05.25.13

Culture of Lickspittle (the evidence)

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:55 pm by George Smith

“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.

And you’re disenfranchised, 1-2-3.

Readers of the blog know social networks aren’t. They’re frequently anti-social, but in a passive-aggressive stealthy way.

And so, as evidence, anonymized excerpts from the Facebook rock/music critic chat on “blues,” micro-blog blurts in which a bunch of upper middle class (mostly white) people name check, micro-list, and make claims. (Quite a few are excerpts from recognizable names, critics for Rolling Stone, big daily newspapers and other high profile places.)

It’s how flash mob opinion, more gently — but still to be said with a sneer — crowd-sourcing, makes you feel stupid and withdrawn.

I’ll amend that. It makes you stupid, period, particularly on the social network where the algorithms work to maximize fragmentation as well as segmentation.

Only a fraction [no link]:

[Blues] its still around, mostly sucks. though Guitar Lightnin Lee and Freddy King do not disappoint, but I would rather slice my eyeballs than go to a “blues fest” …tired of SRV, and Clapton knockoffs they are a dime a dozen, but even my band likes to kick around in the format from time to time, its still fun, and slide sounds great when you are playing it… maybe its only for musicians now. I recommend looking up Jimmy Duck Holmes at his “bar” in Bentonia, Miss its really worth the trip… Black Keys are not the blues.

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I think it was when Johnny Winter got Muddy Waters repopularized in the mid-70s when Muddy came to the long-shuttered rock club in Bangor, Maine where I lived, and I saw him sitting on the third deck of the club, but almost hanging over the stage. It was really cool. Years later, saw one of John Lee Hooker’s last times out with the Flaedh festival in Boston with the Pogues and was also pretty enraptured.

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It depends on the genealogies to which we attend as critics, researchers, and practitioners, right? [Damn right, it’s all about “researchers and “genealogies.”]The question of what is going on in blues communities today is, for me, a much richer one than that of genre–and one that makes the work of artists who are most often overlooked by the critical establishment legible.

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I don’t think we need to avoid sweeping statements so much as categorical ones–the blues is, after all, big…it’s THE BLUES! Patrick Burke starts his great book on jazz and race in the NYC bebop scene by mentioning a sign outside of a club on 52nd street that said “Come on in and hear the Truth.” I’d make a sweeping statement and say that ONE thing the blues has always been is just exactly what that sign promised: a mode of cultural production in which Black American artists have tried to tell the truth about the Black experience in America, to each other and to the mainstream culture. If this sounds like a version of BAM, I’m not troubled by that because I think it’s right–just not everything. As a died-in-the-wool materialist, my big question is whether the economic structure has now become so overdetermined by profit that there’s no way for any commercial music to tell this particular (or maybe even any) kind of truth. In my darker moments, I’m haunted by Chuck D!

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I’m sure others have written about it somewhere (I gotta read [someone you’ve never heard of’s] book!), but the other day I was thinking about the influence of Sousa on instrumental (“classic”) ragtime and the first blues copyrights, in that none of them are in verse-chorus-bridge form, but feature sequences of themes. Which makes sense, given that a brass band leader — W. C. Handy — took out the first blues copyrights.

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Taj played JazzFest with the “Real Thing” tuba band, some of it spectacularly, good, though also some of it kind of meandering.

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And Nashville has the coolest blues history. Jimi Hendrix was Nashvilles own Soul blues Queen of the Blues Marion James guitar player and lived in Nashville before he went psychodelic – Marion James still alive and kicking.

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And I agree with [so and so] who agrees with [so and so] you can find more of Savoy Brown in The Black Keys than The Standells. How do I know this? I listened to both bands when they were popular with a critical but open ear. I suppose beer and drugs sometime infiltrated the perspective too. I digress…

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jazz influence huge of course….piano as important as guitar…ragtime…NO piano Jelly Roll Morton…Alabama piano players…earliest boogie woogie are Alabama piano players…Pine Top Smith, Cow Cow Davenport, Walter Rolland…lost John. And can’t forget how much these guys all traveled…the picture and story of the blues is much more inconveniently fluid than linear! Not a story of evolving from an acoustic one string player in Mississippi delta…

[Cow Cow Davenport]

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As for the blues format , I consider it quite finished, just as the saltarello and the Charleston — and rococo painting — are finished. One does them but so what ? That said, as Nat Hawthirne mentioned having the blues, Clearly the feeling is a long time given ; and I imagine the blues feeling will eventually find fresh expression some day in a firm we cannot niw imagine but will seem wonderful when we or our descendants encounter it.

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A friend interviewed Pokey Lafarge and asked him about playing music perceived as “retro” and he pointed out that no one looks at classical musicians and calls them retro for playing old compositions. He views blues, jazz, folk etc as American classical music. I liked this viewpoint.

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There are two camps, the purists and the blues rock combo. the former seems to totally reject the latter. The best guitarist I have seen falls into the latter catagory. People have no idea what they are missing. He is killing it in Europe on his 4th tour. Many sell outs and fest appearances. The US market is about as fickle as it gets. Except NM,Colorado and West Texas.

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And of course Blues remains big business: A contemporary “Blues Festival” tends to signify a mass consumption hommage to America’s mid-20th C peak: BBQ, HotRods, etc. House of…. Etc.

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I came of age loathing blues, knowing only the white baby boomer macho blues. I had to find, and learn to admire, the real stuff on my own.

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Great thread. That forthcoming Pokey Lefarge record is fairly hot, and really interesting in this context, since Jack White is putting it out. It’s tapping into blues Hot Five-style, among other things. And it’s more Squirrel Nut Zippers than Mumford & Sons.

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All of which pose the quantum and quintessential paradox of whether The Blues are a synonym for Black American Being or for Appropriated Black American Cultural Property. And Cultural Properties. The Archival Record? or Blackfolks evolving musical capacity for deeply felt expression of our secular, spiritual lives? We talking about the performance of blues forms or where the expression originates within the experience of being black and Black Being in America?

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Any excuse to toss those two cents in –thanx, once again for the floorspace FYI [So & so’s] being adroit and modest as a Harlem Hospital bornpre-Katrina New Orleanean and one-time programmer of the Heritage Fest –but when Birdsong sez The Bllues are alright”–she pithily encapsulates everything i was trying to more longwindedly and anecdotally say about blues being a living KULCHA. The Thangs (grown) people DO ha ha ha.

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I’ve been considering a blues tour this summer.

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[The pop critic who brought on the flash mob] I’ve decided to shelve my plan to write about the blues for a while. Obviously I have a lot of catching up to do before I try!

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Culture of Lickspittle — a blues album. Click the display to play — 26 minutes — short.

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Another appropriate response, which I’ll admit might go over the head, is to form a new group named the Lee Atwater Blues Band, and start making tunes glued to old video of the fellow. I may just do it.

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