The Quotation Of The Day Mailing List
Quotation of the Day for December 30, 2003
The young English intellectuals and artists, moving into rock, fell in love with this music, and through them, and in the hands of the likes of Eric Clapton, the slide guitar style became a main orchestral ornament of the international rock movement. Unfortunately, in spite of displays of mass hysteria at their every appearance on stage, these urban translations of Mississippi slide guitar have gone aesthetically and emotionally flat. Today's rock guitarist slides out the notes of his music with unmatched virtuosity, but succeeds only moderately in having his guitar intone or cry out the poetry, or, if it does, these passages are inexpressive and the effect is mechanical and dull, even though delivered passionately and triple forte.
One problem is that, after you have respoken a blues line in Liverpoolese or New Jerseyese, the flavor of some tonal patterns of the language has been changed and diminished and the songs end up saying "Come on, baby, let's truck" or words to that effect. To my jaundiced old Southern ears, moreover, many rock guitarists are more concerned with showing off how many notes they can get off and how many chords they know than what the song has to say or how the guitar can speak it to them. Their fooling around in the upper register adds to the frenzy of public concerts, but these devices are so frequent and so calculated that they have become abstractions of the feminine sexual climax they represent, as mechanical and gelid as a crate of condoms. This is not what Fred McDowell and Napoleon Strickland and their friends intended.
- historian Alan Lomax comments on the adoption of blues guitar music by rock musicians, in his book, The Land Where the Blues Began (Chapter 7).
Submitted by: Terry Labach
Nov. 12, 2003