Faking It

What's It Like to Be Blind?

In the entire history of American popular music, why have so few blind singers sung about being blind? I’ve done a lot of research, and have turned up only three examples.

The first is Blind Roger Hays’s “I Must Be Blind, I Cannot See” (1928), a simple ditty that alternates between first and third person, even in the same phrase; discusses the colors of Hays’s eyes, which he has no way of seeing; and beautifully contrasts the light of God to his own darkness.

The second is Blind Gary [Davis’]s “Lord, I Wish I Could See” (1935), a fairly straightforward autobiographical account of the reverend’s woes, but very moving nonetheless.

Lastly there’s Sleepy John Estes’s “Stone Blind Blues” (1947), the saddest and most autobiographical of them all.

(Sonny Terry’s “I Woke Up This Morning and I Could Hardly See,” first recorded in 1953 and again in a better, live version in 1962, hardly addresses his loss of sight--it’s all about his woman cheating on him).

Blind jazz multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk recorded a piece called “The Inflated Tear” in 1967, which he later said was inspired by “a ‘mystical trip’ when I realized I was part of an Inflated Tear. I went back into myself to find out how that began. When I was one or two a nurse came into work drunk or high or mad at somebody and she slipped and put too much medicine in my eyes. I think that’s when the tear began because I went through years where my eyes used to run and hurt and be nothing but tears.” So perhaps this gorgeous, weirdly violent, and heartbreaking song could be said to be about blindness too.

Of course, there have been plenty of brilliant blind songwriters, ranging from pioneer bluesmen Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Blind Willie McTell to more recent artists such as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. In fact, Luigi Monge, in his article “Blindness Blues: Visual References in the Lyrics of Blind Pre-war Blues and Gospel Musicians” (in The Lyrics in African American Popular Music, edited by Robert Springer, 2001) has counted no fewer than 32 blind pre-war blues and gospel singers (it was he who pointed out the Gary Davis and Roger Hays songs to me). Few of these artists have been reluctant to sing in the first person or to tell stories in their songs. But there is one subject they almost all avoid, the one that is absolutely central to their identities. Why?

One reason was that they were proud of their abilities and didn’t want to call attention to their disabilities. Both Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ray Charles tried to prove that their blindness didn’t hamper in the least their ability to get around and to judge people’s characters (see Monge’s excellent article on Blind Lemon and Ray Charles’s superlative autobiography, Brother Ray).

But there’s another reason, perhaps more important: there was no audience for songs about blindness. Who could relate to it? The number of blind listeners was undoubtedly far fewer than the number of listeners who’d been jilted by a lover.

- Yuval

What Music Do You Regard as Real or Fake, And Why?

Our book Faking It is about authenticity in popular music. We don't argue for or against authenticity--instead we look at what authenticity means and the ways it has affected listeners and musicians and the choices they make. From Kurt Cobain's aversion to faking it to Ry Cooder's desire to find authenticity in third world cultures, from the racial segregation of the blues to the denigration of the Monkees for being fake, we feel that the quest for authenticity has been a major, underacknowledged factor in the development of popular music.

But people have different ideas of what kinds of music or artists are "real" or "fake" and whether "fake" is necessarily bad. It'd be interesting to hear any thoughts on the sorts of music you regard as real or fake, and the reasons why.

- Hugh

Earnest Punk

I've been thinking about the quality of earnestness in UK punk music. In our book, we talk about the ways in which even the first wave of punk musicians adopted personas that allowed them to project an earnest anger or disgust with the world. At this stage, there was little public evidence of conscious irony in the most prominent punk bands. For The Sex Pistols and The Clash, and for their fans, it was important that the anger and disgust be seen to be “authentic” rather than a kind of knowing posture. There were always more comedic or self-conscious elements within the loose punk movement - one could cite the shambolic entertainments of The Damned for a contrasting attitude. But many of the most “serious punks” looked down on The Damned as a joke band, and for the most part it was taken as gospel that bands should at least strive to be authentic, which involved them projecting a serious and earnest attitude.

