Blues man stays planted
in musicis roots
R.L. Burnside
Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down
****
Fat Possum Records
By Brandon Moeller
Daily Cougar Staff
R.L. Burnside has been lambasted by some
blues fans and critics for ruining a good thing.
Some see his latest album, Wish I Was
in Heaven Sitting Down, as a threat to everything that they hold dear:
single-chord blues transgressions behind a traditional blues voice.
The latter of which is what Burnside accomplishes.
Thereis no doubt to any modern listener that his raspy voice has first-hand
experience with the blues. The former is what youill experience if youire
lucky enough to catch him at a solo performance.
But like Wish and other albums heis
recently tracked, the listener will experience things one isnit supposed
to on blues records -- frightening things like electronic samples, turntable
scratches, hip-hop beats, synthesizers and drum machines.
So is it the blues or a new genre called
emix-blues? Either way, Burnside deserves props for his originality.
If anything, he has done nothing but invigorate
and modernize a genre of music that is suffering from its own repetitiveness.
Burnside is to the blues as Beck is to modern rock: fearless in experimentation
and popular among younger listeners who can appreciate crossover music.
Besides, there are only so many ways a
blues artist can croon the classics. Burnsideis interpretations of such
staples as "Hard Time Killing Floor" and "Chain of Fools" include some
of his own lyrics and the songs benefit from his remix-blues style and
drum loops.
For example, take the lyrics "you canit
arrest me, I pay rent here/Iim a nothini man, I never wanted to be a bad
person." in "Nothini Man." Merely writing these lyrics lends no justice
to how Burnside performs them ... he pronounces "person" like a poor sharecropper
would (with too much emphasis on the "per" and not as much on the "son").
Burnside was a sharecropper for even longer
than heis been playing the guitar. Granted, if itis one thing he knows,
itis the blues. Sadly, if it werenit for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, he
might still be working the fields.
Burnside was seen by the band and invited
to be an opener on its 1995 tour. He jumped on the offer and after the
tour, the two new partners recorded A Ass Pocket of Whiskey and
the two groups collaborated on Burnsideis 1998 true breakthrough, Come
on In.
Though the reaction to Come on In
was mixed, blues traditionalists generally hated it. To this, Burnside
responds, "Iim getting too old to waste my time with stuff that isnit on
the cutting edge. Iim too old to be staying up all night writing songs;
I got to spend my time on remixes."
However, "Too Many Ups" on Wish is too
funky to be a blues song in my book, other than its vocals. But Burnside
contends that from the beginning of time people have been dancing to the
blues.
I donit mean to say that Burnsideis latest
comes off like a MTV party sampler disc -- his spoken word "R.L.is Story"
chronicles how his father and two uncles and more members of his family
were murdered in Chicago, a place he says heill never go back to. This,
compiled with the many other woeful tracks on Wish, will leave the
listener in a much more contemplative mood than one can find at a local
dance club.
