05.24.13
Culture of Lickspittle
Press play and it runs itself.
Upper middle class white music journalists, when discussing the blues, make no sense to me. I ran across a rock critic chat on it on social media this morning. And it immediately hit me, although I like the blues and play it a lot, why it was an exchange best avoided.
Scholars of popular entertainment can spoil what was thought unspoilable with an ability to suck the vital juice out of anything. What usually happens when one encounters this is a creeping feeling of embarrassment because you can’t canonically list all the old folk blues artists or successfully debate who belongs in unique sub-genres of your own coinage.
Before you know it you’re actually questioning if you know anything at all.
Well, I know quite a bit.
I learned to love the music’s capacity on guitar decades ago because I had records by ZZ Top and the British groups in the white boy blues boom of the late Sixties and early Seventies. And I picked up the harmonica in middle age because, as a folk instrument, it was just made to be easy to play.
Harmonica, and folk musics in general, are supposed to be simple and inviting. It is music that anyone with human DNA can dip into. You can write what you know, tell stories, make daily observations.
In America this has been turned into a genre where reverence to various stodgy pieties and ways-of-performance are embalmed as benchmarks and methods of accounting and keeping score by white American ruling culture. You cannot bring a sense of humor or alienation to it, two things that are as much a part of old folk musics as community experience.
But if you want something wrecked for the day’s enjoyment, find some pop culture critics to talk about it.
In any case, I realized I’d more than enough tunes over the last three years to make a blues album that has some relation to my American existence.
And here you have by example, what I’m talking about, Stumbling Into the Future Culture of Lickspittle. Running time = a little over 26 minutes.
That looks short. But it’s a good length to show breadth of style and the human touch. And it is definitely not repetitive (Go from “Pasadena 2012 Blues” to “Good Boy” and tell me that) although many of the songs are in the same key.
The alternate title occurred to me after I’d left the YouTube playlist: Culture of Lickspittle Blues. D’oh! So I changed it from the original post and URL marker.
How to ruin anything by crowd-sourcing the opinions of upper middle class white pop music scholars.
The raw evidence.