The New Chicago Blues
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The blues aren’t in good shape these days. Besides being musically moribund–or perhaps because of that–the genre’s been almost completely discredited in the realm of rock music; since that realm is populated primarily by slumming upper-class white folk, that discredit isn’t surprising. To the extent that the blues exist there at all, they appear in two different but warped forms. The first and less interesting is as a foil for some high-powered smirking. The John Spencer Blues Explosion, for example, blow out the blues in a manic rush, in rather the same way quasi-novelty bands like the Reverend Horton Heat burn up rockabilly: they pledge allegiance to the music but trivialize it at the same time. More interesting is the blues’ weird manipulation at the hands of a select few drugged-out, hollow-eyed practitioners: Come, from Boston, and New York’s Royal Trux essay a blues of mental and physical sickness, addiction, loneliness, and marginalization.
