The Museum of Popular Music

By Crispin Sartwell

The mythology of the blues has it arising as a spontaneous folk form, from both African and European vestiges, among sharecroppers and other laborers in the Mississippi Delta and East Texas, late in the nineteenth or early in the twentieth centuries. Its status as a folk or naive art is essential to its use in later recorded and performed musics. We may well attribute part of the power of the blues for, say, British artists of the 1960s to the intrinsic quality of the music itself and its expressive force. But its source in the African-American "peasantry" is also important: the journey of Eric Clapton or the Rolling Stones into the blues is a journey toward some sort of conceptualized other. And in the recordings of such artists, the blues is interpreted, celebrated, and set in stone. If Son House or Blind Lemon Jefferson performed a range of material, the Bluesbreakers reconstructed it into a canon. Now first of all, the blues canon depends essentially on recording: the basic access of British artists to the styles of the Delta was through the recorded traces of that tradition. And then the canon proceeds through recording as well: recording is the basic mode by which British interpretations of the blues were disseminated. The recording fixes the performance into something repeatable, observable, ownable, displayable: potentially, it produces a museum of the blues, Mississippi dioramas of poor black folks in intensely expressive postures.

The blues is a museum. This is true of many popular forms to one extent or another, but it is true with peculiar thoroughness of the blues. People are obsessive about it: we are collectors, and we experience the form through the construction of its canon. These are enshrined in precious recordings and photographs (a watershed was the discovery of two photos of Robert Johnson), in books that tell the history or take the form of alphabetically-arranged encyclopedias, in documentaries such as those by Martin Scorsese, in actual museums such as those in Clarksdale and Memphis. But as well, the performance of the blues and the contexts in which it is performed have been incorporated into an essentially museum-like context: the "blues bars" of Chicago and Memphis with their period flavor and tributes to dead artists, amounting almost to a Colonial Williamsburg. Preservation and restoration are pursued that are analogous to the practices involving paintings in a museum. I think of a recent recording, for example, by Robert Lockwood Jr. Lockwood learned the guitar from his Mom's boyfriend, Robert Johnson. In 2003, at ninety, he was recorded live in a Phoenix bar, doing pieces of the Johnson canon and other historical blues compositions, just the man and his guitar. Lockwood has a claim to blues authenticity, if anyone does, and there is no gainsaying the excellence of the recording. But there is also no doubting its self-conscious status as a piece of art history.

It is obvious that the advent of recording changed music fundamentally. It changed the way music is learned and performed. It converted performances into spatially-circumscribed objects capable of being preserved and imitated (or for that matter, appropriated, accreted, played over). It created the possibility of music as museum, because it transformed performances ontologically into a set of artifacts.

This semester, I've been teaching a class on graffiti, at an art school. And the first question I asked my students was whether the sheer fact that there was a class on graffiti at an art school was a demonstration that graffiti was finished. Here we have a "street art" of urban youth that now has a thirty-year history, a history in which it has repeatedly been appropriated into art galleries, which people have written into books, including monographs on individual artists. The art has lost its initial context and impetus and self-understanding and is now reproducible all over the world.

The museum is of course an attempt to hold onto history and celebrate it: to freeze it or preserve it because it is something we need or admire. But the act of preservation is also a killing, like embalming someone who starts out alive. The value of what is preserved has become self-conscious. And the canon thus produced seeks to freeze time or arrest the flow of production: it establishes standards of authenticity by comparison to the museum display. All of this is precisely true. And yet it should also of course be belabored, because it depends on a set of extremely problematic categories, such as authenticity, truth, spontaneity, tradition.

It's a familiar point that the picture of the naive, isolated folk artist working a crop share by day and singing in a juke by night is wrong. First of all, the dissemination of recordings coincides with the history of the blues, and no doubt Charley Patton heard Tin Pan Alley hits before he recorded himself. And then Patton's records reached an audience all over the US. And the musicians themselves were, in varying degrees, mobile, and moved around the South, or to cities including Memphis, St. Louis, Jackson, and Chicago to record. So the Texas style of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Patton's Mississippi style are connected by a hundred threads. You can hear in the recordings of Patton and Robert Johnson their familiarity with and admiration for American commercial music, and you can hear in the fact that they recorded that they themselves were commercial artists, even then self-consciously selling a retro and rural sound.

