Art & Creativity Quote by Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix is doing something sly here: he’s treating blues less like a genre and more like a diagnostic tool. “The reflection of the world is blues” isn’t a misty homage to tradition; it’s an argument that the most honest music is the kind that can’t look away from hardship, desire, failure, and the daily grind. Blues, in this framing, isn’t just 12 bars and a bent note. It’s a way of telling the truth without pretending the truth is neat.

The second half - “this other kind of music that’s tryin’ to come around” - carries a double edge. On one level, it’s the sound of the late ’60s in motion: psychedelic rock, studio experimentation, pop’s new sheen, the industry rushing toward youth markets and larger-than-life spectacle. Hendrix isn’t dismissing that wave; he’s positioning it as aspirational, even slightly suspect. “Tryin’ to come around” implies a music still searching for its center, still auditioning for permanence.

The subtext is Hendrix’s own balancing act. As a Black guitarist crowned by a rock establishment that often treated blues as raw material to be repackaged, he’s asserting lineage and authority. Blues is the bedrock; everything else is commentary. That’s why the line works: it’s casual speech carrying a structural claim about culture. If new music wants to last, he suggests, it has to earn its reflection in the same mirror blues has been holding up all along.