STRUCTURALLY, SOMETHING OF a mystery-thriller: narrator Seth and his college buddy Carter, who comes from a fabulously wealthy family, use found recordings and studio wizardry to concoct a very-authentic-seeming sound file of a supposedly undiscovered old blues 78, Charlie Shaw's "Graveyard Blues." The fake creates internet buzz, in the wake of which Carter answers a mysterious summons to a dangerous part of town, where he is assaulted so grievously he ends up in a coma.
Who did this? Why? What have these young enthusiasts of old sounds gotten involved in? Such questions pull in Carter's aspiring artist sister, Leonie, with whom Seth is desperately obsessed. Their search for answers leads them to...
Well, you get the idea. The questions do get answers, which I will not spoil for you, but the great thing is that Kunzru's novel lifts itself well clear of the gravitational pull of genre thanks to (1) some deft and genuinely spooky magical realism and (2) his skillful fashioning of his plot into a parable about white appropriation of black labor and black creativity.
One of my best friends had, in his twenties, a fascination with old interwar blues records--Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, and a few score others. He never got into collecting 78s, instead building a collection of as many of the LPs that the 78-collectors compiled as he could find and afford. I was never into it to the degree he was, but I definitely acquired a taste for it; I have a couple dozen of those albums myself.
What does it mean when a couple of white male midwestern twenty-somethings find themselves hunched over a re-issue of a scratchy old recording, made by a black Mississippian musician about the time their parents were born, that evokes a long-vanished culture to which they have no living connection whatsoever? One could answer by talking about the power of music to transcend its circumstances--but is something vampiric also going on, some leeching of a vitality we had small hope of generating on our own? What were we looking for, and what does it tell us that we found it in Son House and Mississippi John Hurt?
No comments:
Post a Comment