Art, Choices and Sadness

Have modern people become incapable of understanding their own misery? I think it's something I've thought for awhile, based on the many "modern" people I have met: they often seem unusually shocked by just how low their moods can descend - and they also seem frightened by it. Why? Well, I think it might have a lot to do with the very key fact that these folks often have no idea what, exactly, was happening in the PAST. Hence my description of them as "modern". My definition of the word modern here really doesn't mean born on a certain date . It means more "only exposed to certain stuff"...i.e. Modern stuff.

My basic idea here is that someone whose only been exposed to recent art and recent history -- like someone who only watches TV shows and never reads history and only listens to artists from about the 70s onward-- is probsbly completely unaware, somewhere in their brain,  of just how infinitely depressing and miserable the entire human story has been now, for a very long time. They have essentially been brought up to believe that life is for "living" and being "happy" and , who knows, "achieving something". I can't say I'm against these values. Certainly not. I find them admirable. However, I also think that the World is and always has been a fairly miserable and violent place. So I'm not that surprised, I don't think, when I start to see all of that erupting somewhere, or even happening in my own brain. It has never occurred to me, for instance, that I ought to take pills to make me happy because , well, in comparison to these blues artists I listen to from the swamps of Louisiana in the 1920s, I seem to be living the life of great cheer.

 I do not seem all that miserable in comparison to their stark and bleak misery, and in some way I guess I could be accused of feeding off of their misery -- I suppose some asshole with a PhD might say that---but I prefer to instesd see it as their strength from the past is helping me with my own in the future. For I am not just engaged with the blues artists for a few brief moments in a textbook or some dirty Princeton classroom for a week seminar. I'm actively engaged with these old ghosts daily. They're a major part of my life.  Charley Patton is my go to favorite artist in the same way that Britney Spears is for some other individual. And listening to Charley Patton has serious perks, like I said: it puts my life in perspective. It puts my modern time in perspective. It helps me to understand my own reality in relation to his. I actually get a chance, I guess, to see my "white privilege" too. The interesting thing about my journey in this world is I never heard the word whitr privilege a single time, since I never went to college and mostly just kept to myself , but I didn't need to hear it because I was listening to these old blues songs since 16 years old,  and so the entire African American tale was put into perspective very quickly for me. Just like other tales were also in perspective for me too, as a result of actively engaging with history and reading of it daily. I can't stress enough how vivid my engagement with history has always been: I don't just read of it . I try to breathe it as deep as I can. I'm not some dirty asshole from Princeton who thinks to be better than the people of history and the past. I don't mock them. I've never thought for one single second that I'm better than any historical character, or that I'm smarter, or anything really. I just think I'm able to see "more" cause I have better "binoculars". I have more tools than them; but tools don't make me a better man or human than them.

I am quite aware of the fact that I would most certainly be the historical character in question, if only I was in their shoes. For some reason I just never thought the dirty people at Princeton and other places had this same idea. They have this idea that they are not only above the history -- but also that they are above even the modern poor folks. It's like these dirty people wholeheartedly believe they would be the same person no matter where they were born. As though they look to some desolate East Texas town and think they would be a book reading liberal still if they had been born there. I doubt it. But this just goes to display how they do lack empathy. And of course so do the conservative imbeciles from the red states lack empathy too, because they can't seem to understand that, if they were black, they'd be pretty pissed and sad as well. Somehow this is all going over their head though--- just like the idea that maybe life isn't about being happy 24 hours a day is too. How come?

Well it goes back to the art intake thing again, reader. People these days don't really have a healthy art intake, in my opinion. I think many of them don't really know how to find art, because what has happened now is that, even though so much art is available, there is this idea that certain people must listen to certain stuff. Art to me actually seems Less diversified than ever before because of how easy it is to make a choice as to what you want to hear or not these days. What do I mean by that? Well, it's simple: artists have actually, to a degree, been somewhat swept off the streets of society, and the normal places of society. How so you ask? Impossible you scream! Oh you are the modern enlightened soul of the New World! How dare I make such a statement. But it's true!  There's actually, in many ways, less exposure to real art than ever before .....

