Genrecide

It's enough to say that you like hip-hop or rock or rap. It's probably even enough to say that you like classical. But to say you like the blues? The blues, it always seemed to me, was not something to be liked; it had to be understood. Singing the blues, even listening to the blues, was supposed to be a commitment to a type of emotion and a type of experience. And what on earth, I used to wonder, could a middle class white boy from the New Jersey suburbs possibly know about the blues?

Sure, I could know the history of the blues. I could tell you that it grew out of sharecroppers' songs in the Mississippi Delta, and that the patron saint of those gritty Delta blues is guitar virtuoso John Lee Hooker. I could tell you how the blues followed the sharecroppers as they looked for jobs up North, first in Memphis, where the blues would fuse with country music to create rock and roll, and then up to Chicago, where it would settle into a pulsing rhythm and produce the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.

But knowing the blues isn't the same as knowing the stuff in history books. The blues, I was always told, was about suffering. And what did I know about the troubles of sharecroppers or migrant workers? The lyrics of most blues songs read like a litany of unfaithful lovers, spiteful landlords and unsympathetic bosses. The song titles alone are enough to fill a therapist's appointment book: "My Baby Don't Love Me" by John Lee Hooker, "Please Send Me Someone to Love" by Luther Allison, "Born Under a Bad Sign" by Albert King. Whatever problems I faced in the cookie-cutter world of middle class New Jersey seemed to pale in comparison to the stuff of "the blues."

But if you really want to understand the blues, the first thing you have to learn is that the music is not about suffering. Just listen to it. From the Delta to Chicago, the blues is the sort of thing you dance to: eight bar repetitions in four-four time with accents on the off-beats. It's the same basic structure you find in everything from square dance music to modern dance mixes. If you're not moving your feet, you're at least tapping your fingers. And you can't find a live blues recording without the sounds of people in the audience shouting and clapping along. This isn't the music of suffering.

Happiness has always been the secret of the blues. "What made the real blues singers so great," said blues great Big Joe Williams, "is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat. Many young singers today are trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used the blues to get outside their troubles."

The blues isn't about exploring your problems or even about listing them. It's about sharing them: getting them out of you and putting them in the open, letting other people see them so they can say "Yes, I know that feeling." More than that, so they can shout it out, tap their fingers, stamp their feet. Perhaps more than any other genre, the blues depends on its audience. Blues songs are a dialogue between performer and listener, a way of creating a shared community of sufferers. It's no coincidence that B.B. King's song "Why I Sing the Blues" starts "I've been around a long time, people. I've paid my dues." The blues have to be told to someone. There have to be people to address. It's a music of anti-introspection, a way of confessing and purging your troubles. It's an answer to loneliness, and it's thesis is that so long as you can tell your problems to someone, they're no longer your problems. And, conversely, so long as you can listen to someone's confession, your own troubles are no longer unspoken.

So if you want to understand the blues, all you have to do is listen. It doesn't matter if you're from New Jersey or New Orleans; understanding the blues comes simply from knowing how to share. We all know how to suffer, goes the logic of the blues. If there's anything we have to learn, it's how to talk and listen to each other.