Blue Roots

The other day I was sitting in my local Hairdressers/Barbers for all you non-UK folk reading this, when my sense of hearing was suddenly pulled into an up and down, no direction known, rollercoatser ride of nausea, similar to sea sickness!

No it wasn’t Vertigo it was the Banshee wail of Beyonce Knowles, which might as well of been produced by a computer as it was just a mish-mash of her vocal acrobatics and her desperately trying to fit as many different octaves and vibrato techniques into one verse with her completely disconnected and oblivious to any meaning of the words she was singing! And today these people are our ‘Master’s of Soul’, ‘Our Motown greats’!??

I do wonder if these so called Artists have ever actually ever LISTENED to the Motown/Soul Masters of the 1960’s. The people buying their albums definitely haven’t!!

Janis Joplin, I’m not talking about that bewildered, watered-down, costume wearing Joss Stone, I’m talking about the ‘Real McCoy’, Janis Joplin. Ok so she couldn’t hit a perfect C#7 ( or whatever other musically unnecessarily long winded professor term you want to put it into ) , but she could sing with such grit, gut passion and complete connection and understanding to what she was trying to convey, this was her ‘Blue Roots’. Forget the word ‘Rock’ for the moment, first and foremost, Janis was a Blues musician, as was many of the other greats of that time i.e, Hendrix, Clapton, Townsend, Albert Lee, David Gilmore etc, etc, which gave birth to ‘Blues Rock’ musicians, very different to the plastic, tacky, cock-rocking rubbish of the 1980’s where ‘Blues’ was replaced by ‘EGO’.

Above all else, the Blues teaches/shows you the way to connect with your feelings and emotions through your music, something which carried through greatly into the ‘Motown Era’ but has since been all forgotten in a haze of militant perfection, ‘go faster’ production and a huge pile of bank notes, giving birth to today’s highly laughable yet very tragic version of R&B.

Let’s take two classically trained pianists, both are ‘masters’ at what they do, both TECHNICALLY equal, but if one of these musicians is able to truly connect and understand what they are playing on an emotional level, to anyone with half an ‘ear’ for music, they will stand ‘head and shoulders’ above the other.

I mean Hendrix never once played a song the same, it was all about feeling and what felt right at the time, for sure he was a ‘technical wizard’, he’d worked damn hard to be, but he had that connection, he had those ‘Blue Roots’ and stacks of them.

Most of today’s modern bands that are in the spot-light of today’s ‘Media Circus’ would immediately fill their pants with fear at the very idea of walking onto a stage and playing whatever ‘felt right’, breaking away from their rigorously rehearsed dance routines and military precision planned shows, which are no different to listening to their album on a CD…….Boring!!

Are we as a Race becoming more and more numb to our emotions, unable to dig deep and connect to what we really feel? Our ‘Blue Roots’ seemed to be well and truly tapped which I feel intern is slowly starving our imagination.

It’s not about everyone becoming a Blues player, I feel it’s just the connection and understanding of your emotions portrayed through your music, it just so happens that the Blues is very good place to start in showing the ways to discover it.

All the best, Dan O’Flynn.