As a museum, the blues has to be produced as a narrative. I would say that its origin is mysterious and complex to the point of chaos, but one cannot write that origin without moving it toward comprehensibility. And the story of the blues, of course, intersects the story of race in America, and reflects that chaos as well. The question of the blues's relations to African musical traditions is immensely difficult, for example, and has been made to rest on structural similarities to contemporary African music. Here we try to peel back layers to understand what African music was like in, say, the 18^th century, which is itself an immensely difficult task given that the whole continent has been soaked in recorded musics throughout the twentieth century, so that African-American styles have fed back through Africa continuously. But the question of African origins, fundamentally unanswerable though it is, is itself saturated with ideologies of American racial history. One interpretation emphasizes the cultural annihilation practiced in slavery and hence the disconnection of African America from tribal traditions, while another (more popular at the moment) emphasizes the heroic preservation of African cultures over insuperable odds.

And then the narrative proceeds: field hollers, convicts, rhythmic labor songs, spirituals, and folk artists working in relatively isolated places: Patton, Jefferson, Muddy Waters: field recordings of a man alone with his guitar or a gang on Parchman farm. Or, on the other hand, minstrel and medicine shows, classic blues, Clara Smith, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith, working with instrumental virtuosi and professional songwriters, with small orchestras and perhaps with written music, W.C. Handy's publishing concerns. This gives a more "Europeanized" story. But of course it is fair to say that these two stories merge from the beginning, that the minstrel and medicine shows rolled through the south, as did the phonograph and the juke box.

When Samuel Charters tracked down the widow of the great blues/gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson in Texas in the early fifties, she took him up to her attic and showed him Willie's collection of dozens of nineteenth century volumes of church music, which confirmed not only that Johnson was performing a variety of traditional white hymns in a blues style, but that he was reading music and gathering strands out of its written history to be reinterpreted. Then again, some of the music in these books itself no doubt derived from Negro spirituals. And so on.

We cannot really tell this story in a plausible, coherent way, because what we're trying to tell is not, after all, a story. We can't uncover the origin because, after all, there is no real moment of origin but an indefinitely long and complex process of development. But on the third hand, we have to tell the story, and we have to uncover the origin: we're driven by our interest and commitment toward comprehension, toward a roster of particularly significant artists, moments, places, recordings. We're forced toward judgments about authenticity as judgments about proximity to origins or even as judgments about naivete or ignorance. We're forced, we might say, to falsify what we love and to freeze it into moments. And the "romance" of white America and Europe with the blues cannot possibly be detached from varieties of racism: we celebrate the blues, but we celebrate it as a folk art and as something with an access to primal human emotions that we lack: we need it as an opposition to ourselves, our literacy, our expertise, our training. We might as well go ahead and call it a savage music.

Rendering the blues into the museum is not something we do voluntarily, and it's not something we should stop doing. The alternative really is to let the thing disintegrate into its real chaos, to lose it entirely because we've allowed it simply to flow into the next thing. But of course the appropriation of the blues into the museum contradicts the romance it seemed to bring us in the first place: its naivete and spontaneity, its folk status, its immediacy and raw emotional power. All of these, though they are in large part things we inserted into the blues and made it bear rather than things we found there, are severely attenuated even in the very act by which attention is drawn to them and value placed on them. The illiterate blues becomes text; ethnomusicologists describe it in terms of the European scale and write out its notation; they dissect the little modules of traditional lyric as they would Milton. The blues becomes a written form and a classical music, and supports all sorts of avant-garde appropriations and deconstructions: it lies before us as a resource to be grasped and used. And that is no less true of the "purist" than of Wynton Marsalis: the fact that we've made it into a history renders it over into something permanently available for use, even as it falsifies it fundamentally.

But, even through the fundamental falsification, the museum allows the blues to persist and grow. In fact, its continual falsification and its growth are to a large extent identical. In the assertion that white boys can't sing the blues is marked the idea that white performances of the blues are often stiff, formalized: that they emerge from the museum rather than the living tradition. But this stiffening is in fact a development and it leads to a series of other developments as it gets loosened up in turn by Led Zepplin or Cream into hard rock or acid blues. To play the blues in a traditional vein or straight out of the museum is itself an artistic decision for artists black or white and no matter where they come from: it has significance as a kind of refusal even as it does not exactly make anyone sound like Charley Patton. The blues depends upon the continual falsification of the museum for its preservation and for its development.

