"My cultural background is irrelevant."
I've never heard a non-white person say that. I'VE never had the privilege of saying it and having it be taken for any value, let alone face. And that's part of what you seem to be not getting. The Stones' background was irrelevant to their success even though that success came SOLELY because of cultural appropriation. Culture wasn't so irrelevant to them, after all, or they'd have been putting out ... whatever their fellow white countrymen listened to that wasn't Black American music.
And yet, the folks who CREATED that music and lived the live s that inspired and necessitated it ... lived in near-obscurity in comparison, as you've pointed out by sharing some of the make-up of your music collection. And I GUARANTEE YOU cultur was NOT irrelevant to their of relative lack of fame and relative poverty.
Culture--and race--VERY MUCH played parts. So, what you assert as so casual and obvious a truth ISN'T THAT for everyone. For some of us, it's not true at all and never will be for us, or our great-great-great-grandchildren, just like it wasn't for our great-great-great-grandparents.
And that you have seemingly no consideration for the fact that MOST OF THE WORLD doesn't have the privilege of tossing culture-as-a-consideration-in-their-HOURLY-lives is frustrating and galling and disheartening. Not because of YOU, but because so many folks in this world who have so much power and so many resources and opportunities--including the Rolling Stones--think the same way. And only seem to know how to double-down on their lack of consideration and lack of empathy.
They get to have all the fun and power that LITERALLY COMES FROM BLACK PAIN AND SUFFERING AND DISENFRANCHISEMENT, without having to live with and CARRY that burden. And then they talk stupid shit as if their words don't have weight and don't cut people. But they do. And so do yours. The lack of regard implied in your words, of the truths of people who invented an artform you claim to enjoy ... even--even in its most anemic-anondyne, watered-down state--in 2021, is ... depressing and painful. But hardly unexpected. Just as blues and rock, just as I am the result of hundreds of years of CONTINUING Black suffering because of white theft and predation and torture ... dehumanization, you are also a result of those things. We both show it in our own ways and in our own words, I suppose. I only wish I could so easily dismiss your words and everything behind them, as you dismiss this article.
