Nelson George once asked his readers why Hip Hop was so popular with white people, and he said
"...There are scores of stories that illustrate hip hop's essential mutability. They are literary, cinematic, fashionable, and political in ways that have nothing to do with black nationalism, for hip hop is the ultimate capitalist tool." I got that feeling from the broad support for Sinners out there. It's the acceptable face of the African-American cultural struggle.
"Up front, just so you know where I’m coming from, I think 'Sinners' is a very bad movie on every level"
You had me from the first line! We saw it on a rare chance for an evening out, and became more and more perplexed what it was trying to say as the film progressed. In particular the choice to make an Alan Lomax/Pete Seeger character the main villain was very strange to us. You seem to suggest a mechanism where the vinyl recording makes villains instead... which makes a little more sense.
You did your homework on this one. I haven't been able to bring myself to watch "Sinners." I am down with vamps, but not vampires: Ann Rice cured me. As did the drunken white boy at the Bottom Line who sang louder than Muddy Waters.
Once again, you've got me thinking. Please read this as responding, not trying to "correct" you.
I'm reading Wald's book at the moment, and nodding my head in agreement every time he debunks the idea that musicians who played what we call blues were anything less than savvy entertainers who, when successful, gave their audiences what they wanted, and whose professionalism and repertoire has been distorted by the markets, first the record companies' desire for race records, and later by nostalgic White desires for an authenticity to counter our capitalist alienation.
I think Sinners is a confused movie, because it's internally inconsistent. For me the daylight Clarksdale movie is a horror movie about history, perfectly legible as such, and the nighttime roadhouse movie is a horror movie about the supernatural world that doesn't really have a understandable set of rules. They don't fit together, really, and it's confusing and frustrating. Plus, it's pretty clear that Coogler has as detailed a grasp of British colonialism in Ireland as sixties White boys (like me!) had of Jim Crow.
On the other hand, you have Delroy Lindo as Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Sun Ra in the dance scene. There is a lot to enjoy in the film.
The young musician becomes Buddy Guy. He's playing electric blues in Chicago at the end. That's another moment of incoherence: Instead of driven, evil vampires in the grip of an eternal curse, we have the stylish vampire couple, and the owner (in real life) of a international tourist attraction waxing nostalgic about an authentic past that never existed.
All that said, I have more respect for what Coogler tried to do, than what Paul Thomas Anderson did when he changed a white character named Frenesi (free and easy) to a black terrorist named Perfidia (you get the allusion).
Most of all: thanks for pointing me in the direction of the Marybeth Hamilton book.
Seems to me that the blues player becoming Buddy Guy the vampire on the electric Chicago scene is perfectly coherent or consistent with this motif of white capitalism as vampire, and Black Culture adapting the distortions of there authenticity by white consumer needs into its own vampiric Whiteface commercial Blues Chicago tourist attraction. Let's even give Coogler the benefit of the doubt and say the Irish/ Scottish White vampires are themselves perverted by their past oppression under the British into becoming complicit in capitalism's project of turning authenticity into product. So maybe it's not all as inconsistent as that.
If Coogler's calling Buddy Guy, metaphorically, a vampire--that Guy and his predecessors commercialized blues (partly by electrifying it?) as an adaptation to white capitalism--well, that's a point of view, though I don't think a pov cogently expressed by the movie. You have to believe blues was at some point anti-commercial, that electrification is nothing but a symptom of capititalist corruption, that there's something called authenticity, etc. It would be a lot to lay on Buddy Guy (and kind of mean to invite him to appear in a movie that takes that position on him). The pov would also require making the Chicago club we see in 1992 not a funky bluesy dive but something more like Buddy Guy's Legends packed with white blues-bro tourists. I don't see it.
But if it’s understood how such a POV undermines the very premise that Coogler was holding up Delta Blues as authentic (and I’m not saying he intentionally did this; artists are not in control of their works’ meanings anymore than allegories are ever purely allegorical), the claim of “authenticity” itself can be seen as distorted even from the “time” before the movie “begins.”