This has become true to an ever more extensive degree of every major form of popular music. That artists get inducted into a Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame and that we can go there to see old guitars and stage wear pointedly indicates or constitutes the death of rock, but also its continual resuscitation. Kids learn to play off records and with records, and worship recording artists as painters worship Picasso or whomever and make pilgrimages to the blockbuster. The development changes fundamentally because every part of the past is available in the archive; every style and every artist is always available for revival or refutation. A good case in point is punk music, a paradigmatic style because of its supposed simplicity, immediacy, and spontaneity: in a particularly intense form these are fundamental values of rock, in turn of the blues. But punk rock has been around for a quarter century and has a canon. It has been washed over by waves of revival and "post-punk" elaboration and then post-punk revivals, and so on. It has classical, baroque, rococo, and neo-classical moments, all of which are still available anytime you hit the play button. Once recording is in place, no popular style is ever finished; each remains permanently fixed as a resource. And each use of that resource deploys it into a different context for different purposes; the style cannot be revived and is always being revived.

The way a band like the Rolling Stones performs now would be incomprehensible without the museum of popular music; they are a diorama of themselves circa 1969. They are a Rolling Stones tribute band, simulating their own dangerous creativity, and for that matter simulating their own youthful veneration of blues records. They run through their greatest hits and they can absolutely rely on everyone to know the songs so that they can meet or frustrate expectations. One has to believe that they often listen to their old recordings, especially when they're developing a set list for a tour; their understanding of themselves is mediated through the artifacts they have left in their wake.

In many ways, however, even as it has reached its apotheosis, the popular music museum is being pulled down or superseded. This, we might hope, is also true in the visual arts, where museums have been decentralized or redistributed, and in which technologies of image manipulation and reproduction help the object itself that is the venerated in the museum begin to melt away. Of course, many visual artists actively resist making things that can be preserved and displayed permanently in the museum, while others try to undermine the solemnity of the masterpiece and its house.

Actual pop music museums such as the Rock Hall of Fame and The Experience Music Project are not, all things considered, that much like the National Gallery, or for that matter like the Baseball Hall of Fame: they are raucous multi-media extravaganzas, tourist traps designed to involve you or blow you away, ways of trying to bring a living loud thing into an institution, because the institution understands that it is as a living loud thing that people want to experience rock, that we still romanticize it as we do the blues. The idea of the music, its story, has to be narrowed and falsified by these institutions, but on the other hand the idea of the museum expands at the same time.

With the advent of dj's who play records on turntables as an instrument, and then of digital sampling, pop music undergoes another ontological shift, and the very idea of its museum gets holes blown in it, or loosens up, or intensifies, or at any rate is transformed. The history of recorded sound is available now not only as a set of artifacts that can be re-experienced at any given moment but as a set of situations in which one can intervene. In fact, hip hop artists and others have sampled many blues records. In one aspect this is a declaration of value and respect, a Clapton moment of veneration into the tradition. But it is obviously not another blues revival, as the track is torn apart and reworked, placed over a thumping bass, commented on by an emcee. In fact, many hip hop tracks make use of classical recordings, which is really like walking into the National Gallery and using the Monets as canvases: perverse celebration and direct iconoclasm.

Of course, such developments emphasize the status of musics as museum artifacts; they highlight the permanence and availability of recorded music, show it as something available for exploration and archeological study because preserved in accreted layers. But they also insistently point up the ontological situations that the museum is designed to elide: that the objects are disintegrating or are disintegratable, that they are understood in bits and pieces and appear as bits and pieces in new contexts which in turn take up a place in the museum, that people love the works but also despise them or feel oppressed and restrained by the weight of traditions. A child dragged for three hours through the Met, where she is introduced in hushed tones to a hundred masterpieces, really ought to be pissed off about it, and it might be interesting to see what would happen if you took an ADD boy to the Met and gave him an exacto knife and a can of Krylon.

The continual reworkings of old music in hip hop and other digital forms at once makes use of and attacks museum notions of origin and authenticity: the very origin can appear in the latest permutation, or can be placed in a context where it consumes itself in irony. In hip hop, pop music ceases to be even in appearance the record of a particular performance, enters wholly into the medium of recording, which now ought to be re-named. And the authenticity of hip hop itself is partly measured not by the purity but by the pollution of its structure, not by its independence as an artifact but by the way it sweeps histories into itself and casts them out again, altered. But of course this activity depends for its meaning and for its making on the availability of those artifacts in the first place, on their preservation in the museum.

The idea of a museum of popular music, in other words, fundamentally alters and constrains the idea of popular music itself. But it also potentially alters and deconstrains the idea of the museum. That, in turn, transforms the history of popular music and the uses that can be made of it. And so on.