It's astonishing to think that when they got their hands on "the white man's" tools, black people were able, in the space of three chords, to invent a form of music that utterly defies the entirety of western classical harmonic theory. I guess it's easy for people to overlook that these days, especially for the ignorant.
Quote:
Originally Posted by creegstor
Documenting music history is not "making it a race thing".
Quote:
Originally Posted by jrhager84
And kindling can't ignite without a flame. You just provided an avenue for people to make the statement. I've seen it many times on this board...
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Gearslutz App
Quote:
Originally Posted by creegstor
I'm sorry, I fail to see how simply referring to what was an amazing feat accomplished when one culture crossed with another is somehow "making it a race thing" or "opening an avenue". I guess I just don't think that way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by deathromantik
Actually the foundations of blues started in Africa on African instruments. It is African folk music on western instruments.
I have heard tales of the 12 bar blues' trickier cousin the 13 bar blues.
I'd like to think there's enough blues to go around for everyone.
It's certainly true that without the African diaspora forced upon people from all over that continent by the perverse institution of slavery, the music of the Americas might well have evolved entirely differently. Perhaps there would have been no blues, and, hence, no country or pop, no reggae or calypso, no bossa nova.
Or perhaps the polytonal, harmony-dominated music of Europe would have intertwined and hybridized with the (mostly*) mono-tonal, rhythmically compex music of Africa, nor been indirectly influenced by the complex scales and modalities of middle eastern music in time anyway, although, of course, that path would likely have been quite different and likely have produced a somewhat different set of hybrids.
What is, is. We can no more deny the influence of Anglican hymnal music on the blues and hence pop music than we can the influence of African musical strains.
No one man or woman, no one race owns the blues -- or any other form of music.
* Some of the African Pygmy cultures (Aka–Baka and the Mbuti) developed vocal polytonalism and improvised communal counterpoint, apparently in isolation from the influences of Europe.
I always though that joke was more relevant to country music.
The Blues is there to do the opposite of bringing you down and making you sad, you are able identify with others about hard times and see a way through it.
So the rest of the song needs to go...
I shot the wife.
Dog wouldn't eat her. I ain't either.
Used her for fertilizer. Killed the tree.
With the firewood money. Bought a new bed.
Dog and I is happy. We's snorin' away.
__________________
"It's not a performance...It's an experience." ...Janis Joplin
I shot the wife.
Dog wouldn't eat her. I ain't either.
Used her for fertilizer. Killed the tree.
With the firewood money. Bought a new bed.
Dog and I is happy. We's snorin' away.
Haha.... if that's the way to make you feel better.
The Blues are an expression of the heart. The Blues are not about a formula, chords, or a style. They are about the destruction of this life. Putting ones heart into something greater. They are about a hope, greater than the things of this world. Sorrow for the things of this world.
The only qualification one must have to sing the blues is: To have lived the blues. To have come to the point in their life that nothing in this life can bring happiness. It's when a person evolves into an unselfish love that brings happiness and fulfillment that this life cannot. It's singing about the truth of this life and it's end is death and destruction...always. It's a point where people seperate...either evolve, or turn into a complete destroyer. The evolved sing the blues.
When a person speaks of the Blues from the point of view of formulas, style, chords, etc. They do not yet have a clue. They have not lived the Blues.
Silly. For instance, I can assure you Jazz is not boring. You may be bored listening to it but that usually means you can't hear what's going on and cannot establish a frame of reference so you become bored. Being bored is not the same as being boring. It is a matter of perspective. It is not unlike a person with no math skills trying to read an advanced treatise on fractal equations. In other words, just because someone is bored by something does not make that thing boring. That is just faulty logic which is in fact the true underpinning of this entire thread and many others on this board.
The simply fact is that objective and subjective are so deeply confused and mixed on boards like this that one has to take their search pretty deep to discover anything meaningful. Thankfully it is there from time to time.
The Blues are an expression of the heart. The Blues are not about a formula, chords, or a style. They are about the destruction of this life. Putting ones heart into something greater. They are about a hope, greater than the things of this world. Sorrow for the things of this world.
