All I’ve Been Seeing is Grey

Ruben’s sent me drown in my own tears by Ray Charles and it’s got me thinking about the blues. The mythos of Robert Johnson — the chaos, ups and downs, whiskey drinking, women fucking’ (or whomst ever you like to fuck), bar breaking, string snapping, wolf howling blues. It’s not the notes that you play but the notes you ain’t playing between those notes, see what I’m saying? The fractured inner self paired with the tumult of the physical world and all of its caprices. For me, that’s real blues. The music is the distillation of anguish, disdain, struggle, sunny days, the lack of them, drinking until it burns your stomach, being outside and feeling the heat on your skin, the heat from others, other bodies, moving and churning. Blues is waking up one day and realising that the life you’re living was never gonna go the way you wanted it. I thought I’d never have a drink in my life. Sometimes it’s realising that it’s always where you wanted it to be. Ain’t that a travesty. Blues is going to sleep with your darling’s head on your shoulder, deep and easy breaths on your neck, and knowing the beginning ain’t never the way it ends. Laboured moans and sweat running off your back can too easily grow haggard and spiteful, scratches on your wrists. You might be gone the next day. They might be gone before you wake up. Personally, I have a few lovers, they all got six strings and love to wail (you ever heard a fox say I love you?). My favourite is Cleopatra, but Lilith is a close second (until I think about sweet, sweet, Mary Jane). Blues is watching the people you love grow old, struggling to look after the people that cared for you the most. It’s loud, unapologetic and it’s even louder when the record stops playing — a miasma brimming with the whisper of a soft hiss as the needle continues its caress on spinning vinyl. Sometimes it gets a little hazier than that if you like a bit of puff. 

My blues comes from knowing that the best things in life are fleeting. I hold onto feelings for as long as possible before the tide of the most elusive concept known to mankind wrenches them from me and disperses them like ashes over a cliffside, the waves banging and eroding and clapping and stomping everything into oblivion until what’s finally been laid to rest can be found sleeping softly on a salty sea-bed. Otherwise I’d choke on them instead. Sometimes I like to go diving. I like my whisky-drinking muddied waters when I’m feeling mystical and spiritual like the truest voodoo chile I am. Where I’m from we call that juju but you must be careful when dealing with ways of the old gods (“then the world’s gonna know, what it’s all about”). Hendrix had some real blues the same way Etta had some real blues. Marvin had some blues, brother. We all got real blues, just some of us like to swap it out for some other colours — pinks and greens and yellows and reds, so pretty — it ain’t blues though. We’ve had generations of kids fucked up because there was too much blues. Locking a brother up for wanting spiritual, educational and physical lifting is some real blues. Fireworks are triggering, flashing blue lights are traumatic. Some men (a lot of them) will give women some real fucking blues because of it. You like leather, boy? Don’t get me started… 

In sinner’s prayer, Ray Charles says “Lord have mercy” but the kids ain’t got no God no more. That God threw in the towel as soon as the pastor said “body of Christ”. Now I don’t quite remember it going like that… I bet He doesn’t either. Or She? Where I’m from, God is Ataa-Naa Nyonmo, both man and woman, and I’m assuming whatever’s in-between. My mother told me that’s why the women where I come from are pretty hardcore (hell hath no wrath like a woman scorned and so forth). My mother also told me that whilst a man may be the head of a house, the woman is the neck. That’s some real fuckin’ blues. Indigo is forgetting all of that and conceding to a mass-scale state sanctioned lobotomy — nobody knows what blues is anymore, just that it’s there. Kinda like God. Instead now, God hangs out at the bottom of a pint glass, wine glass, whiskey tumbler, at the end of a spliff, somewhere crystallising in the back of your nose, your throat. Choke on God, throw God up — whatever it is, it ain’t no absence of blues, I’ll tell you that for free. If God is the real blues, then the real devil is when the music stops, bars closing down, nobody comes out no more. Chinua Achebe talks about the God in everything, the sky, the clouds, the water, the trees. That means my guitar must be real holy. That must mean that a soul is murdered for every songs that’s never played again, every book that’s forgotten. You tell me how holy you feel at your worst moments like some martyr for your own cause. It’s 4:54 pm and the sun’s already set. That’s some real blues.