* -- Impossible ** -- No such thing
Well, sure, the blues is an actual thing. Like, a guitar teacher can learn you twelve bar blues, but therein lies the trouble. Blues is a loaded, implication heavy term. Somewhere between a middle aged white guy wearing a Stetson Whippet waxing poetic about his original pressing of Scrapper Blackwell's "Trouble Blues," and the vision of a sweaty, silk-shirted black guy wailing virtuosic solos over Standard Blues Riff, it's a pretty unfortunate legacy. Somehow both ivory towered and bastardized, blues is an inexorable foundation of the American musical identity. It is so deeply ingrained, blues has become a tired cliché and impossible aspiration rolled into one. Who made real blues? What is real blues? I do not know, but it's a feeling.
So, Jack White, the guy loves the blues. He loves it like an academic. Third Man Records is doing a joint release with Document Records reissuing the catalogs of the Mississippi Sheiks, Charlie Patton, and Blind Willie McTell. And you should go ahead and treat yourself to those gems. I would kiss Jack White on the mouth for this, or maybe he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize? Hard to say, but enough isn't being done to celebrate this special, wonderful thing he's given us--a thing we probably don't deserve. Jack White also loves the blues like a musician. I learned to appreciate the White Stripes after hearing their cover of "St. James Infirmary." It was a full swoon by the time I heard their take on, "Boll Weevil." Still, it was blues lite--a thin interpretation of what 'The Blues' should be, the blues on which Jack's young incisors were cut. There just wasn't much Mr. White in there. Comedian Kyle Kinane said it best:
It's the I'm gonna make, "real blues," windmill chase, an unachievable goal we've seen manifested in the quest for "real rock and roll," "real hip-hop," and "real, good old fashioned country music." It's trying too hard to pluck something from a nostalgia invariably filtered through the lens of collected influences. Even the bluesmen of the 1920's were channeling an old-timey sound in an effort to stay in line with market trends.
Blind Willie Johnson's songs are not always real blues, but real blues is the only way to describe Blind Willie's Johnson's songs. A dude just singing about stuff. Stuff he knew about and lived through. There is a recognizable form and style, but Blind Willie is, you know...talking the blues. Which bring us to Jack White's finest hour in the blues tradition, and the track which--if there is such a thing--makes that blues talk: "Instinct Blues." (Is, "Ball And Biscuit," a better track? Well...it's ballsier, more fun, but when you name check the iconic Seventh Son in the opening stanza, it creeps into tribute. Disqualified.)
And everything in the ocean blue
They just happen to know exactly what to do
So why don't you?
So, Jack White, the guy loves the blues. He loves it like an academic. Third Man Records is doing a joint release with Document Records reissuing the catalogs of the Mississippi Sheiks, Charlie Patton, and Blind Willie McTell. And you should go ahead and treat yourself to those gems. I would kiss Jack White on the mouth for this, or maybe he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize? Hard to say, but enough isn't being done to celebrate this special, wonderful thing he's given us--a thing we probably don't deserve. Jack White also loves the blues like a musician. I learned to appreciate the White Stripes after hearing their cover of "St. James Infirmary." It was a full swoon by the time I heard their take on, "Boll Weevil." Still, it was blues lite--a thin interpretation of what 'The Blues' should be, the blues on which Jack's young incisors were cut. There just wasn't much Mr. White in there. Comedian Kyle Kinane said it best:
It's the I'm gonna make, "real blues," windmill chase, an unachievable goal we've seen manifested in the quest for "real rock and roll," "real hip-hop," and "real, good old fashioned country music." It's trying too hard to pluck something from a nostalgia invariably filtered through the lens of collected influences. Even the bluesmen of the 1920's were channeling an old-timey sound in an effort to stay in line with market trends.
Blind Willie Johnson's songs are not always real blues, but real blues is the only way to describe Blind Willie's Johnson's songs. A dude just singing about stuff. Stuff he knew about and lived through. There is a recognizable form and style, but Blind Willie is, you know...talking the blues. Which bring us to Jack White's finest hour in the blues tradition, and the track which--if there is such a thing--makes that blues talk: "Instinct Blues." (Is, "Ball And Biscuit," a better track? Well...it's ballsier, more fun, but when you name check the iconic Seventh Son in the opening stanza, it creeps into tribute. Disqualified.)
Brutally simple in construction, the track opens with broken finger noodling. An amp growls in the background, and the first note pokes through with a restrained hum. A descending line slouches down the staff, gathers itself, staggers back to the top of the riff, and like life in primordial tide pools, the song takes shape from the murk. Defiant of any rigidity, loud and soft makes a better descriptor of the dynamic than any apparent time signature. Chunks of verse and chorus are chipped off, Meg punishes her cymbals, throaty chords thrash about, and as the song ascends toward climax, the center pole snaps and the track collapses into a feedback miasma. A slow burner, "Instinct Blues," never fully explodes, but seethes sending the occasional arc of magma from the cauldron in lewd, guttural yowls.
Admittedly, there are lots of grody, herk and jerk blues tracks, but what really sets, "Instinct Blues," apart is the lyrics. Free of context, they may be the worst song lyrics ever penned. It's really just a list of all the mammals/birds/ocean life/fruits/vegetables that, "get it," countered by Jack's desperate plea to get you to, "get with it." But sometimes a man doesn't need to say a complicated thing.
Jack is harried. Jack is worried. This is the lament of a man who is mystified--and maybe outraged--at what he sees: a whole world running in the opposite direction of what the Lord made.
Oh, you're only eating macrobiotic foam with assorted tekka relishes and aduki bean rice for ethical and/or spiritual reasons?
All them big jungle cats get it.
This is your third meal today someone handed you out of a drive-thru window?
And the ants get it.
From your front door to the car to the office to the car the to front door--those were the only times you went outside today. Oh, except for a couple of cigarettes on the balcony.
Well, the crickets get it.
So you don't do "that" because it's an extension of the agro-penistatorship ploy to dehumanize women as submissive sex objects?
And I bet your little dog gets it.
Reciprocation only? Get in there and wear that thing like it's an oxygen mask in a plane going down. Not for her sake, but for yours.
But I bet you the pigs get it.
The fourth fiscal quarter is going to be defined by whether or not you can use the dividends of projected interest to leverage the buy of toxic securities in the hope of hedging them into gold based on strong speculation the loans in the package will default?
And them singing canaries get it.
Did you find the answer at the bottom of you most recent refill of prescription pills? Was it in the bottom of that bottle of whiskey? Maybe it's at the bottom of one more cashed bowl or coke baggie? Is the hole finally filled? No? Well surely it's in the bottom of the next one...
Even strawberries get it.
"But I have yet to see an octopus, or any sort of animal, for that matter, which wasn’t entirely content to pass its time on earth as a food gatherer and to shun the experiments with unlimited greed and ambition performed by humankind." -- Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos
Well, Kurt Vonnegut gets it, but that was never really in question.
'Cause everyone that's under your shoe
And every bird and bee in the jungle, tooAnd everything in the ocean blue
They just happen to know exactly what to do
So why don't you?
A man and his guitar uncluttered. A song engineered from ancient rock and roll DNA. A simple, urgent message as imperative as it is personal and coarse in delivery: don't fight it, don't burden yourself, don't kill yourself to live, don't forget what we are, just get with it. As humans are animals, as the Delta is the wellspring, as songs speak truth, as these are the things hardwired into us far deeper than we know, this is the real blues.
