant popular music. Can you imagine a song like Green Manalishi charting on the Hot 100 today? Like Richard Dashut said at one point too, Blues is more of a live artform anyway. Of almost all the artists/bands you listed, as great as they are, most are has-beens. Of course that label undoubtedly applies to our beloved Fleetwood Mac too. They haven't had a mainstream hit on an album of new material since 1987. There are artists like John Mayer and Amy Winehouse who are still current and offer Blues tinged material... but in general true hard-core blues had their peak in the late 1960s in my humble opinion. I believe that's why Fleetwood Mac itself slowly moved away from the blues... not just because Peter Green, Danny Kirwen, and Jeremy Spencer all left the band. FM moved towards a more pop/rock sound because that's the shift that popular music was taking at the time. Led Zepplin and other bands of that era that started out in the blues had moved away from that genre of music by the mid/late 70s. It's simply all about cycles in the music industry and popular tastes at the time. During the mid 90s popular music took a huge swing towards rap, hip hop, and R&B. It seems like that trend too is phasing out, and is being replaced by country-pop fusion. Just wait a while and it'll all change again... we get bored as a music consuming public it seems. Pop music will never go out of style though... because it's what's
POPular with the general public... and that's the kind of music that FM struck gold with Buckingham and Nicks.