Popular music is an ever changing landscape where the styles that dominate the industry and airwaves switch from year to year. Due to this, musicians of an older era often dislike or disapprove of more modern, popular music. This would not be true for Louis Armstrong and modern Hip-Hop, he would have liked the freedom provided to artists to be themselves in public, in their music, and understood their differing styles from his preferred style.
Although Louis Armstrong presented a very clean cut, and oftentimes silent, public image, in private he was much more animated and regularly interlaced coarse language into regular conversation where he swore frequently (Palmer).This stark contrast between his true personality and what he showed to the majority of his fans is due to the rampant racism, which would have gobbled him alive had he been anything less than a model of a man (Louis Armstrong Biography). When Armstrong stated,"The government can go to hell, it's getting so bad a coloured man hasn't got a country," (Louis Armstrong Biography) in reference to the segregation problems going on in Little Rock, Arkansas, he angered many of his fans, a few to the point where they boycotted his performances. Armstrong would have appreciated modern Hip-Hop because the creators of the music are enabled to state their actual feelings in their own words without fear of ruining their careers. The ability to state his opinions and be a popular performer would have excited Armstrong greatly. For example the popular music artists Macklemore & Ryan Lewis created a song about an extremely polarizing issue, gay marriage named "Same Love." This song offended some people, yet that did not stop this song from being played on YouTube 95 million times (Snell). The only way Armstrong was allowed to put his emotions on display publicly was through his music.
Jazz for Louis Armstrong was more than just a job or a hobby.