A Groundbreaking Album!!!
Rock’n’roll is the only good thing to come from the American stain of slavery and the institutionalized race hatred of Jim Crow. The connection between race and rock is often alluded to, but rarely discussed in anything but the most superficial detail. I suspect people would rather not be confronted by this fact: those who were the most battered, discarded, and discredited by the American dream invented the music that defines our lives. Eric Clapton talking about Buddy Guy or Robert Plant mumbling a few words about Clarksdale doesn’t teach us a goddamn thing about that. Their lip service to some airbrushed sepia-toned blues ideal is a smiley face painted over the fact that people were kidnapped from their continent, jammed into slave ships where they wallowed in their own shit and vomit for months, and then they and their descendants were committed into chains and forced servitude; the rhythms, rhymes…
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