Better than thinking too much random Ten


 


1. Enya - Wild Child
2. John Adams - Leon Klinghoffer: "I've never been a violent man" {The Death of Klinghoffer]
3. The Tallis Scholars - Missa in gallicantu: Sequentia: Nato canunt omnia
4. Chicharones - Pork Rind Disco
5. Mortiis - Underdog (Zombie Girls Remix)
6. Residents - Diskomo (Original 1979 Version)
7. Jimmy Witherspoon - How Long Blues
8. Christopher Parkening - Concierto de Aranjuez - 2.Adagio
9. Big Bill Broonzy - Horny Frog
10. Joan Armatrading - I'm Lucky

And bonus 11: Uncut - Out Of Sight

A reviewer in Rolling Stone ages ago asked the question, why listen to the blues? And his answer was that when you're feeling as bad as it's possible to feel, the blues helps.
There's some truth to that.
It's not simple: in the face of death, you'd think what was desired was either a promise of eternity, or a diversion from all such thoughts, guiding you back onto the midway. But neither of those are necessarily real help: not if you're not easily convinced that death is only three steps homeward, and not if running away is more horrifying than standing in its big dark presence. Not if you know it's the only way off the midway.
No the blues doesn't tell you it'll be all right. "The sun will come out tomorrow" is about as un-blues-like as it's possible to get. Nor does it say fuck death, let's dance.
The curious thing is that the blues is so completely secular, at least on the surface. Faced with a white civilization that carried its music across the dark abysses of history on the back of the Church, and vast portions of which allowed its place only in the form of hymns (or whose popular and sentimental songs were so laced with belief as to make no difference), the blues says nothing about God. In plain fact it paints the bleak picture the religious paints of the secular: they fuck a lot, but their partners are always unfaithful; they never have any money, and get cheated all the time in that as well; and they live a mean, dark, doleful, lonesome existence. Tell me how long/that evenin' train's been gone...

But while the gospel voice says nobody knows the trouble I've seen but Jesus, the blues is letting you know right here. Something different is going on here: instead of minimizing the hurt, or rationalizing it, or explaining it away, it draws a line under it.
Or a pentagram around it.
Even the pastiest suburban white boy can tell that the repetitive structure is integral to the blues. Without that repetitive/response structure, there wouldn't be anything there. And even the most sheltered of them can feel that while the words are filled with the woe of the world, the music is filled with something else.
What it seems to me, is that the same forcibly imported culture that confronted us with The Drum, also presented us with something that we Europeans had lost, maybe since we stopped digging barrows to bury our dead: a song as simple magical invocation. Not defining or describing the spirit, but embodying it. Not a contract or a petition with the god, but the working itself.

Yeah--slightly unhinged, are we then? But others have written about this --and all i can say is that, for myself, in this place where I'm not comforted by the beauty of the rising fluted voices of the medieval church--where I'm not soothed by the soft minor threads of Spanish guitar played by a master like Parkening (and where John Adams's brutal modernist opera of terrorist death gives me less than nothing, I am most helped by the dark sunset voice of Jimmy Witherspoon singing in the ancient pattern.

But isn't Pork Rind Disco just a great name for a song?

Posted: Friday - May 04, 2007 at 03:09 PM        

©