So, simply as an artifact of culture, his film bears the burden (rather than suffering from it) of your analysis of its failures in conveying a “true” history of The Blues, Delta, Chicago, or otherwise. In a way, it’s almost too perfect. I don’t expect you to be persuaded by this of course. Even I’m not entirely persuaded, except within the confines of an exercise in understanding art and its place in a “vampiric” culture.
I have no idea how anyone can distinguish the "commercializiation" of blues from "blues musicians like to get paid, like everyone else." B.B. King's Live at the Regal turns authenticity (feelings, modalities, blue notes, gospel vocalizing) into product. Good! As Ted Gioia details, King was a musical sophisticate: from the Delta, but not in any sense a Delta bluesman. I don't think we're in disagreement, but if Coogler really wants to counterpose "authenticity" and "commercialization," that's just dumb.
“what Paul Thomas Anderson did when he changed a white character named Frenesi (free and easy) to a black terrorist named Perfidia “
As keeps needing to be pointed out, PTA is updating Pynchon’s themes of counterculture vs establishment with a focus on white supremacy. That would be difficult to do if Perfidia and another important character were white for what should be obvious reasons.
I think it’s perfectly okay, probably necessary, for PTA to make a movie that brings Pynchon’s 60s/70s counterculture into the 21st century.
What I object to, along with a considerable number of commentators, notably Black women, is making a peaceful snitch, caught in her own fucked up psychopathology into a sexually rapacious terrorist, a murderer, with a name suggesting “evil,” and oh-by-the-way, a Black woman. It didn’t scan for me.
It’s good to remember that the film collective that Frenesi belonged to was more or less non-violent, at least at first. It’s also good to remember that, as Pynchon knew well, there were lots and lots of delusional hippies under Nixon, looking back under Reagan on their folly, far too nostalgically.
If we take the timeline of OBAO seriously, we have to imagine that there was violent (or at least loud) resistance to the racist and abusive immigration system under Obama. The system was racist and abusive to be sure, and there was lots of resistance. Revolutionary Black Feminist violence? No. Frenesi is a parody, hardly realistic, but based in people who actually existed. Perfidia is no such thing and to my mind, that diminished the movie, not just by comparison to Vineland, but judged as an independent work.
Don’t get me started on transforming the villainous system in Vineland, which consists of Nixon, Reagan, the drug war, a complacent society, and the FBI into a shadowy Christian Nationalist conspiracy, hidden from public view.
You’re moving the goalposts significantly from questioning why the character changed race (manifestly obvious) to why you don’t like the way it was done. You’re welcome to your opinion on the latter, but it’s amusing to say the original comment somehow carried all this.
I was trying to convey what you call "moving the goalposts" in the original comment. Obviously, I failed. The goalposts were in the same place. The map sucked, apparently.
I never intended to question changing the race of a character in PTA's movie just because it was a change of race. If that was how my comment read, then I fucked up, and I apologize.
I definitely recommend Elijah Wald's book on Robert Johnson, as well as Brother Robert, which he helped shepherd into print. It's baffling (at first) how often Jimmie Rodgers (not to mention Fiddlin' John Carson!) shows up in older Southern folks' reminiscences.
I like to think of twenty years' worth of Doug Shulkind's Give the Drummer three hour show atchived on wfmu as ritually touching the mashup transitions from irish ballads through blues to snare drummed like you said Mamie Smith. Musicians as far as I can see move fast and break things, so that if Shulkind intends to recast a history every week, he would not say there is a straight line to reveal. But see if he isnot almost retelling the same old story in a way. World music influence reaches a nerdy receptive who styles himself for the discotek... It is a David Copperfield story, it is charming. We should learn to despise bootstraps stories, but the most we have time for is simply to disbelieve in the Selfmade. You, we need, the real history is a palimpsest.
I do agree that I think a real problem of Sinners (or perhaps more the reaction to it) is that this story somehow reflects the true African American music experience. But it just does not. Significant literature (particular Mark Anthony Neal's 'What The Music Said') helps us see that the uniqueness of African AMERICAN music is born in music's role to uniquely express political thought when slavery stopped you having that public debate. So, Neal and others have shown us the join importance of gospel music because that music contained the double messages (both political AND religious) that was taking place in the church as a site of the 'Black Public Sphere'. This 'polytonality' (Neals phrase) is the key thing, that runs all the way to Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready (basically a gospel song) and James Brown's 'call and response' singing in funk.
