High Water Everywhere Revisited

Another take on "High Water Everywhere" by Charlie Patton... exploring the lyrics and the legend of a man whose recordings in themselves don't always live up to the myth...or the potential that Howlin' Wolf saw in them....it may be that seeing Charlie live was a totally different experience that what we got when he was in the artificial setting of trying to capture a musical piece for the "record". A good dose of whiskey and a hot and hoppin' audience surely brought out a different aspect of his performance. So I offer more an interpretation that any attempt, hopeless at best, to copy or imitate his sound...but most of not to tame it into another ragtime guitar style...you here it in his music but it is somewhat at odds with his vocals and lyrics...I tend to go towards the darker more minor pentatonic tonality of accompaniment that only seems to come out with Mississippi Delta blues guitarists that played with a slide...

12-29-10

Charlie Patton ala Warhol

"Buried Alive" 12-27-10

Vloggin' on the Internets

   Bloggin' or vloggin' or floggin' a spiel on the net  is much like buskin' on the street...a lot of potential audience but but you still need to get their attention and maybe only a handful will connect with your music or message... My attempt at a 21st century topical protest song, "Set Poor Julian Free"  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRf4OduGCLI is a case in point. I'm still working on a "talkin' blues" style to make up my lack of "musicality" in my "singing." So I know that is definitely a minus in getting people to listen. But "location" is a major factor. Alyona approved my video reply to her broadcast Wikileaks co-founder speaks to Alyona http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sYXppiOteM which helped generate my largest number of hits since "Muddy the Waters."

   But Wikileaks  http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks didn't respond to my Twitter but they did post a reference to Rap News' excellent news parody, a Hillary v. WikiLeaks music video,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl4NlA97GeQ that helped generate 400,000+ hits, well deserved I must add. Goes to show the power of a mention that directs people to a Youtube video. 

   Philosophy and rights and the human plight go hand in hand. A quote from BiancaJagger http://twitter.com/#!/BiancaJagger

“Not to help justice in her need would be an impiety.” Plato

  Her tweets are an excellent source of relevant human rights issues on a daily basis.

Two long months ago....

    Two long months ago....my passion for the blues fell in love with an idea, the ideal of philosophy as an engine of social criticism...of bitchin' 'bout what makes us feel down, out of sorts with the world in which we are thrown, the alienation of existential philosophy and the downhome urge to holler and moan about it. The trouble is it doesn't fit academic philosophy...the only home philosophy really knows today, despite the efforts to start up Socrates' Cafes....Christopher Phillips' bestseller was a brilliant attempt to naturalize philosophy...to once again turn its attention from from "the heavens" and back down to earth...not quite down to home, downhome style, or the home of Heidegger, but closer, our sense of homelessness, not at home-ness, alienation from the technological demands of conformity to a faceless, impersonal bureaucracy that sees us all as the same raw material  of the same exploitable value of exchange. Heidegger on the right and Adorno on the left say clearly the same problems of modern existence...the blues singer felt it and expressed it in a more immediate way....they were reacting to not just to the alienation of the working class...the service worker, the factory and industrial farm worker, the migrant and the dispossessed... but the alienation of us all in the post-modern world.
   Dylan, a white boy from the north, some how caught the spirit, ..without a home, no direction known, like a rollin' stone...the Rolling Stones caught it, and countless others, black and white, American and British..Marley reggae-fied it and took it even deeper into the Third World that gave it its rhythmic soul. But it deep roots come from India via Europe as well... the canto hondo of the Spanish gypsies, the deep blues of Europa's first dispossessed working class gave the strumming guitars and minor melodies to the cultural mix out of which the blues evolved. Rhythm, melody, harmony and a lament over man's fate in a world the powerful created for themselves....that is the blues for me...a world that critical philosophy seeks to understand, intellectualize in a way but still to serve the yearning to understand this ol' world that fate has thrown us into..

Fightin' in the Streets

Fightin' in the Streets....rhythm inspired by street drummers in Belarus demonstrations, sort of an 80's Stones style funk number.

12-21-10

12-20-10 Let Our Minds Soar

12-19-10

   Quietly optimistic resistance to the technocrats is somehow still possible...the medium is now the only message, who controls the flow of information in the globalized network of electronic communication holds the power...only art can pass by the censors, so let's muddy the waters so the art of social criticism cannot be distinguished from the art that functions as the last claim of intellectual sensitivity of the economic power elite -- the art that is their status symbol, the only thing that provides an illusion that raw power is not all they crave, their only link to humanity and their only way of remaining human themselves so they are not totally devoured by their own game....