“YOU CAN SING BLUES, BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO LIVE IT”

Maybe we can think about any other musical genre and simply affirm that this fact is actually accurate and easy to explain.

Maybe we could think about a rapper, a rock singer, even a tropical music artist, and easily check on their story, in order to make sure that the artist's life has nothing to do with their musical genre: we can eventually think about some other genre they could sing, and there would be no problem there. Now I have to think about blues, and the main idea that keeps rounding my head is: "be careful, this is not completely true..." but, why?

It's simultaneously easy and hard to explain, because we could think about a black man who can make great blues and we can easily think that (even though it was his parents, or his grandparents) has lived the terrible slavery times there. I think it's important to clarify that we are thinking about the context of the Cadillac Records movie, around mid-20^th Century, when the musical industry was still making its first steps.

19th century blues had their roots on a tangible fact: sorrow, suffering, depression; even though the musical industry was taking all the original intentions of the composer, and was making the artists make their pieces in order to get rich, and bring their work to an audience, instead of a story and a feeling.

Therefore, it depends on the context and the time we put this sentence on, because it is always important to make this kind of clarifications, we have to analyze all the facts which surround a topic, and even more if we talk about something regarding culture and music. So, if we take this sentence, and put it before the mid-20^th Century, I wouldn’t agree, because blues were a way to express all the important feelings that surrounded black people lives during that time, and it’s just inaccurate and even not correct to say you can sing blues without feeling it during that time. Now we can think about the boom of the musical industry, when that enormous monster began to feed on the talented artists: that time changes everything, because seemingly nowadays the only thing that matters is the audience, and the money it would bring with a musical hit. That sentence will get all the sense here, because you only need to sing fair, get good lyrics, and that’s it.

I think this sentence: you can sing blues, but you don’t have to live it, should work with the fact that the musical industry has been taking advantage of the audience, and music has a different definition nowadays, which was possibly born there, with the good music, with the real blues.