Sinners seems to have next to no awareness of this dynamic. Put most simply, there was (and is) a copious amount of gospel, or Rhythm and Blues, that could have been central to the ideas of the film, but this is conspicuous by its absence.
This is one of those incredible things that just goes completely over my head in a strange way. Being a black American, one presumes that these are all roots we're supposed to understand, but a smaller fraction do than don't. It's nevertheless strange to be a stranger to the Blues. It's like eating wheat bread all your life and not knowing what or where a wheat field is. Worse, you're not sure if the bread you eat is all wheat, but you know a good burger.
If any part of your critique has to do with a kind of suburban overreach into mysterious magical realism or longing for some kind of new angle on old black power, well we went there with Wakanda and maybe this is just another Wakanda. That barndance 'loaded with meaning' was just a bit too hokey.
All that said, this was an ambitious masala. Seems like there were too many cooks in the kitchen for an actual coherent vision, but who goes to the movies for that?
I take your point, and I guess I do go to the movies for that, sometimes anyway, especially when the excitement around the movie is about what's *said* to be a coherent vision.
I went in search of those cross roads, and it’s nice to see the fog at night in the small town of Clarksdale. Never felt like they were holding back the rest of the story so much in my life.
The film and the official blues history, which a man in Mississippi identified as Yankee reconstruction, and we laughed, test a person’s suspension of disbelief. Not a terrible movie, it’s kind of cool and weirdly Baptist. Not sure we will ever get the full story on the blues, and it is mostly forgotten by now
"Ironic truth. The notion of Delta styles as a distinctly, exceptionally authentic kind of blues, with especially deep ties to ancient griot and other African traditions, contrary in some ways, but not in all ways, to Christianity, was developed by white record collectors and writers and promoters, beginning not, as is often said, in the mid-1960’s blues revival but in the early 1940’s."
There is also a lot more Scot-Irish influence on The Blues than is considered proper to acknowledge.
Pentatonic scales are common in Scots-Irish music. Not so much in West Africa.
Also, the themes of blues music have a lot in common with Appalachian ballads.
And nobody so far had mentioned the music of a Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey. Probably the most popular and best known blues artists of the time, and a very different animal to the country blues.
I mentioned the blues queens in the post, but yeah: the whole thing was to cast the Rainey/Smith approach as a kind of jazz-backed variant of blues, not the "authentic" thing, which was routinely said to be the rural Delta stuff. It's just a made-up taxonomy.
Your explication of the 'roots' of "Wild Mountain Thyme" reminds me that "Danny Boy", beloved of tipsy Irish folk the world over, was written in 1910 by an English lawyer who graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford, and wrote hundreds of music hall songs as his hobby. Oops.
Ehhhhh, the air itself is let's just say 'contested' (though lyrics are as you say, English). Evidence of it originating as a folk tune in 1792 in Ireland, though again, it's a hall of mirrors.
"She Walked Through the Fair," _pretty_ certainly a pastiche of traditional material, was elevated to the Michael Collins soundtrack. People get pretty weird about this song.
And Rocky Road dates from 1841 according to wiki, so the Vampire is at least keeping up with musical trends. It's certainly not from the myths of time!
I left the following reply to Pat Dolan's comment but I think it might serve as a mild rebuttal to your well thought out article (and I make this comment as someone who found a great deal about the movie unsatisfying). This might also be a reaction to what I found to be your glaringly poorly considered blanket statement that "allegories" are not "good":
"Seems to me that the blues player becoming Buddy Guy the vampire on the electric Chicago scene is perfectly coherent or consistent with this motif of white capitalism as vampire, and Black Culture adapting the distortions of their authenticity by white consumer needs into its own vampiric Whiteface commercial Blues Chicago tourist attraction. Let's even give Coogler the benefit of the doubt and say the Irish/ Scottish White vampires have been themselves perverted by their past oppression under the British into becoming complicit in capitalism's project of turning authenticity into product. So maybe it's not all as inconsistent as that."
