Below is a short essay. I wrote it six months ago, but if I do not post it, it will undoubtedly otherwise get lost in the ether, and I will never recover it.
The Blues:
Let’s get one thing clear, you don’t listen to the blues. The blues enters you at the start of the day, when you head is still pounding and the sun is only just coming up. It enters you at the end of the day, when you don’t even have the strength to walk home, and lie out on the porch looking at the largeness of the world. It enters you like a whisper in the middle of the night, when, filled with whisky and women, you bet your house on the roulette wheel, and lose. You don’t listen to the blues. The blues is an experience of the world.
In Corregidora, Gayl Jones tells us that “the important thing is making generations. They can burn papers but they cant burn conscious, Ursa. And that’s what makes the evidence. And that’s what makes the verdict.” Collective memory, body-felt. The blues is an irrepressible human spirit, the urge to continuity; the ability to laugh amidst broken houses and broken bodies. Blues is not just a legacy, a memory. Blues is re-invented in each generation since. In Alvin Youngblood Hart, but also in Hip Hop, in Saul Williams. Blues speaks to a sedimented american history, recreated and reborn in each rhythm and each vocal. It also speaks to another rupture, internalised as such. Listen to ali farka toure or the bamako railways band from mali and listen to Corey Harris: the music was always there, from, as Corey says, Missippi to Mali, you just have to let it in.
The blues is not just the repetition of songs sung to keep men in time in the fields from plantation days. The blues has a history for sure, but the blues speaks to the chest. You first hear the blues when you are on your mothers back, when you hear her heart a patterin’ – that’s the sound of the blues, rhythm, as basic and as complex as life itself. Blues speaks to all of us – it takes the overpowering truth of one generation, a truth of oppression and warmth and madness and hope, and renders it – is it- so powerfully I’ve yet to meet a person alive who hasn’t had it enter them.
A lot of people ask me if I listen to Billie Holliday. I don’t listen to Billie Holliday much anymore, great singer though she was. But she lives with me; she is part of the grammar of my life. When I’m down, when I’m beat, she is there: the words just roll into my head and all the pain and experience is concentrated in that voice, that sings through it, and manages to produced such hope. Above all else, the blue’s is survival. It is the next day: it is a feeling of liberty when all is lost. It is the push on of the plough. It is rich in laughter and joy and forgetting, as fundamental as beat, beat-ific.
*Drum n’ Bass/Grime*
Music always emerges from somewhere. The densities of tone in music emerge not just in relation to previous musicians but also, if we speak of musical genres, in terms of a locality and position, and a shared set of practices and modes of life.
Great music seems to somehow transcend this: that I was not in the smoky clubs listening to Mingus, that I was not black and living in America in the 50’s, that I did not hear the song of the railroad in my walk somehow does not matter; it awakens something in me and in doing so I join the list of reverberations that Mingus sets off over the centuries.
Drum n’ Bass, in contrast, seems somewhat partisan. I have tried many times to explain the richness of this music, but it does not consisted in something listened for, rather it consists in something awakened that has perhaps limited reverberations. Hearkened, the old English word, expresses it well.
The speed of drum n’ bass, and latterly Grime, matches that of the London I know. I do not mean the speed in the sense that it is fast, I mean the exact speeds, 138bpm and so on. The off kilter Amen breaks that speak of the displaced energy, the frustrated distraction that becomes the prime mode of organising perceptual consciousness.
There is perhaps a degree of fallacy in such a description. How could it have been otherwise: drum n’ bass is what you listened to when working nights in the supermarket, getting pulled over, living under a grey sky sunk so low that ocassionally it seemed possibility was eclipsed. Thus, it would naturally seem like this music renders this environment: and this is precisely the congruence of possibility coming together at the same historical moment that allows for such sedimented hearkening.
/Grime/. Not just dirty, but grimey. Grime that you cannot get off at the end of the day, grime you could try to clean, but in the end you don’t know if you are scraping off the grime or scraping off your skin, the very skin that acts as protection. Grimey beats, not clean house music for prep boys with portfolios, but grimey beats. Beats that echo with life, with the tears and strains of existence, harsh and brittle like a glass mask teetering on the edge of falling from one’s face.
The depression and eulogisation, the despair and joy of making do on the streets of London, the way of life given sound: or perhaps, the sound given life, the sound structuring and arranging consciousness around its beats, the mixture of patois, cockney and krio forming a world that speaks from and forms a world.
The making do of another hustle: no good position from which to see. Vantage points are for generals and politicians: you have to make do with what is in front of you. Take it up and turn it around: any oppression a tool, any tool a weapon. The street allows for no vision apart from the immediate: there are too many faces, too many things going on, too much pressing up to your distracted vision. Not an engineer with a long list of necessary equipment: a handyman with a mixture of odds and ends.
A rhythm of life and not a harmony, a fundamental tonality awakened which is the compressed residue of this experience of life.
A life based on distraction, not contemplation.
