Holy generalizations, Batman.

Heavy and progressive rock mainly. I also like seventies soul, such as The Temptations, Four Tops, Chi-lites, Gladys Knight, Fat Larry's Band and many others.

That's reassuring in a way.

How many Rap artists do you know of?

What are some of you favorite bands on the heavy rock side of that equation?

Budgie
Black Sabbath
Groundhogs
golden Earring
Robin Trower
Stray
Deep Purple
Glenn Hughes
Black Country Communion
Boston
Jorn Lande
Pat Travers
Thin Lizzy
UFO
Mountain
The Who
ZZ Top
The Quill
Graveyard
Ted Nugent
Nutz
Patto

Don't ask me to name them, but I'll try. Here goes:

Dizzy Rascal (He's British)
Fifty Cent?
Jay Z
Li'l Kim (I like the version of Lady Marmalade and the video even more!)
Kanye West

That's about it.

Hmmm... so definitely on the 70s rock side of things. This is the really obvious suggestion, but have you checked out The Roots at all?

Come on mate. You can't expect to be taken seriously if that is what you base your opinions on.

I'm not yet a converted fan of hiphop, but even so, I'm aware that most of the generalizations you've made are false and based on bias towards mainstream acts.

Never use the mainstream as a basis for an opinion on a genre.

Okay, fair comments. I definitely liked The Roots track.

I have never heard of them before.

They're a good band and sort of the go-to group when people are looking to recommend hip-hop to people who think the entire genre is all about sampling. I think they're fairly approachable from the outside because they have a very noticeable traditional band configuration. It's true that that kind of configuration is rare in hip hop but that doesn't mean the people involved can't, or don't, write and play their own music. It's a genre that's full to the brim with keyboardists for one thing, but there are a lot of multi-instrumentalists out there as well. Take Andre 3000 from Outkast or Tendai 'Baba' Maraire from Shabazz Palaces for example—these are extremely talented multi-instrumentalists who do more writing and playing on their albums than most individual musicians of traditional rock bands. The thing is people involved in this type of music tend to downplay the amount of work that goes into it. It's ironic for a genre that's so often accused of being all about self-promotion, but hip hop musicians pretty consistently work very hard behind the scenes to conceal how much hard work and crafting goes into their compositions.