Replied above. Re allegory, I said it's rarely good. I see "Get Out" as largely an allegory, and a use of the horror genre, and to me it works like a charm.
Also, I just subscribed to Hogeland's Bad History. I like the project. I myself do a lot of bad history (not saying that's what HGH does!), some of it for satirical purposes, and some just because I'm not a historian.
Works as a movie, or works as a statement? The statement seems the same as in Sinners: White people are always stealing black culture. I guess Get Out takes it to mean white people do this because they want to *be* black people? If you disagree with the premise of Sinners, I'm not sure how you can agree with the premise of Get Out?
I don't disagree with the premise of "Sinners," though I think it's too confused to agree with. To me, the premises are pretexts for making movies. Get Out works perfectly as a social satire (which almost never works at all, for me), enfolded in a slightly meta horror movie, the kind of thing that takes a lot of discipline to pull off; and I think what it's satirizing is worth looking at. So, good movie.
I haven’t read all of your Folk/Blies/Rock posts, but I thought you did not agree with the premise that “White people stole Rock and Roll from black people”? That you held a more “Omni-American” view?
When a movie creates (or in this case, reifies) another myth (another Bad History, if you will), I can’t see how it works as satire. “A lie that tells a lie” isn’t the same as “a lie that tells the truth”.
There’s how art makes you feel, and there’s the facts of the matter. We separate those with many works, and I’m happy to here except it seems this particular viewpoint gets a pass (part of an amorphous reparations package agreed to by the white PMC?).
I find your views valuable because you try to get to the facts as best as one can. Which is to say that *if* you have facts to support the “white people stole rock and roll” narrative, I’d listen! But right now I’m skeptical, which leads me to believe that Sinners and Get Out, whatever their artistic merits (and Get Out has many) are promoting a harmful lie, so how can that be good satire?
For me, I don't have to agree with the premise to enjoy the work. There are movies where it's pretty obvious that underlying strains of misogyny and racism and xenophobia are in play that I nevertheless appreciate. On Get Out, though, I don't even think the joke is as simple as "white people stole rock and roll from black people." What's being observed just seems undeniable: a lot of "white" culture, certainly including liberal "white" culture, is obsessed with devouring "blacknesss." From there, let the zany hijinks begin.
"if the vampire were Alan Lomax with a big reel-to-reel" -- Back in 1993 in the Clarion writing workshop, I tried to produce precisely that story, but could never get the ending to work.
My favorite Lomax moment is the recording in which he captures a great previously unattested folk masterpiece from a singer on a work gang, asks where he learned it, & audibly loses interest when the singer says "from the radio."
Classic. There used to be audio on YouTube--I can't find it any more--where Lomax pressures the hell out of Blind Willie McTell to sing songs about the problems caused by the white man, and McTell is just embarrassed.
Oops, shoulda scrolled down further. I've heard this recently, though I'm not certain where. I believe it's among the field recordings reissued by Document Records.
My favorite is the field recording in which he badgers (there is no other word) Willie McTell to describe his music as "protest music." Which of course McTell won't do.
Second favorite: the passage in The Land Where the Blues Began (a notion that makes no chronological sense) in which he seems to hint that Forest City Joe (a Sonny Boy Williamson epigone) is better off dead, since that makes him immune to commercial pressures.
As I noted, I was confused by the movie itself -- so yes, maybe there isn't an allegory! But that leaves me more confused.
Nelson George once asked his readers why Hip Hop was so popular with white people, and he said
"...There are scores of stories that illustrate hip hop's essential mutability. They are literary, cinematic, fashionable, and political in ways that have nothing to do with black nationalism, for hip hop is the ultimate capitalist tool." I got that feeling from the broad support for Sinners out there. It's the acceptable face of the African-American cultural struggle.
"Up front, just so you know where I’m coming from, I think 'Sinners' is a very bad movie on every level"
You had me from the first line! We saw it on a rare chance for an evening out, and became more and more perplexed what it was trying to say as the film progressed. In particular the choice to make an Alan Lomax/Pete Seeger character the main villain was very strange to us. You seem to suggest a mechanism where the vinyl recording makes villains instead... which makes a little more sense.
