I was listening to Howling Wolf this morning while cooking. I really enjoy him. Then I got to searching YouTube for videos of him, and found this. Call it what else you will, this is direct and honest.
He says the blues is when you don’t have the money to pay for your house. It’s when you are thinking evil.
Few points: this song was first recorded in 1951; this session is from 1966. I wonder if he would have said that in 1951. I don’t think so. Evil was still bad then. Nowadays we more or less look to serial killers as heros. I can’t help but think many people watch movies like Hostel or American Psycho (to be made into a musical soon in New York) and wonder what it would be like to let the world know what they really think.
But all that was in its germination phase back in 1966. He could say things like that without fear of rejection, since especially in the early stages of the War on Poverty–and the late stages of the Civil Rights Movement–he could have counted on sympathy.
I wonder, though, if he would have FELT that way in 1951. The ethos he is articulating here is that of helplessness that leads to a sense of paralysis, then violent retribution against the world that put you there, “by whatever means necessary”. This, in my view, is a political ethos, that is external to the spirit upon which the old blues were based.
The old blues were tragic, but were meant to share pain, such that everyone could relate to you, to one another, and take strength from a sense of shared trouble and difficulty. The blues is not different, in principle, from Hamlet. It describes the world not how it ought to be, but how it is.
Useful art is local. I was going to make this a separate post, but will make the short statement here that I feel as if there is a certain isomorphism between the professionalisation of art, and modern Statism. We only want to look at those “heros” who made it to the gallery. We don’t want to create it ourselves. We let someone else lead us, dictate our taste.
You want to know the bald truth? I don’t have a freaking clue why Picasso is so famous. He was a shit to most everyone around him. I have an article I printed some time ago showing him and his friend Apollinaire to be knee shaking cowards, who damn near peed themselves whenever confronted with anything hinting of danger. They were the sort of people who would shove their girlfriends in front of them to not get hit by bullets.
Why can’t I just ignore him? Why can’t I just ignore most of modern literature, and all the slack-wristed and morally obtuse modernists that we are told to respect, but most of whom operated on a much, much lower level of moral integrity than the average man or woman in the street.
In my view, local poetry, local art, local drama and all that–with wide participation–will be a part of our cultural renaissance. And we need to ride out on a pole most of what has been foisted on us as “modern” in the last 100-150 years.
The question is this: does it helps us grow as individuals and as a society? If not, throw it away.
Had more to say, but things to do. This is close enough.
Look at this video though. By and large it is only white people who listen to the blues nowadays. As far as I can tell, black music gave way first to sex, and now violence. The “blues” was transformered into gangsterism, which is more less open and proud evil.