Creativity Quote by John Lee Hooker

Hooker isn’t making a polite genre argument; he’s describing a pressure system. “If they played more blues, people would just get it” frames the blues as something audiences instinctively understand once it’s put in front of them, like a language you don’t realize you already speak. The “if” is doing quiet work here: the problem isn’t the music’s accessibility, it’s the gatekeeping around it - programmers, labels, club owners, a whole middle layer deciding what counts as palatable.

Then he flips from persuasion to inevitability. “They try to hold it back” carries the subtext of race, commerce, and respectability politics: the blues as a Black working-class art that the mainstream has historically either ignored, sanitized, or strip-mined for parts. Hooker doesn’t name the thieves or censors, because he doesn’t need to. The line’s power is in how casually he treats suppression as obvious, routine behavior.

“But just about can’t hold it back now” is the sound of the early 60s turning over: blues electrified in Chicago, crossing into rock and R&B, young white audiences discovering it in clubs and imported records, British bands building their identities on it. Hooker’s phrasing, “really going,” is beautifully untechnical - not “reviving” or “innovating,” just moving, traveling, spreading. It suggests the blues as a living force with momentum, not a museum piece. The intent is half warning, half prophecy: you can delay it, you can repackage it, but you can’t stop it.