The only qualification one must have to sing the blues is: To have lived the blues. To have come to the point in their life that nothing in this life can bring happiness. It's when a person evolves into an unselfish love that brings happiness and fulfillment that this life cannot. It's singing about the truth of this life and it's end is death and destruction...always. It's a point where people seperate...either evolve, or turn into a complete destroyer. The evolved sing the blues.
When a person speaks of the Blues from the point of view of formulas, style, chords, etc. They do not yet have a clue. They have not lived the Blues.
The blues formula is so simple so a lot of amateurs navigate towards this music form and gives it a bad rep, unfortunately.
Let's say the basic blues formula.
And, when you get down to it, it may be more over-familiar than simple.
After all, unlike many simple songs, various blues forms almost always involve modulation (although many performers are content to view that modulation through the permissive 'lens' of pentatonic melodies and so may not actually confront or exploit that modulation-based complexity).
And while the good ol', plain vanilla...
Quote:
I, I, I, I
IV, IV, I, I
V, IV, I, V
...bedrock may be well ingrained in us, there's nothing to stop all sorts of embellishments and substitutions, like, for instance...
Quote:
I, III7, VIm7, Vm7-I7
IV, #VIdim, I, I
II7, V7, I, V
I feel similar to the thread starter. I acknowledge the foundational influence of blues and I love some of the pioneers of it but it has turns into " baloney sandwich " music.
I think I hate the snobbery of the practitioners of it more than the predictability of it.
Like I have said for years , there's only one thing I hate more than the Rolling Stones is single minded slack jawed Rolling Stones fanatics. Same goes for blues snobs or any genre snobbery for that matter.
I could say positive and negative things about just about every genre!
Things I don't like, that are not exclusive to Blues (but sometimes inherent in it) are:
Too long of a solo.
Too many solos.
Non-stellar solo.
(There's a theme there.)
Overly repetitious.
Too long of a tune.
Too bitter lyrics.
Too many Blues tunes at once.
I've composed Blues tunes, and loved it!
And I love what has been done to some Blues songs, such as some of early Led Zeppelin.
But it seems to me that a lot of folks would enjoy Blues more if it were in smaller doses.
As far as color of skin, or size of body, or whatever, well, unless there's a fantastic-sounding venue (great quality, not too loud), since I usually prefer studio recordings to live sound, I may not even know what the person looks like. I listen to music for music. If I like the tune, I do; if I don't, I don't. And then there's the mood I am in.
I appreciate nearly every genre. I can enjoy or even love tunes from most. But, like most people, I do have my personal preferences. And there are few or no genres that I would say that I hate. There may be things about it that I dislike or hate, but usually (if not always) not the whole genre itself.
Maybe we can start a new genre, and call it – I don't know – Yellows! LOL, where we sing about happier stuff, to help balance out our own blues.
Cheers & Blues!
sadsongs
Last edited by sadsongs; 22nd September 2012 at 02:33 AM..
Reason: Typos. Clarification. Added a sentence to list.
Most blues suck - some is good in small doses. "Red House" by Hendrix i think is very good - he doesn't play the typical boring crap with the typical boring tone, and the recording is unique compared to other blues songs, i think it worked. "Yer Blues" and "For you blue" by the Beatles i also like, probably because they recorded over 100 songs and only 2 were blues songs. I think the real issue is if an artist plays only or mostly blues, then its boring. Personally i think Jazz is usually just as bad, its more interesting but it is basically crap. John Scofield is amazing at scales, that is great, the songwriting is non existent though, its just a boring long jam session. It would be more pleasing if somebody incorporated Jazz into a songwriting format of some kind. Phish was ok at that, not really Jazz though. Country too sucks most of the time, sure there are exceptions. Rap almost always sucks. Pop is mostly crap. Punk is mostly crap. Metal is mostly crap. Electronica is mostly crap. I can't think of any genre that isn't mostly crap with exceptions who do something good within it. So yes blues suck in general, as with everything else, i suppose blues being so basic makes it difficult to do something fantastic with.
Most blues suck - ... Jazz... is basically crap.... Country too sucks most of the time,... Rap almost always sucks. Pop is mostly crap. Punk is mostly crap. Metal is mostly crap. Electronica is mostly crap. I can't think of any genre that isn't mostly crap...
Wow, now that I think about it, Siddhartha did kinda sing the blues. "..all life is composed of suffering.." it was just code!