For example, in the past, you would have perhaps had the experience of walking into a bar and finding a sad bluesman playing there randomly. You might have experienced an entire "concert" in that way. Now this is all but gone, more or less. Nothing is random now. Now it has all been carefully pre arranged and scheduled for you. So you get tickets to a concert and plan three months in advance for how Madonna will make you feel in January, et cetera. Or of course with the radio, you turn it on and you have pre selected stations that you can always rely on for the sound you're looking for. Wanna feel happy ans boisterous ? Twist to 99.3, where they play loud aggressive rock . Or sad? Switch to Delilahs Sad Hour on 101.9. Wanna feel good and hopeful tonight? Make sure to watch the movie with Scarlett Johansson that is being advertised as the happiest movie of the year! You see what I mean? We are in this weird age of being able to choose our emotions with songs and film and anything really. In the past, it simply wasn't really like this. Everything was yet to be organized. In the age before the radio, you had no choice. You didn't say "I think I'll sit and listen to the blues tonight." No. It was essentially forced upon you. It was all that was around.

Now in my own case I do consider my discovery of the blues to have happened somewhat against my will, and I say this because I believe my own method of finding artists is one that is no longer really practiced by too many of the enlightened modern folks, and this is the method: I don't generally listen to what the radio tells me to listen to, or what the magazines or the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune tells me to listen to . I don't listen, either, to what my pals tell me to listen to.  I listen, instead, to what the artists themselves have told me I ought to listen to, after I'm done listening to them. And I have often done this even when I find the artist they've directed me to absolutely awful. So for instance, I came to discover Hank Williams Sr., only after realizing that he had been a vital influence for Bob Dylan, in an interview I watched, and I came to discover someone from the 70s like Eartha Kitt, only after realizing that the new black rapper Azealia Banks was making references to her on Twitter. And I do feel that this method is not being practiced by most people, because something tells me that most people just sort of wander around the radio dial,  or they go, again, by those intolerable genres that something like Sirius gives you. And what has happened , as a result of this, is that a genre like the blues has become just a mere "genre", instead of being AMERICAN HISTORY.

The basic point here is that I don't think I've ever listened to Charley Patton in order to listen to somethin "enjoyable" or "pleasurable". I listen to him because I'm remembering the history of the country I'm in. But for most people you can see that they almost don't see him as history --- but rather just someone who was an early practitioner of this music "genre" that Sirius radio now plays on Tuesday nights, when it's time to feel "blue". For me , I think I saw it all as something that I literally *had* to listen to, just like people *have* to accept that a Civil War once happened or someone named John Kennedy was once assassinated. I did not see Charley Patton or Blind Willie McTell as choices. I saw them as artists who had to be heard , if I wanted to understand the emotions of my own country. I saw them in this way because I saw them , again, not as a genre, but as history. Like spokesmen of a certain place. So i almost hesitate to call myself a fan of Blind Willie McTell. To be a fan would imply that I have thoroughly chosen it and enjoyed it. I'm not sure I'd say that. I'm not even sure his music is meant to be "enjoyed". I think it's meant only to be heard and reflected upon...

And of course this "method" still basically applies to modern artists too. For example, to mention Azealia Banks again, I did not "choose" to listen to Azealia Banks. No. What happened was that I came to see Azealia was the modern black female representative of Harlem, New York -- she certainly seems to be one of the most famous black females in the media right now -- and so I essentially forced myself to listen to her music, as well as her various Twitter statements, in order to more deeply understand that specific area of society. Yet still, if I am to make many references to Azealia Banks, the automatic assumption is instantly that I am a great fan of hers, and that I love her music, and that I get great joy out of it , etcetera. But again, I don't really consider myself a "fan" of hers. I am just someone who listened to what she had to say. Why must I automatically be called a fan...? Why is there this obsession with fanhood? Why can't someone just listen to someone , to take something in, in the same way that I listen to the evening news -- whether I like it or not? If I sat researching the assassination of John Kennedy, you would never say I was "a fan of it". Nor would you say that a researcher of World War 2 was a "fan of the war". No. They were merely forced to study it. So how come we refuse to let this happen with music and even ART in general?? Why is music still being seen as this thing that folks must only do for fun??

I think it is ashame. I think music and art deserves much more than that. And this all reaches back to what I was saying initially, about happy pills and stuff, because this all goes to show you that modern people have become so obsessed with this idea of CHOICE...that they now even think they can choose the very mood they're in. So now they're going to go on for a hundred years, one imagines, creating these mood pills... Oh well..

I'll be back here with Charley Patton still yuh know ... "Prayer of Death". ....