Categorizations/Meanings/Art

[bill@ADMS-RAD.Unisys.COM (Bill "Albatross!" Oswald)]

      EXCUUUUSE ME!?!  Bonnie Raitt a COUNTRY singer??!

I've been listening to Bonnie Raitt for GENERATIONS.  While she
now qualifies as a "popular" singer, let me please place her in
the "folk blues" category.  She covers -- or used to -- Robert
Johnson, Sippie Wallace, Chris Smither, etc., plus lots of
bottleneck guitar.  Although I rejoice at her recent success, I'm
afraid she's finally mastered that particular lack of substance
that makes a performer appeal to the mass audience.

The essential job of a folk artist is NOT storytelling.  His/her
art is to convey human, often earthy, often profound thoughts and
images, usually in a simple, though not necessarily unsophis-
ticated, manner.  Storytelling can be one means toward this end.

The boundaries of folk are vague enough that it does serve as
something as a catch-all, and the category has lately been
stretched far enough to include the likes of Uncle Bonzai, Buskin
and Batteau, and Suzanne Vega.  It's not just Leadbelly, Woody
Guthrie, Joan Baez, and the Kingston Trio any more.

But Kate Bush is not a folksinger!  Her music is by no means
simple.  It is intricate, complex, multilayered, and often
ambiguous or obscure.  It's "experimental," as Meredith Tarr
suggests, or "progressive," if you need to categorize.

I love the straightforwardness of folk.  There's great beauty in
the literal images that it presents.  But there are levels above
 ....

Take familiar sounds -- a train whistle, a helicopter, a bullhorn
("Get out of the waves!  Get out of the water!"), a parent's
voice ("Look who's here to see you!"), a Bulgarian choir, an
Irish jig.  Each has its own *literal* meaning, and each brings
with it certain connotations, attributes, and associations in the
mind of the listener (and the artist).  Take these sounds, and
others, out of context, as fragments, and begin to blend them
into new and perhaps unnatural contexts.  The *literal* meanings
become unimportant and are stripped off in the mind of the
observer, and what's left are the connotations, attributes, and
associations -- the *subjective* meanings.  These *subjective*
meanings thereby become *formal elements*, which can be combined
to form new connotations and associations.  The listener (or the
artist) pulls these meanings from common human experiences and
from his/her own unique experiences and creates (Robert Cole's
"gestalt of everyone's theory") a new, subjective "reality" of
images, thoughts, and feelings which he/she may never have
encountered.

This is the real magic of art.

As an analogy, simple line drawings can become letters of the
alphabet, which are invested with meanings having little or
nothing to do with the original drawings.  The letters can be
combined, losing their names, but retaining their attributes, to
form words, which have meanings of their own, unrelated to the
individual letters, much less to the original drawings.  The
letters have become formal elements, and it's the meaning of the
words, not of the letters, that's important.  The words can be
combined, as formal elements, to form phrases, sentences,
metaphors, and so on.  The trick is in knowing what letters to
pick and how to combine them.

Listening to Kate's music, I'm continually astonished at the
brilliance of the combinations.  A common reaction is, "Who would
have thought that such diverse elements could coexist at all, let
alone blend so beautifully?"  Kate, evidently.

Anyone can throw letters together and make nonsense.  It takes
someone like Kate Bush to put them together and make SENSE,
POETRY, and MUSIC.


  --  Bill Oswald - bill@ADMS-RAD.Unisys.COM