You Didn't Hear it from Me

See the blues man of course, or the blues woman, is someone who begins with the catastrophic. The blues in an autobiographical chronicle of a personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. It's a lyrical response to the monstrous. Like the first sentence of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor Samson wakes up from an uneasy dreammmma. The blues responds to the catastrophic with compassion, without drinking from the cup of bitterness, not with revenge but with justice. The blues sensibility. You let that love inside of you be expressed even though it's hard for it to be translated into love or justice on the ground. That's a great lesson in this age of terrorism. What I have in mind is a tragicomic view in which compassion responds to catastrophe. By blues I don't mean just a particular art form, it's really a way of life that that art form helped popularize. That's what shaped and molded me, and I am old school to the core. Unapologetic! Motown, Stax, Philly International Sound, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, Aretha, W.E.B. DuBois, Leroy Jones, transferring into Baraka...