But this was a very difficult posture to maintain 24/7. As soon as the musicians became well-known and had to continue creating music, the pressure of keeping up an earnest front began to show. The Pistols disintegrated before this became obvious, leaving John Lydon with the long-term problem of having to prove his personal authenticity over and over again. The Clash had to gradually modify their approach over time to adapt to commercial pressures and cultural changes.

But the progress to a more ironic, knowing posture was more apparent in some of the other bands who followed in the wake of early punk. A few examples from the period:

Alternative TV’s “How Much Longer” mocks the various tribes of the late 1970s  UK, moving on to the “punks” before concluding that all of them “don’t know nothing, and don’t really care.” The extremely funny lyrics describe punks as endlessly talking about “anarchy, fascism and boredom.” This is already a long way from the earnestness that many expected from punk. Alternative TV’s Mark Perry was an anomaly in the early punk movement. His Sniffin’ Glue fanzine was always prepared to criticize the tendency for punks to conform to a new fashion code, and he expressed disdain for the “sell-out” of those bands like the Clash who had signed to major labels. Partly as a result, he was a strong advocate of the DIY approach, and more experimental ideas. But the ideal of a thousand cheap records made in separate front rooms also meant an acknowledgment that the punk “movement” was a collection of very disparate voices, some serious and earnest, some more anarchic and humorous. The slightly arch punk poetry of Attila the Stockbroker and John Cooper Clarke came from a similarly oblique take on the punk attitude.

The Fall weren’t punks as such, although it is hard to imagine their brutal art-noise approach having had the same level of attention without punk having retrained people’s ears to hear “noise” a bit differently. But their early radio and TV exposure came from material like “Industrial Estate,” which gleefully takes the basic sound of punk and twists it into something more sarcastic, twisted and weird. Punks often sang about the bleak boredom of suburban towns. “Industrial Estate” taken in isolation could almost be taken to be an extension of this kind of earnest, gritty realism, but this kind of song was merely a launch pad for Mark E. Smith to move on to weirder material like “Bingomaster’s Breakout” or “Psychick Dancehall” in which the textures of urban 1970s Britain become the background to a more self-consciously artistic reinterpretation.

Wire’s “12XU” sounds like a straight-up punk song on first hearing, but there is something a bit more clever and self-conscious about it. It is no surprise that they went on from this to a more self-consciously arty approach which prefigured “post-punk.” This represents a far more knowing version of punk, where the band and audience could conspire to use punk in new ways.

“Jilted John” by Jilted John wasn’t really a punk song at all, but a parody of a punk song. Over a deliberately stupid guitar riff, “Jilted John” whined about how difficult his life was because his girlfriend had left him for Gordon the moron. The song was a hit in the UK, reflecting the fact that punk’s earnestness had come to be seen as something slightly ludicrous, and also perhaps the fact that buyers were just as happy to buy this comic take on punk as they were to buy “real punk.”

All of these examples go in slightly different directions from the original wave of punk. What they all share is the fact that they are happy to seen as “knowing postures.” Alternative TV and Jilted John make fun of the punk movement from inside and out, effectively puncturing the original earnestness. While Wire and The Fall are happy to utilise punk’s basic structure and sound, but to be seen to be doing something a bit more “clever” or “ironic” which is something that the earliest punk bands could rarely do.

Of course some earnestness persisted. Bands like Crass retained their earnestness by focussing on politics and remaining resolutely outside of the mainstream. The Jam retained a fervent following for a few years while keeping to a rather po-faced manifesto. But Paul Weller clearly felt constrained by this in the end, and eventually moved on to the far more frothy Style Council in a clear attempt to redefine himself as a pop musician who could have fun as well as be serious.

So as punk disintegrated into a variety of new strands and directions, the initial pose of earnestness became extremely hard to sustain. And these directions could only be found by setting that earnestness aside or by parodying it.

- Hugh