I mean, have you read William’s thoughts on Pete Seeger?
You did your homework on this one. I haven't been able to bring myself to watch "Sinners." I am down with vamps, but not vampires: Ann Rice cured me. As did the drunken white boy at the Bottom Line who sang louder than Muddy Waters.
Once again, you've got me thinking. Please read this as responding, not trying to "correct" you.
I'm reading Wald's book at the moment, and nodding my head in agreement every time he debunks the idea that musicians who played what we call blues were anything less than savvy entertainers who, when successful, gave their audiences what they wanted, and whose professionalism and repertoire has been distorted by the markets, first the record companies' desire for race records, and later by nostalgic White desires for an authenticity to counter our capitalist alienation.
I think Sinners is a confused movie, because it's internally inconsistent. For me the daylight Clarksdale movie is a horror movie about history, perfectly legible as such, and the nighttime roadhouse movie is a horror movie about the supernatural world that doesn't really have a understandable set of rules. They don't fit together, really, and it's confusing and frustrating. Plus, it's pretty clear that Coogler has as detailed a grasp of British colonialism in Ireland as sixties White boys (like me!) had of Jim Crow.
On the other hand, you have Delroy Lindo as Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Sun Ra in the dance scene. There is a lot to enjoy in the film.
The young musician becomes Buddy Guy. He's playing electric blues in Chicago at the end. That's another moment of incoherence: Instead of driven, evil vampires in the grip of an eternal curse, we have the stylish vampire couple, and the owner (in real life) of a international tourist attraction waxing nostalgic about an authentic past that never existed.
All that said, I have more respect for what Coogler tried to do, than what Paul Thomas Anderson did when he changed a white character named Frenesi (free and easy) to a black terrorist named Perfidia (you get the allusion).
Most of all: thanks for pointing me in the direction of the Marybeth Hamilton book.
Seems to me that the blues player becoming Buddy Guy the vampire on the electric Chicago scene is perfectly coherent or consistent with this motif of white capitalism as vampire, and Black Culture adapting the distortions of there authenticity by white consumer needs into its own vampiric Whiteface commercial Blues Chicago tourist attraction. Let's even give Coogler the benefit of the doubt and say the Irish/ Scottish White vampires are themselves perverted by their past oppression under the British into becoming complicit in capitalism's project of turning authenticity into product. So maybe it's not all as inconsistent as that.
If Coogler's calling Buddy Guy, metaphorically, a vampire--that Guy and his predecessors commercialized blues (partly by electrifying it?) as an adaptation to white capitalism--well, that's a point of view, though I don't think a pov cogently expressed by the movie. You have to believe blues was at some point anti-commercial, that electrification is nothing but a symptom of capititalist corruption, that there's something called authenticity, etc. It would be a lot to lay on Buddy Guy (and kind of mean to invite him to appear in a movie that takes that position on him). The pov would also require making the Chicago club we see in 1992 not a funky bluesy dive but something more like Buddy Guy's Legends packed with white blues-bro tourists. I don't see it.
But if it’s understood how such a POV undermines the very premise that Coogler was holding up Delta Blues as authentic (and I’m not saying he intentionally did this; artists are not in control of their works’ meanings anymore than allegories are ever purely allegorical), the claim of “authenticity” itself can be seen as distorted even from the “time” before the movie “begins.”
So, simply as an artifact of culture, his film bears the burden (rather than suffering from it) of your analysis of its failures in conveying a “true” history of The Blues, Delta, Chicago, or otherwise. In a way, it’s almost too perfect. I don’t expect you to be persuaded by this of course. Even I’m not entirely persuaded, except within the confines of an exercise in understanding art and its place in a “vampiric” culture.
I don't think Coogler's allegory is coherent, so I have no idea what he could mean here. It's always nice to see Buddy Guy, though.
