On weekends, Herman opens the gym and yesterday after my workout he was showing a young woman a self-portrait he had done for his grown daughter. (A better than adequate likeness, I saw this work last weekend.) Herman is a few years older than I am.
The young woman asked about the symbols he included. A helmet for his motorcycle, a paint brush for his art, a couple of others and also a clef to indicate his love of music, the blues in particular.
“What are the blues?” She asked.
In my experience Dutchies my age know far more Blues musicians than do Americans so geography could not explain her lack of knowledge, a lack she felt defensive about when she saw the look Herman and I gave as a reflex to her question. “I am only twenty two,” she said with an agreeable laugh.
I suggested she try Muddy Waters and “Mannish Boy” but she tried B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” and made it five seconds, exactly as long as I made it through the “music” she played for me.
Strikingly, she does not listen to songs. Lyrics mean nothing to her. With a look Herman and I agreed on the role lyrics played, and play, in our inner dialogues. Old men tangled up in blue.
She did seem interested in the way Blues led to Rock and Roll and had sort of— “Yes, I think so”—heard of The Beatles and The Rolling Stone. For a futile minute I tried to explain the idea that all this music had invented being young.
Still, the truth is that outside of school this young woman has never had to intake anything—music, news, information, entertainment—she did not choose herself. She works (and works out) hard and is obviously, if I can put it this way, a good kid. But she lives at a time when it is possible to know a lot and have zero ambient knowledge.
Nor is there any moral, ethical, or artistic mount from which one can preach the sanctity of blues music.
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Television was supposed to make us more empathetic because we would see people from all over. Instead it made us catatonic.
The internet was supposed to connect us. Instead it has given us each our own silo of despair.
Music was supposed to win us a culture war. Instead it got purchased.
You may know this from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
I’ve waded in and against the backwash of that wave my whole life, longing for a shore that could not exist without Count Basie, Freddie King (Herman’s favorite), Aimee Mann, Al Green and a thousand more. Despite Thompson’s all too accurate vision, I nevertheless had moments I though that wave might crest again: A Talking Heads show in Maine; Obama’s election; Rage Against The Machine.
Turns out what the generation ahead of me felt beneath their feet is not just distant, but washed away altogether, all my R&B certainties questions now: Fight the power? Born to run? Never mind the bollocks?
Everything gonna be alright this mornin’?