Music Quote by John Hunter

There is a street-level stubbornness in the way Hunter bats away the label before it can pin him down. "I don't know how they define that" is less confusion than refusal: a quiet jab at the gatekeepers who turn living music into categories that can be sold, archived, and argued over. The next line sharpens the complaint. Calling the "Texas blues thing" "blown kinda out of proportion" suggests a hype machine at work - regional branding that flattens the messy, migratory reality of blues into a postcard.

Then he pulls the conversation back to the body: "I am a Long John Hunter blues". It's a flex, but not the glossy kind. He's staking a claim to authorship over his own sound, insisting the identity runs through a person, not a marketing tag. The phrasing "before and after" is doing a lot of work. It hints at eras, trends, and critics coming and going, while the self stays constant. It also reads like a veteran's timeline: before the industry cared, after it started packaging, he's still the same musician.

The subtext is a warning about how culture gets narrated. Scenes and "movements" love to crown a place or a style as definitive; artists know those stories often arrive late, and usually with someone else's fingerprints on them. Hunter's intent is to reclaim the center: not Texas, not "blues" as a museum category, but the singular life that actually makes the sound.