If you don’t know the blues... there’s no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

Richards is asserting the primacy of the blues as the root language of rock. The quote frames blues not as a niche genre but as a foundational vocabulary—rhythmic feel, phrasing, harmonic movement, and emotional directness—without which rock performance becomes imitation rather than expression. It also functions as a statement of lineage and respect: popular music, in Richards’s view, is indebted to African American blues traditions, and musicians should study that tradition to play authentically. Implicitly, it critiques technical flash or genre-hopping that ignores origins, urging players to internalize the blues’ sensibility before attempting rock or other mainstream styles.