Music is about what? It’s hard to say, exactly. What there is about good music seems to me to be a fluency of expression, a continuity, within massive variety, of theme and feeling, and carried within all this lives a crie de coeur; resonating, as it were, in the form of something pretty elemental in us, as us being in the first place instinct animals, and in the second place, in us being rational thinking human animals.
I believe certain genres of good music are able to display these different aspects of what I believe make for good music. In general one genre is able to display one aspect better than most other genres. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
We have the genre of blues. Most of us who appreciate blues know something of its antecedents and their origins. We tend to know that blues arose out of Southern US slavery of negro populations kidnapped from the African coasts and trafficked to The New World and to The Caribbean as an unpaid forced labour on plantations which were labour intensive by their natures. Tobacco, sugar, cotton, some rice, etc, were the main crops.
These enslaved peoples did not leave their cultures behind them when they were forced aboard ships taking them westwards. I’d imagine they sang together in the holds, in the darkness and dankness of the ships; and just to keep up some kind of spirit and morale. I know many many died on the way. I know that, as Sir Walter Scott mentions in one of his Waverley Novels in his footnotes, that slaver masters on ships would have crews fire off pistol shots at the feet of the slaves during the few minutes each day the slaves were allowed on deck for a short exercise and some air. The aim of firing the shots was twofold it appears – firstly to give some ‘entertainment’ to the shooters and their the crews, and secondly and ostensibly the received prime reason, to get the slaves to ‘dance’ and so give exercise to their limbs and circulations.
These African peoples sang. They carried with them, along with much else of great value, their songs and their musical traditions across the Atlantic to the plantations; where new influences affected them as people and so changed their musical modes and developed their timbres and moods.
Being a subject race, under ownership, and often also under duress and pain; and bearing hard lives of hard work and long hours and little comfort; what else might be expected to have become of any African roots in music brought across the ocean with them, than for it to express sufferings and long-sufferings, and to brood and to tap into the depths of the wells of human emotional endurance?
And so, one amongst many genres of ‘Black’ American music, blues became a formal musical expression. There subsists in many blues songs, especially in the blues artists’ songs of the earlier 20th century (I have been able to find nothing before this on record) with their thin haunted carols in their rather tinny and distant-sounding voices and supporting instruments – sound recording produced by the state of the art technology of the time – there subsists a lamentational mode which is able to and does conjure up in one’s breast a great movement of sympathetic sorrow and an acute awareness of some of that pain of the music as a palliative to us and expressive of our own woes.
There is a feeling carried in these old and unremastered disks of blues which is well-conveyed by likening their musical desolations to a person who is listening to a broadcast of The Shipping Forecast late into the night on a radio which is carrying an amount of white noise and static interference. A friend of mine once called this experience ‘like listening to the end of the world.’ It works in our imaginations an impressive and powerful sense of otherness, of a presence of some of those things in earth and heaven which Horatio never dreamed of; an imaginative widening of horizons to a place we’d perhaps rather not go physically in the flesh and blood.
Blues can and often does carry this sense of otherness; and that strong pungent taste of listening to experience recorded which we have never had in such power; and God forbid that we should ever have. I liken it to a wail; not an amorphous anarchic wail of sheer horror and pain; there is no beauty in such, but only distress, and even for a listener. In regard to wails which are sheer and unadulterated coming straight from the bowels of a suffering person and so being red raw and harsh and alarming; one might agree with the poet Matthew Arnold who called suchlike expressions experiences in which ‘everything is to be endured, and nothing is to be done’. Arnold on the basis of this his comment excluded certain of his own works from his own artistic canon deliberately because he felt they were conveying only an unrelieved suffering and no solace.
Blues then as an art form of some greatness is able to transubstantiate an absolute and singular suffering into a mode of music which is blissfully affecting and cathartic of pain to hear and to appreciate. Despite its ‘otherness’ on the crackling thin-sounding player, it connects; and it connects at a level very hard to put into words because it is essential music and so bypasses words and goes to as place deeper else and straightway.
A parody of such a ‘direct-hit’ on one’s sensibilities might be the hackneyed Tarzan-like cry of ‘the natural man’ as portrayed in the movies, which tries whilst remaining in a comfort zone to express something beyond organised institutionalised society; and something which is prior in the psyche in human life. This reaching of good blues numbers into the soul and breast and heart, and them grabbing a person thereabouts, is in fact I believe a chief means of blues providing a certain relief and soothing to a listener.
Sigmund Freud’s ideas on our daily regular regulated lives were ideas which centred on the concept of trade-offs for lives lived in human societies. We as a society trade-off certain good and even beneficial things from our individual selves and in return we obtain the social benefits of the rule of law, the regulation, the standing in queues, the waiting for a bus, the keeping of our temper, the obeying of the speed limits, and a million and one other curbing items which we might quietly call ‘bugbears’ but they are each an item by which society functions and survived; and to lose them would mean for us all catastrophic disorder and a common free-for-all. Freud’s specific book on this topic is called ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’.
Good blues then, short-circuits, bypasses these ‘discontents of civilisation’ to some degree (I am not calling blues primitive or uncivilised; no, not at all; all art, all good art, does this same thing in its own discrete way) and blues thus provides a route for us for some of our deepest feelings of anguish, angst, and existential sorrow within to become recognised; recognised by us in ourselves in the first place; and in the second place recognised by way of a sympathy with the singer whom we recognise as one who has ‘gone before us into the darkness of the terrible night’.
And so words like ‘elemental’ and ‘instinctive’ can come into play within such a context; because in each of us there is that rebel who in the final instance bucks at the burdensome fardles life places upon him or her; and who recognises s/he needs some company who likewise wants ‘that hair they are tearing out to be let down a little’ and for a while to be, to exist, to live, in another easier mode than as the regular, official ‘me’. It’s a beer taken as medicine to do you some psychical good.
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