But being a reviewer requires more than merely eyedropping the jaundice, so I took out the box set and nosed around, playing Skip James’s “Devil Got My Woman”, Lead Belly’s “C.C. The cachet attached to blues-lovers is far too powerful not to look skeptically at such loud claims of stewardship over Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf. As such, there were good episodes (Clint Eastwood’s) and bad episodes (Wim Wenders’s), but more troubling than the spottiness was the creeping piety that ran throughout.
The episodes were a mixed bag, each coming from a different director and each taking a personal approach rather than attempting to fit into a master plan for the series.
It was with this taste in my mouth that I received the box set for Martin Scorsese’s The Blues: A Musical Journey, five discs of music from his seven-part series on PBS designed to outdo Ken Burns’s Jazz as the definitive documentary on a historical idiom. Public should finally admit what has been obvious all along - that he doesn’t actually like blues. And since most anguished African-Americans have long since moved on to other outlets for expressing their grief and white people singing about plowing cotton is dumb, I thought that John Q. The genre sits beside reggae and jazz as one that I think would be abandoned all at once if earnest white people were freed of their perceived responsibility to like any and all outpourings of African-American anguish.
The blues, I opined as I have many times before, appear to have no artistic validity today, the form having been long since bankrupted by bumbling thieves like the Stones, Cream, and Janis Joplin. Disgusted not only with the thinly veiled crassness of the project but also with the abysmal music, I panned with all my might. A few weeks ago, I penned a review for this site on an album called, Exile on Blues St., an attempt to rework tracks from the epochal Rolling Stones album in a blues context.
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