__________________ Magnetic media rules.
When in the City of Coyotes area, visit the Ryman Auditorium and come on by Good Intentions Studio or just throw a beer bottle in the driveway as you pass and scream, "AW, HELL YEAH!"
Last edited by johnny nowhere; 24th September 2012 at 03:10 PM..
Reason: batting .1000
Most blues suck - some is good in small doses. "Red House" by Hendrix i think is very good - he doesn't play the typical boring crap with the typical boring tone, and the recording is unique compared to other blues songs, i think it worked. "Yer Blues" and "For you blue" by the Beatles i also like, probably because they recorded over 100 songs and only 2 were blues songs. I think the real issue is if an artist plays only or mostly blues, then its boring. Personally i think Jazz is usually just as bad, its more interesting but it is basically crap. John Scofield is amazing at scales, that is great, the songwriting is non existent though, its just a boring long jam session. It would be more pleasing if somebody incorporated Jazz into a songwriting format of some kind. Phish was ok at that, not really Jazz though. Country too sucks most of the time, sure there are exceptions. Rap almost always sucks. Pop is mostly crap. Punk is mostly crap. Metal is mostly crap. Electronica is mostly crap. I can't think of any genre that isn't mostly crap with exceptions who do something good within it. So yes blues suck in general, as with everything else, i suppose blues being so basic makes it difficult to do something fantastic with.
Love it. This post gave me a good giggle, so brutally honest.
And for me too, it's the song, not the genre.
Things I don't like, that are not exclusive to Blues (but sometimes inherent in it) are:
I think I was like you in many ways (and probably still am), but I've recently found new respect for Jimi Hendrix (especially the live stuff even though sound quality isn't so good), and some of the tracks of SRV.
SRV's version of Little Wing is magical to me - I never tire of it. I still remember the first time I heard SRV on some NPR telethon - it was like the Texas Flood concert or something - and I couldn't stop listening. I don't like many of SRV's songs - but he has some gems that just do it for me, and I find his guitarwork inspiring (but I do like guitar instrumentals)
And Hendrix - I absolutely didn't get Hendrix when I was younger - I was like "He can't sing" and "recording quality is bad" - but I've come around to become a big fan. What Hendrix does really hit me hard when I was home alone one night after work and was putting together a some fairly complicated piece of furniture (workbench type thing) from Harbor Freight. It probably took me 3 or 4 hours. I had just downloaded a bunch of Hendrix stuff off emusic (not just the stuff you hear on the radio that's really not his best stuff sometimes - but the backlist stuff too). And I just selected all of his tunes and let it play while I was working. It took it a little while to sink in but his music is hypnotic - I've never had that experience listening to music before. It just took over my mind and put me in some stupified zone while I was putting that workbench together. My wife came home and it was hard for me to snap out of it. I don't do drugs - but I imagined it was kindof like some kind of being stoned by induction if that's possible. Since I've really learned to appreciate his style and technique. The more I listened to his backlist I heard how he's different from any other guitarist I've studied, even though so many cite him as a primary influence.
I can relate to what you are saying Smili. I was about 12 years old when my older sister began dragging in these albums by 'weirdos' like The Vanilla Fudge and Jimi Hendrix. I'd listen to these records through her bedroom door with mixed amounts of interest and fear.
About four years later, after she'd gotten married and moved away, and upon finding my own interest in music, I'd put these albums on and scrutinize them. 'Eleanor Rigby' redone in the somnambulistic Vanilla Fudge style made me feel as if I were dreaming, as did 'Third Stone From the Sun' by Hendrix. I was amazed at the sounds that I was hearing and was determined to figure out how they were being made.
This, of course, led me to finally discover that a great deal of the effects were made during the production process and that much of them were simply tape manipulation, which probably accounts for why I prefer the medium to this day. Once the sounds become plastic, there isn't anything you can't do with them. Hendrix was indeed ahead of his time, and his technique was second to none.
Last edited by johnny nowhere; 19th October 2012 at 11:57 PM..
Reason: misspellings abound
Been playing music for almost 25 years, I love music and listen to most kinds of it (well, most kinds known to the average westerner). I've been heavily into jazz for some time and used to play in a rock/soul/pop band.
