How can a 64-year-old John Lee Hooker song lure me into one of the douchiest bars on W.6th?
Rock and Roll that’s how.
Maybe I can hear the black voodoo in a sharecroppers heart, up from the delta and his first time in a big city anywhere, pluggin’ in and talkin’ bout the Henry Swing Club, probably terrified but certain he would take over Detroit and the World with rock&roll motherfucker. yeah
b/c I was born in a small town just outside the City and the blues always sounded alright wit me and felt even better.
I truly believe that Johnny Lee was the first punkrocker O.G. Maybe him&Wolf, certainly Son but perhaps not Muddy. I shudder anytime anyone mentions the Stones, their eyes glazed over in dumb reverence to industry dogma. I shudder when these folks are my people, in my country b/c
don’t you know those half-a-fags were listening to American folk music? Slave hollers and r&b, barn burners and jukejoint stompers that had been blasting in shotgun shacks of the developing rural ghettos of America for decades?
We gave the world rock&roll. Well, the blackman did. And all he was listening to was the whiteman’s blues-music from other disenfranchised agrarians, downsized by the Industrial Revolution, singin’ they sad cowboy songs by campfires in the new wastelands of America.
America gave the world rock&roll and took everything else. We did. We gave it to the World. And Europe. So lower middle class snots can support heroin addictions and cruise liners to the Spanish country side with their super model girlfriends. So their vapid phony rock&roll can pervade mass consciousness until its way past obsolete and meaning anything (if it ever did), but by then they’ll have books to write that’ll be bestsellers that are really nothing but more stroking off in our faces. Fucking cunts.
The blues is why I don’t like:
Jack White, The Black Keys, Any Blues Revisionist Band, Eric Clapton, Bono/U2, The Rolling Stones and etc. etc. etc. The classic rock catalog should be retired. Anything contemporary that offers nothing but whiffs of classic rock that amount to nothing but farts should remain in the pop end of the spectrum, run their course and be flushed&forgotten. And don’t worry about them, America. They’ll catch a bump in about 20-30 years w/ generational biopics and books about nothing while we boogie wit Iggy&Zevon&Randy Newman&Hot Snakes&Cory Branan&Lovey Dovies&Thee Nosebleeds. Don’t worry about them, punkrocker. They will get fooled again.
Hey hey, my my,
rock and roll can never die.
-Neil Young
Going for the Throat 