* BLUES AND BALLADS * |
In 1984 Frederick Jameson, writing about legitimation in his forward to the English translation of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Post Modern Condition, identified in his [Lyotard’s] perspective, “the way in which narrative is affirmed, not merely as a significant new field of research, but well beyond that as a central instance of the human mind and a mode of thinking fully as legitimate as that of abstract knowledge.”
Narrative,
or storytelling, an alternative to the scientific approach, which for
at least the last century has been historically more favorable to capitalism, is fundamental to the music of the
Afro American. The musician and author Ben Sidran argues, in his book Black
Talk (1971), that the oral culture of the Afro American, exemplified in the
Blues, stood, in times of great cultural suppression, as a radical alternative
to the values of the Western literary tradition. Sidran claims that [Black
music] “ was an act of physical, emotional, and social commitment . . . thus
not escapist in nature, as was most popular culture during the past two
centuries, but was a direct reflection of the combined experiences of many
individuals, all of them grounded in reality."
Lyotard’s
theory is now more or less assimilated, not least in the field of
contemporary art, where, for the last decade, the uses of narrative as
methodology have been a necessary detail in the service of most
global agencies of power: academic, political and financial. From individuals
like Gillian Wearing in the early 1990s to the almost meta-narrativisation of
narratives in the 2002 Documenta; where 5 ‘platforms’ that were “devised
as committed, discursive, public interventions, and enacted within distinct
communities around themes conceived to probe the contemporary problematics and
possibilities of art, politics, and society” foregounded the ‘voice’ of
minorities and other previously unheard individuals and societies. One of
these platforms, described as “Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice
and The Processes of Truth and Reconciliation,” took place in New Delhi,
India; another: Creolité
and Creolization, that took place in St Lucia, included the narratives that
are very much, along with other previously repressed epistemologies,
methodologies and ontology's, now acceptable and even encouraged for the implementation of the
(not so) new globalisation of power. In other words: The Blues is dead, long live
the Blues.
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Some more pages of records:
USA
THE GUYS WITH SOUL * PART 2 * PART 3 *** THE GIRLS WITH SOUL * PAGE 2 *** GROUPS WITH SOUL * PAGE TWO *** MEN WITH RHYTHM & BLUES *** WOMEN WITH RHYTHM & BLUES *** GROUPS R&B, R&R AND DOO WOP *** BLUES AND BALLADS *** 70s SOUL AND FUNK *** PAGE 2 *** INSTRUMENTALS *** ROCK AND ROLL ***
JA
SKA VOCALS *** SKA INSTRUMENTALS *** ROCK STEADY *** EARLY REGGAE / SKINHEAD *** PAGE 2 *** MILITANT *** ROOTS / DUB / VERSIONS * CHAPTER 2 *** RASTAFARI / DIDACTIC / ROOTS SPIRITUALS *** PRE-SKA *** STUDIO ONE *** DJ's / TOASTING *** LOVE SONGS / LOVERS ***