What seems to be ubiquitous among musicians is the great admiration for blues. I know it's pretty damn ignorant not to recognise it as the foundation for rock, jazz etc but I just don't find it sexy. I think it's partly been ruined for me by overweight white middle-aged men that seemed to kidnap the genre some decades ago. But I don't really enjoy listening to the early stuff either. I don't mind bits and pieces of it in music, I use it too, it's hard not to.
Does anyone else feel this way? I'm not talking about one genre people who are exclusively into some sort of EDM or hiphop. I mean people who dig jazz, rock, hiphop etc but ... Well, does anyone find this remotely interesting or worth discussing? I guess I just had to get this off my chest
As someone who likes just about every type of music, and has played in some of the most diverse orchestrations possible:
For me, I always tend to lean towards fusion. The moment anything becomes a static category, and people start simply emulating eachother around in circles, it loses vitality.
For instance, I loved hip-hop when it started... but am not so fond of what it has become.
Often times, people have the misconception that if people like Jimi Hendrix were alive today, they'd be making stuff that sounded like what they did back then. I doubt it. They were pioneers BECAUSE they were all about creating something new. It's only the imitators that are stuck on repeat.
As for blues:
Blues back in the day was about innovation, about blending sounds... African call and response, a coke bottle as a slide, it was innovative. Just because many blues musicians stopped pushing it forward decades ago doesn't mean it died.
I love the blues... for what it was and can be. Check out the track in my signature. It was written from the ground up to be both harmonically and lyrically a fully modern realization of what the blues is all about. Kids today might not even recognize it as blues. To me, that's ALL it is. The rest is just decoration.
__________________ .
PRODUCTION GOAL: Blend ridiculously diverse musical influences into a viable pop signature sound that works for top 40 radio, clubs, earbuds, computer speakers, car stereos, submarine galleys, Australian walkabouts, Turkish prisons, skydiving simulators, volcanic craters, anechoic chambers, Martian discotheques, and all other known and unknown playback scenarios in perpetuity throughout the universe. - AINT NOBODY
I've been into and out of the blues for decades. Loved it as a beginner (three chords, one scale, sound sexy, what's not to love?) then got bored with it. Then rediscovered the love, then got bored again.
I've been through playing loads of complex stuff and getting off on it. Now find myself sort of playing less and meaning more, if you know what I mean. Which is blues spirit. But I run a weekly jazz jam session and whenever a blues gets called I tend to switch on autopilot and start considering what colour to repaint the kitchen.
It can be done really well, if the feeling is there. But even then, I couldn't take a whole night of it. I'm afraid for me, listening to the same 8, 12 or 16 bar cycle over and over isn't much preferable to turning on commercial radio, where every song goes I V vi IV over a spayed Amen break with airbrushed vocals by pretty teens banging on about how they're going to die if they can't be with you again.
And, when you get down to it, it may be more over-familiar than simple.
After all, unlike many simple songs, various blues forms almost always involve modulation (although many performers are content to view that modulation through the permissive 'lens' of pentatonic melodies and so may not actually confront or exploit that modulation-based complexity).
And while the good ol', plain vanilla...
...bedrock may be well ingrained in us, there's nothing to stop all sorts of embellishments and substitutions, like, for instance...
Still the blues.
When I go to the few blues jams I sometimes visit (mostly out of boredom or don't want to sit in the studio), I play wacko bass lines, jazz centric and so on, just to push the bounders and let the old timers scratch their heads.
Music as to evolve, me thinks blues got stuck in the seventies, which is bad, means stagnation.
On the subject of blues variations, sure you have the variations - the jazz blues, the minor blues, the Parker changes, the Coltrane variants, etc.
You don't even need to anchor around I IV and V. You can just think in terms of a sort of loose attitudinal roadmap like (eg for a 12-bar):
Use your ears, fingers, heart, liver, spleen, anything to define "home", "different" and "weird". Any chords, scales, sounds you like. You'd think that would send the grannies running, no? But the tension-release pattern of the blues is so ingrained that people still hear it. Once you have that pattern established, you can go further. Maybe spend a chorus or two, or one and a half, focusing on "weird" as long as when you come out of it, you land back in the right place on the roadmap.
The blues is like a joke. Guy walks into a bar and something happens. He does it again ... and the same something happens. The third time, something different happens.
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