I have no idea how anyone can distinguish the "commercializiation" of blues from "blues musicians like to get paid, like everyone else." B.B. King's Live at the Regal turns authenticity (feelings, modalities, blue notes, gospel vocalizing) into product. Good! As Ted Gioia details, King was a musical sophisticate: from the Delta, but not in any sense a Delta bluesman. I don't think we're in disagreement, but if Coogler really wants to counterpose "authenticity" and "commercialization," that's just dumb.
“what Paul Thomas Anderson did when he changed a white character named Frenesi (free and easy) to a black terrorist named Perfidia “
As keeps needing to be pointed out, PTA is updating Pynchon’s themes of counterculture vs establishment with a focus on white supremacy. That would be difficult to do if Perfidia and another important character were white for what should be obvious reasons.
I think it’s perfectly okay, probably necessary, for PTA to make a movie that brings Pynchon’s 60s/70s counterculture into the 21st century.
What I object to, along with a considerable number of commentators, notably Black women, is making a peaceful snitch, caught in her own fucked up psychopathology into a sexually rapacious terrorist, a murderer, with a name suggesting “evil,” and oh-by-the-way, a Black woman. It didn’t scan for me.
It’s good to remember that the film collective that Frenesi belonged to was more or less non-violent, at least at first. It’s also good to remember that, as Pynchon knew well, there were lots and lots of delusional hippies under Nixon, looking back under Reagan on their folly, far too nostalgically.
If we take the timeline of OBAO seriously, we have to imagine that there was violent (or at least loud) resistance to the racist and abusive immigration system under Obama. The system was racist and abusive to be sure, and there was lots of resistance. Revolutionary Black Feminist violence? No. Frenesi is a parody, hardly realistic, but based in people who actually existed. Perfidia is no such thing and to my mind, that diminished the movie, not just by comparison to Vineland, but judged as an independent work.
Don’t get me started on transforming the villainous system in Vineland, which consists of Nixon, Reagan, the drug war, a complacent society, and the FBI into a shadowy Christian Nationalist conspiracy, hidden from public view.
You’re moving the goalposts significantly from questioning why the character changed race (manifestly obvious) to why you don’t like the way it was done. You’re welcome to your opinion on the latter, but it’s amusing to say the original comment somehow carried all this.
Have a good one.
My bad. Obviously I was not clear.
I was trying to convey what you call "moving the goalposts" in the original comment. Obviously, I failed. The goalposts were in the same place. The map sucked, apparently.
I never intended to question changing the race of a character in PTA's movie just because it was a change of race. If that was how my comment read, then I fucked up, and I apologize.
And I think my objection to how it was done is a little better grounded than "I don't like it." It was partly inspired by this: https://blackgirlwatching.substack.com/p/one-battle-after-another-review
Peace. You have a good one too.
I definitely recommend Elijah Wald's book on Robert Johnson, as well as Brother Robert, which he helped shepherd into print. It's baffling (at first) how often Jimmie Rodgers (not to mention Fiddlin' John Carson!) shows up in older Southern folks' reminiscences.
I like to think of twenty years' worth of Doug Shulkind's Give the Drummer three hour show atchived on wfmu as ritually touching the mashup transitions from irish ballads through blues to snare drummed like you said Mamie Smith. Musicians as far as I can see move fast and break things, so that if Shulkind intends to recast a history every week, he would not say there is a straight line to reveal. But see if he isnot almost retelling the same old story in a way. World music influence reaches a nerdy receptive who styles himself for the discotek... It is a David Copperfield story, it is charming. We should learn to despise bootstraps stories, but the most we have time for is simply to disbelieve in the Selfmade. You, we need, the real history is a palimpsest.
I do agree that I think a real problem of Sinners (or perhaps more the reaction to it) is that this story somehow reflects the true African American music experience. But it just does not. Significant literature (particular Mark Anthony Neal's 'What The Music Said') helps us see that the uniqueness of African AMERICAN music is born in music's role to uniquely express political thought when slavery stopped you having that public debate. So, Neal and others have shown us the join importance of gospel music because that music contained the double messages (both political AND religious) that was taking place in the church as a site of the 'Black Public Sphere'. This 'polytonality' (Neals phrase) is the key thing, that runs all the way to Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready (basically a gospel song) and James Brown's 'call and response' singing in funk.
