Politics & Power Quote by Bonnie Raitt

Bonnie Raitt is being polite about something she’s furious about: the way corporate consolidation turns a living culture into a rounding error on a quarterly report. By framing the blues as a “style” that’s become “difficult to encourage,” she points to a gatekeeping problem disguised as market logic. The music business isn’t simply failing to notice the blues; it’s structurally disincentivized from nurturing anything that doesn’t scale fast, stream endlessly, and slot cleanly into a branded mood.

Her phrasing does a clever double move. “Consolidation” sounds bloodless, almost inevitable, like weather. That’s the point: when a handful of conglomerates and platforms control distribution, radio promotion, playlist placement, and touring infrastructure, their preferences get laundered into “what people want.” Raitt’s subtext is that taste is being engineered. The blues, built on regional scenes, older audiences, and slow-burn apprenticeship, doesn’t fit the industrial template of viral hits and frictionless monetization.

Then she yanks the argument out of nostalgia and into civic language: “treasured national resources.” That’s a deliberate escalation. She’s refusing the idea that the blues survives only as a boutique genre for connoisseurs. Instead, she casts it as cultural infrastructure, as foundational as public lands or libraries. In a country that routinely celebrates the blues’ influence while neglecting the musicians and venues that sustain it, Raitt is calling out a familiar American hypocrisy: we canonize the artifact, then starve the ecosystem that made it.