24th February 2010

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Gospel, Blues, & Punk

While reading Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues, I couldn’t help but think about how his idea of blues music as a sort of fight against the blues relates to punk music’s similar purpose.  Many see punk as meaningless or even nihilist, but this is not the case.  Punk is a struggle against not just the blues, but against what seems to some to be an ever more likely truth of nihilism.

The idea that there might be no meaning to life is what punk music tries to fight against.  We’ve been brought up to believe that there is a right and a wrong, but so much of the world around us seems unconcerned with morality.  Those same authority figures that told us what is right and wrong are the ones breaking those rules.  Punk always comes from a feeling that one is in a place where things are not the way they ought to be.

The Clash sang about career opportunities (or rather, a lack of them).  Joe Strummer was anything but lazy, and yet he was not able to find a job.  There’s something wrong with that, and yet we’ve been living in a world where unemployment is a structural necessity.  Jello Biafra sings about the injustice of the Dan White trial; apparently, the law only applies when certain people want it to.  The blues of punk music is the recognition of immorality at the very core of our society.  But it is most definitely the blues.

When Iggy sings “Search & Destroy,” he’s singin’ the blues.

Honey gotta help me please / Somebody gotta save my soul

Sound familiar?  The difference seems to me, however, that whereas the originators of blues used blues music as a sort of healing salve for the blues, punks seem to almost revel in the blues.  It may not be the case that, through punk music, one instantly chases the blues away.  But the goal is still the same. It’s through the magnification of the blues that, hopefully, change comes about.  When it’s made so plain that things aren’t the way they should be, how can it be ignored?  Eventually, we hope, the blues shall be taken out right at the core of the issue.

Tagged: all you men are slime