As I sit here in the doldrums of essays and exams all while waiting for festival season to start I start to think about a lot of things. I feel a need to be emotional and intellectually stimulated again, and little did I know I'd find a doozy in the below posted article Million-Dollar Juke Joint: Commodifying Blues Culture. Now this is a long article spanning six pages but it is worth reading. Daniel Lieverfeld so eloquently writes a manifesto of all my misgivings of The House of Blues and of use blues culture. Of course I've written about be opinions on the House before with some
interesting responses. But where Lieberfield shows his strengths in his discussion of white infatuation with Black culture, specifically white interst in the blues culture.
As a young white male who loves blues music and culture this article is kind of depressing. On one hand I see my own actions falling in line with Lieberfield's theory on blues appeal but many of his points I have been internally thinking about for quite some time. Frankly I always felt if was a shame that House of Blues sells a culture that's beginnings were from people in abject poverty. House of Blues sells expensive dinners and jackets while Bobby "Blue" Bland and others are slowly slipping into obscurity and sickness. Yet I feel I must look at my own paticipation in this culture and this is something I'm going to have to think about.
Lieberfeld does not condemn House of Blues; he in his own words says he is highlighting how " America's dominant culture uses aspects of peripheralized cultures to manage its dilemmas of individuality and race and class relations," he goes on to discuss that House of Blues did not start this culture but is merely a very successful exploiter of it.
Sure makes you think.
by Daniel Lieberfeld
In fact, The Blues Brothers film has but a single running gag: the brothers' unflappable cool in life-threatening situations. The only thing that can rouse them from their lock-jawed sangfroid is gospel and blues music....
