Tuesday, April 7, 2009

The New Frontier



Keb’ Mo’, Every Morning. Keb’ Mo’. Okeh, 57863, 1994.

In “Every Morning,” Keb’ Mo’ returns to the roots of blues—notice, the blues themselves have roots, and have evolved over time, in addition to being roots for other music—in an acoustic bottleneck solo. And yet he is essentially an artist of the popular strain; his other songs tend to be jazzy, soulful, melodic, lyrically simple, and fully instrumented depending on the case and its requirements. This fact is perhaps the best evidence of all that blues is just one more of the forms under which an artist can make his art, and is equal to other forms rather than merely being their predecessor. “Every Morning” is plaintive, moving, and structured, working its magic and meaning without resorting to anything complex or too innovative to still be pleasantly harmonic. Here is blues pop, expressing self yet intended to be pleasing, creative in its merging of sounds yet rooted always in the concerns of an audience.

Muddy Waters, Trouble No More. The Best of Muddy Waters. MCA, 11946, 1999.

Bob Dylan, Someday Baby. Modern Times. Columbia, 87606, 2006.

What is characteristic and significant about this song, as with so many songs by Bob Dylan, is its lyrics. An adaptation (musically) of “Trouble No More,” by Muddy Waters, this song flips the original lyrics into the words of an old man: regretful, remorseful, bitter, violent. Listen also for the old blues technique by which an obvious, material-world lyric is joined to an existential follow-up (“Living this way ain’t natural/ why was I born to love you?”) The main theme—hardscrabble, vengeful, but true human love—is also straight from the blues canon and philosophy. In other words, what Bob Dylan is doing here lyrically is confronting the genre head-on, but the words are all his own; this is not to say, of course, that lyrics are the only way to be freshly expressive. Music is, for an artist, equally embodying of new meaning.

Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure, Diaraby. Talking Timbuktu. Hannibal, 571381, 1994.

Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure, Amandrai. Talking Timbuktu. Hannibal, 571381, 1994.

These songs, from this album, are excellent examples of how blues can be blues and go in just about any number of different directions, creatively and commercially. One might contend that this—teamwork between Ry Cooder, the great blues slide guitarist and songwriter, and Ali Farka Toure, an artist from West Africa whose singing is stubbornly and still pentatonic—is the final return of blues to its real roots. Syncopation, scat singing, crossroads and catharsis imagery, the role of “griot” as both the worshiped holder of communal narrative and the scorned dealer with evil spirits: all of these are, of course, pivotal to the blues and holdovers from West Africa. And yet “Talking Timbuktu” as an album is mostly about an African artist falling in love with sound that formed in American place; none of what Ali Farka Toure had previously recorded felt at all like the music here. Ry Cooder was not rediscovering the old blues—rather, he was bringing the blues somewhere new, and adding to the blues the new sound of old Africa singing mournfully the way any bluesman can. This is blues adding an outside influence, not cutting back on itself to become more authentic, although that might be how the record was sold. The daring move of blues moving outside of the American region changed the musical face of blues forever, and nothing could sound better as music, simply music.

G. Love, Sunshine. The Hustle. Epic, 394, 2004.

Perhaps this last song represents also the last frontier for the genre of blues, but if this playlist is right, then most likely not. G. Love is an artist mostly of the hip-hop tradition, although his schooling in blues and in guitar instrumentation generally founds him squarely in the mold of those who pick and choose from previous art to make their own as is fit (and popular). “Sunshine” is an acoustic solo blues song, straight from the Mississippi John Hurt and, later, Bob Dylan tradition, but is not so much an indulgence in pure roots music (dabbling in roots, as an exotic throwback) as meaningful new music of its own. This analysis can be proven by the simple fact that G. Love is widely popular and profitable. If his blues are still available and successful in the commercial market, then the blues is still living, and talking about the blues as an anachronistic holdover—one decade of music appropriated for the rest of the century— is wrongheaded, hurtful to the process of continuing and profitable creation, and disoriented in time.