About Me
- Name: 1009
- Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Gentleman seeking to write the song that will destroy rock and roll.
pretty neat, pretty neat
- Stevens had friends?
- Dead Canary Records
- Walt Whitman
- Nels Cline
- Bus Man
- Brighton Technical Academy
- Ch-Ch-Changes
that was some time
Saturday, June 11, 2005
blooze fest
The Chicago Blues Festival is going on this weekend a few blocks north of my apartment, although I can't hear it from here despite the complete lack of anything at all between me and there. For commentary I defer to eminent blues scholar, Guggenheim recipient, J. Ronald Lane Latimer Chair of Folk Musix at the South Side School for the Deaf, and incendiary deconstructor Dr. James Robert McTweedpants:
"As with most of the elements that composed to so-called "Great Migration" of African-American laborers from the Southern states in the twentieth century, the blues did not escape unscathed. Expecting a lifestyle in which jobs would be available in a "free" market, Delta sharecroppers found instead a climate in which racist boundaries and exclusions still obtained, although in insidiously implicit and de facto forms. Likewise for the blues: musicians accustomed to performing to the rhythm of a heart beaten into a shape no 4/4 time could fit arrived in Chicago intending to follow their mode of expression, except that maybe some of those hipbones might be a few shades whiter.
"What the blues encountered in Chicago, although celebrated on Mayor Daley's manicured lawns, was an attention that, instead of allowing for the growth of blues artists into major cultural figures, forced their expressions into ever-narrower forms palatable to ascendent bourgeois audiences. They couldn't dance without a snare on 2 and 4; they couldn't hear you unless you plugged yourself into an amplifier; they didn't like songs whose lyrics seemed to shift with every performance, moving from one song to the next. The old Delta guys had to make a buck, and Chicago blues was born.
"Everything now regularized, every chord progression obvious before it's even begun, no hint of surprise: you can dance to it, baby! But it kills the soul, as Skip James knew and as precious few practice today. You almost have to get those old 33s and work through the vinyl crackles to find the strangely lustrous blue gold inside. I can tell you for sure you won't find it out on those stages in Grant Park. You can probably find a hot dog out there, but no blues.
"Translation's not an easy game, and it's hard to say if any practice crosses boarders without changing somehow. Hell, look at baseball, the 'American past-time,' which we inherited from a bunch of French monks. Best-case scenario, something new and impossible to predict emerges -- you get an art form that is just recognizable enough to catch your ear, but strange enough to hold it. That's a million-to-one chance in our day of late capitalism, and in Chicago it just didn't happen. If you go looking for it in some small towns just on the Union side of that Ohio River, though, you just might find it."
Special thanks to Dr. James Robert McTweedpants for guest authorship.
"As with most of the elements that composed to so-called "Great Migration" of African-American laborers from the Southern states in the twentieth century, the blues did not escape unscathed. Expecting a lifestyle in which jobs would be available in a "free" market, Delta sharecroppers found instead a climate in which racist boundaries and exclusions still obtained, although in insidiously implicit and de facto forms. Likewise for the blues: musicians accustomed to performing to the rhythm of a heart beaten into a shape no 4/4 time could fit arrived in Chicago intending to follow their mode of expression, except that maybe some of those hipbones might be a few shades whiter.
"What the blues encountered in Chicago, although celebrated on Mayor Daley's manicured lawns, was an attention that, instead of allowing for the growth of blues artists into major cultural figures, forced their expressions into ever-narrower forms palatable to ascendent bourgeois audiences. They couldn't dance without a snare on 2 and 4; they couldn't hear you unless you plugged yourself into an amplifier; they didn't like songs whose lyrics seemed to shift with every performance, moving from one song to the next. The old Delta guys had to make a buck, and Chicago blues was born.
"Everything now regularized, every chord progression obvious before it's even begun, no hint of surprise: you can dance to it, baby! But it kills the soul, as Skip James knew and as precious few practice today. You almost have to get those old 33s and work through the vinyl crackles to find the strangely lustrous blue gold inside. I can tell you for sure you won't find it out on those stages in Grant Park. You can probably find a hot dog out there, but no blues.
"Translation's not an easy game, and it's hard to say if any practice crosses boarders without changing somehow. Hell, look at baseball, the 'American past-time,' which we inherited from a bunch of French monks. Best-case scenario, something new and impossible to predict emerges -- you get an art form that is just recognizable enough to catch your ear, but strange enough to hold it. That's a million-to-one chance in our day of late capitalism, and in Chicago it just didn't happen. If you go looking for it in some small towns just on the Union side of that Ohio River, though, you just might find it."
Special thanks to Dr. James Robert McTweedpants for guest authorship.
Posted by: 1009 / 6:36 PM 
