no, you don't blame anybody. The 'higher powers' as you call them are just looking to make money, and if they can market some douchebag southern rapper who makes a dance to a snap rap to a bunch of 12 pre pubescent white girls and drunk frat boys and make some $$$ on it then they'll take that over some nigga like messy marv or j diggs. You can't blame everyone else for the bays problems. When the spotlight was on the bay guess how many albums got released? Zero. E-40 built the hype up for the '06 summer and the only fucking thing the bay got was a keak da sneak re-re-recycled album that sucked donkey dick. If the artists aren't going to play to the market and what it wants, they're not going to succeed this day in age, theres too many people in the game who sound the same to even try and go out and be succesful on your own. The only successful rapper in the game right now who's always done his own thing and is still in the spotlight is Tech N9ne. but back to the bay and dropping the ball, the record companies definitely were looking for the next 'trend' in rapping and i guarantee they heard most of the artists that the bay was repping hard at that time. And what were we listening to then? Mac dre, who's dead, some asshole named nump, and a whole slew of other random dudes who had decent lyrics with a decent beat, but were only getting love in the bay. Its half the culture out here to begin with, we don't even have all of california behind the bay, so-cal was hating on us fat, so if we couldn't even win the west how the fuck was the bay going to win the nation? bottom line is the artists didn't want to give the record companies what they wanted, so they passed on 99% of the acts that came their way. Mistah FAB and the pack are pretty much the only dudes who got signed, so where does that leave the bay? right where we were two years ago, except no theres no movement, except for that one douchebag kid that everyone knows who still says 'yadada' and calls every song a slapper, even if their neighbor made it with a fisher price keyboard.