Sinners seems to have next to no awareness of this dynamic. Put most simply, there was (and is) a copious amount of gospel, or Rhythm and Blues, that could have been central to the ideas of the film, but this is conspicuous by its absence.
This is one of those incredible things that just goes completely over my head in a strange way. Being a black American, one presumes that these are all roots we're supposed to understand, but a smaller fraction do than don't. It's nevertheless strange to be a stranger to the Blues. It's like eating wheat bread all your life and not knowing what or where a wheat field is. Worse, you're not sure if the bread you eat is all wheat, but you know a good burger.
If any part of your critique has to do with a kind of suburban overreach into mysterious magical realism or longing for some kind of new angle on old black power, well we went there with Wakanda and maybe this is just another Wakanda. That barndance 'loaded with meaning' was just a bit too hokey.
All that said, this was an ambitious masala. Seems like there were too many cooks in the kitchen for an actual coherent vision, but who goes to the movies for that?
I take your point, and I guess I do go to the movies for that, sometimes anyway, especially when the excitement around the movie is about what's *said* to be a coherent vision.
I went in search of those cross roads, and it’s nice to see the fog at night in the small town of Clarksdale. Never felt like they were holding back the rest of the story so much in my life.
The film and the official blues history, which a man in Mississippi identified as Yankee reconstruction, and we laughed, test a person’s suspension of disbelief. Not a terrible movie, it’s kind of cool and weirdly Baptist. Not sure we will ever get the full story on the blues, and it is mostly forgotten by now
I think there might even be an Irish jig influence in the Smokestack Lightening riff, and that's the mightiest of them all
"Ironic truth. The notion of Delta styles as a distinctly, exceptionally authentic kind of blues, with especially deep ties to ancient griot and other African traditions, contrary in some ways, but not in all ways, to Christianity, was developed by white record collectors and writers and promoters, beginning not, as is often said, in the mid-1960’s blues revival but in the early 1940’s."
There is also a lot more Scot-Irish influence on The Blues than is considered proper to acknowledge.
Pentatonic scales are common in Scots-Irish music. Not so much in West Africa.
And blues has Euro chord progressions. There's also a lot more African influence on Appalachian banjo-fiddle dance music than many people acknowledge.
Also, the themes of blues music have a lot in common with Appalachian ballads.
And nobody so far had mentioned the music of a Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey. Probably the most popular and best known blues artists of the time, and a very different animal to the country blues.
I mentioned the blues queens in the post, but yeah: the whole thing was to cast the Rainey/Smith approach as a kind of jazz-backed variant of blues, not the "authentic" thing, which was routinely said to be the rural Delta stuff. It's just a made-up taxonomy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_sub-Saharan_African_harmony
Your explication of the 'roots' of "Wild Mountain Thyme" reminds me that "Danny Boy", beloved of tipsy Irish folk the world over, was written in 1910 by an English lawyer who graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford, and wrote hundreds of music hall songs as his hobby. Oops.
That's always been one of my favorite backstories. I don't think it should bother anyone, but I guess it does.
Ehhhhh, the air itself is let's just say 'contested' (though lyrics are as you say, English). Evidence of it originating as a folk tune in 1792 in Ireland, though again, it's a hall of mirrors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londonderry_Air
"She Walked Through the Fair," _pretty_ certainly a pastiche of traditional material, was elevated to the Michael Collins soundtrack. People get pretty weird about this song.
And Rocky Road dates from 1841 according to wiki, so the Vampire is at least keeping up with musical trends. It's certainly not from the myths of time!
Good point--I updated the post to note that.
I left the following reply to Pat Dolan's comment but I think it might serve as a mild rebuttal to your well thought out article (and I make this comment as someone who found a great deal about the movie unsatisfying). This might also be a reaction to what I found to be your glaringly poorly considered blanket statement that "allegories" are not "good":
"Seems to me that the blues player becoming Buddy Guy the vampire on the electric Chicago scene is perfectly coherent or consistent with this motif of white capitalism as vampire, and Black Culture adapting the distortions of their authenticity by white consumer needs into its own vampiric Whiteface commercial Blues Chicago tourist attraction. Let's even give Coogler the benefit of the doubt and say the Irish/ Scottish White vampires have been themselves perverted by their past oppression under the British into becoming complicit in capitalism's project of turning authenticity into product. So maybe it's not all as inconsistent as that."
