Saturday, March 08, 2003
As 2003 has been officially designated the year of the blues by the U.S. Congress, we can look forward to a lot of print devoted to the blues.
(Courtesy of 2/21/03 post at scribble, scribble, scribble
"The blues is so...encoding and fetishizing
I try not to filch from Andrew Sullivan, since I figure it's my responsibility to write my own bloody blog. But this was too good not to share. Thanks to him for the pointer.
Robert Cantwell is an adjunct associate professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina. Something called the "Experience Music Project" will hold a "Pop Music Study Conference"—a spectacularly bad idea—next April, and Professor Cantwell intends to deliver a paper titled "Blues Residues: Blackface, Bakelite, Fossil Fuel." Here is the precis:
Metaphors of blackness link it to residues: of ash, soot, coal dust, and burnt cork, thence to the collier, smith, and engineer, to mummery and minstrelsy, finally to travesty, inversion, and social chastening, on the one hand, and to conversions of energy, physical, social, political, on the other. In the blues disc, as cultural residue, as human trace, as musical contest or struggle, these metaphors converge. At once token, sign, text, miniature and windup toy, the disc encodes and fetishizes an human action—one thinks of Tiger Woods's golf stroke, recently captured as a computer file by outfitting him with a sensor-embedded electronic drysuit from which the stroke can be digitally read, capable of endless repetition, not "preserved for posterity" but embodied as the end and original of all possible golf strokes, at once consuming and resurrecting the game.
Like Nepalese religious shrines tendered on cow dung, the blues disc is an "opportunity for devotion." In the three economies in which it occurs, of the market, of society, and of the self, a disc collection such as James McKune's or Harry Smith's becomes a kind of counter-capital, a harvest of filth, like Dickens's dustman converting what is dispersed, discarded, ruined, and despised to what is recovered, concentrated, and renewed, rendering it at once rare and precious, scandalous and subversive. In the vertical archeology of the social body, it is an edifice of the repressed, making one's own despised or ruined condition available for contemplation and turning it, by virtue of our irrepressible sociality, into a source of cultural power. "Whatever we worship we make sacred." (Patanjali).
Further comment would be superfluous, except...I want a red-hot mama to rock me like my vertical archaeology ain't got no bone." ¶ 3/08/2003 08:09:00 AM
(Courtesy of 2/21/03 post at scribble, scribble, scribble
"The blues is so...encoding and fetishizing
I try not to filch from Andrew Sullivan, since I figure it's my responsibility to write my own bloody blog. But this was too good not to share. Thanks to him for the pointer.
Robert Cantwell is an adjunct associate professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina. Something called the "Experience Music Project" will hold a "Pop Music Study Conference"—a spectacularly bad idea—next April, and Professor Cantwell intends to deliver a paper titled "Blues Residues: Blackface, Bakelite, Fossil Fuel." Here is the precis:
Metaphors of blackness link it to residues: of ash, soot, coal dust, and burnt cork, thence to the collier, smith, and engineer, to mummery and minstrelsy, finally to travesty, inversion, and social chastening, on the one hand, and to conversions of energy, physical, social, political, on the other. In the blues disc, as cultural residue, as human trace, as musical contest or struggle, these metaphors converge. At once token, sign, text, miniature and windup toy, the disc encodes and fetishizes an human action—one thinks of Tiger Woods's golf stroke, recently captured as a computer file by outfitting him with a sensor-embedded electronic drysuit from which the stroke can be digitally read, capable of endless repetition, not "preserved for posterity" but embodied as the end and original of all possible golf strokes, at once consuming and resurrecting the game.
Like Nepalese religious shrines tendered on cow dung, the blues disc is an "opportunity for devotion." In the three economies in which it occurs, of the market, of society, and of the self, a disc collection such as James McKune's or Harry Smith's becomes a kind of counter-capital, a harvest of filth, like Dickens's dustman converting what is dispersed, discarded, ruined, and despised to what is recovered, concentrated, and renewed, rendering it at once rare and precious, scandalous and subversive. In the vertical archeology of the social body, it is an edifice of the repressed, making one's own despised or ruined condition available for contemplation and turning it, by virtue of our irrepressible sociality, into a source of cultural power. "Whatever we worship we make sacred." (Patanjali).
Further comment would be superfluous, except...I want a red-hot mama to rock me like my vertical archaeology ain't got no bone." ¶ 3/08/2003 08:09:00 AM
