opinion

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Bernal, Panama and China
Falun Gong, Should the world boycott the Beijing Olympics?
Leis, The privatization of air
Carpio, Disaster reduction: made in Japan
James, Disaster relief in the Caribbean Basin
Pilgrim, Don't roll the dice on decent values and their opposite
Sánchez, Venezuela turns its attention from MERCOSUR to the Andean nations
Reporters Without Borders, Cuba arrests six journalists in 24 hours

Jackson, Blues power

The meaning of the blues, 
and of their absence
by Eric Jackson

I caught a blues show by Bitches Ghost the other night. This column is not a review, much less a social or political commentary, on the band or the content of its music. Yes, it's good to hear blues guitar by an accomplished professional. Yes, it's a reasonably tight band, especially considering that this is a once-a-month gig. Yes, if you want to pigeonhole cultural phenomena by congenital traits, this is a male form of the blues.

(Now the blues might be male or female, black or white, from all sorts of class backgrounds, or even Republican, these days. The blues upon which I was raised were entirely black and mostly female, as in Bessie Smith, Champion Jack Dupree, Billie Holiday when she was in that mode, Big Mama Mae Thornton, et al. On one level, the blues are about life turned so tragic that it's funny. On another level, the meaning of the blues is a mathematical progression of chords deriving from the same African-American ancestry as jazz. Brits like Eric Clapton and Texans like Janis Joplin long ago proved (and not for the first time) that the blues can be Caucasian, and as far as I'm concerned the greatest blues guitarist of them all was a Geechee named Jimi Hendrix.)

The blues were a rare musical form here in Panama for the past several years. Yes, there was and is a little group of people dedicated to its preservation and enjoyment. However, during the Clinton administration the US Embassy would regularly bring in blues and jazz acts that would never be able to come here as a purely commercial proposition, as a part of a cultural outreach designed to put the best American foot forward to the rest of the world.

After five members of the US Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush president in a 2000 partisan proceeding, I wondered what sort of cultural outreach we'd see from the new administration. Would that Mormon musical crowd that was so prominent in the Nixon years (the King Family, the Osmonds, etc.) send people on the road for Uncle Sam? Would that faction of the country scene that set up Brampton, Missouri as the alternative to the allegedly decadent and homosexual Nashville and in more recent years has moved to shun the Dixie Chicks represent Americans to foreign peoples? Would conservative gospel acts, black or white, be the US State Department's musical ID?

Alas, none of the above. The US government hardly does any cultural outreach under the Bush administration. The proffered excuse from embassy folks is that all resources are being sent to Iraq, but the reduction of US cultural outreach efforts antedates that war. As much as so many of the religious conservatives in the Bush coalition condemn the corporate culture coming out of New York and Hollywood, that's what the White House has been leaving by default as the cultural face and voice of America in the rest of the world all these years.

You would think that with a librarian first lady, this administration would be more sensitive to things cultural. Especially so, given that America's worst enemies, Osama bin Laden and his minions, root their political appeal in the idea that US culture is totally degenerate and forced upon a world that doesn't and shouldn't want it.

When they had Afghanistan under their heel, bin Laden and Mullah Omar tried to ban music, blew up or otherwise smashed the country's most priceless antiquities and dragged the country into a dark age in which anger and hatred substituted for the creative subtlety and ethical high ground that characterize the many flowering seasons of Muslim culture at its best. The cultural scenes of Arab Spain and the medieval university town of Timbuktu had much more in common with the blues --- which, after all, also have their Muslim exponents --- than with the wasteland that the jihadis offer.

Yes, you can shoehorn degrading, insulting, mean-spirited lyrics into the musical format that's the blues. You can debase anything. Look at how Charlie Manson twisted the Beatles into icons of his "hip" fascism.

But the real blues --- blues from the heart, in as many sub-genres as you may want to identify but only insofar as they come from genuine and humane emotions --- negate all arguments that American culture is superficial.

Also in this section:

Bernal, Panama and China
Falun Gong, Should the world boycott the Beijing Olympics?
Leis, The privatization of air
Carpio, Disaster reduction: made in Japan
James, Disaster relief in the Caribbean Basin
Pilgrim, Don't roll the dice on decent values and their opposite
Sánchez, Venezuela turns its attention from MERCOSUR to the Andean nations
Reporters Without Borders, Cuba arrests six journalists in 24 hours

Jackson, Blues power

Sirias, Becoming a teacher