Replied above. Re allegory, I said it's rarely good. I see "Get Out" as largely an allegory, and a use of the horror genre, and to me it works like a charm.
Couldn’t agree more.
Also, I just subscribed to Hogeland's Bad History. I like the project. I myself do a lot of bad history (not saying that's what HGH does!), some of it for satirical purposes, and some just because I'm not a historian.
Works as a movie, or works as a statement? The statement seems the same as in Sinners: White people are always stealing black culture. I guess Get Out takes it to mean white people do this because they want to *be* black people? If you disagree with the premise of Sinners, I'm not sure how you can agree with the premise of Get Out?
I don't disagree with the premise of "Sinners," though I think it's too confused to agree with. To me, the premises are pretexts for making movies. Get Out works perfectly as a social satire (which almost never works at all, for me), enfolded in a slightly meta horror movie, the kind of thing that takes a lot of discipline to pull off; and I think what it's satirizing is worth looking at. So, good movie.
I haven’t read all of your Folk/Blies/Rock posts, but I thought you did not agree with the premise that “White people stole Rock and Roll from black people”? That you held a more “Omni-American” view?
When a movie creates (or in this case, reifies) another myth (another Bad History, if you will), I can’t see how it works as satire. “A lie that tells a lie” isn’t the same as “a lie that tells the truth”.
There’s how art makes you feel, and there’s the facts of the matter. We separate those with many works, and I’m happy to here except it seems this particular viewpoint gets a pass (part of an amorphous reparations package agreed to by the white PMC?).
I find your views valuable because you try to get to the facts as best as one can. Which is to say that *if* you have facts to support the “white people stole rock and roll” narrative, I’d listen! But right now I’m skeptical, which leads me to believe that Sinners and Get Out, whatever their artistic merits (and Get Out has many) are promoting a harmful lie, so how can that be good satire?
For me, I don't have to agree with the premise to enjoy the work. There are movies where it's pretty obvious that underlying strains of misogyny and racism and xenophobia are in play that I nevertheless appreciate. On Get Out, though, I don't even think the joke is as simple as "white people stole rock and roll from black people." What's being observed just seems undeniable: a lot of "white" culture, certainly including liberal "white" culture, is obsessed with devouring "blacknesss." From there, let the zany hijinks begin.
In what sense is Ryan Coogler's ownership of "blues" more secure than yours or mine?
"if the vampire were Alan Lomax with a big reel-to-reel" -- Back in 1993 in the Clarion writing workshop, I tried to produce precisely that story, but could never get the ending to work.
My favorite Lomax moment is the recording in which he captures a great previously unattested folk masterpiece from a singer on a work gang, asks where he learned it, & audibly loses interest when the singer says "from the radio."
Classic. There used to be audio on YouTube--I can't find it any more--where Lomax pressures the hell out of Blind Willie McTell to sing songs about the problems caused by the white man, and McTell is just embarrassed.
My second-"favorite" Lomax moment!
McTell is a pop music touchstone for me. As light-touch classy as Sinatra's acolytes claim Frank to be, but with an unequaled sense of irony.
Oops, shoulda scrolled down further. I've heard this recently, though I'm not certain where. I believe it's among the field recordings reissued by Document Records.
Found it: https://thedocumentrecordsstore.com/nobody-sings-the-blues-like-blind-willie-mctell/
My favorite is the field recording in which he badgers (there is no other word) Willie McTell to describe his music as "protest music." Which of course McTell won't do.
Second favorite: the passage in The Land Where the Blues Began (a notion that makes no chronological sense) in which he seems to hint that Forest City Joe (a Sonny Boy Williamson epigone) is better off dead, since that makes him immune to commercial pressures.
Also that for a movie about transcendent music the soundtrack felt way too slick and pop-sounding. Soulless. The blues and the Irish stuff as well.