This video by The Black Keys for their song “Just Got To Be” really intrigued me in relation to my theory about the cathartic interplay between musicians and their audiences. I’ll start this by putting the lyrics in print:
When it comes to pride/And other sinful matters/You’re gonna be misled/Left there in tatters/I got to go because/Something’s on my mind/And it won’t get better/No matter how hard I try/Whoa, yeah/You just got to be/The best thing for me/Evil hides in dark places/But now I find it/In familiar faces/I got to go because/Something’s on my mind/And it won’t get better/No matter how hard I try/Whoa, yeah/You just got to be/The best thing for me.
To start with, the music video itself is filmed in muted colors: no one color, band member, or particular facet of the room they’re in or stage they’re on stands out, and the dust that’s trapped in the minimal rays of sun that are coming through evenly spaced windows is so thick the viewer almost has an allergic reaction, if one is prone to those sensitivities. This is lo-fi; this is about music and the landscape it creates; this is about the production of sound. Behind them is a bucolic mural (prosaic enough to be found in elementary school auditoriums across the nation) and in front of them is dead space, complete emptiness stirred only by the ceiling fans that are set on haul ass and a shadowy figure that darts on and off camera at the very end of the film reel.
This atmosphere creates a certain voyeuristic pleasure in the viewer; we are witnessing an intimate moment between musician and instrument in which the artist uses vibrations as a form of release, which is to say the catharsis sought in this particular film has nothing to do with the immediately tangible, corporeal audience and everything to do with the audience at home that they have purposely excluded. How a one is at home and how one is in public can, in fact, be two very different beasts; how one responds to the Seven Deadly Sins is a primary barometer for behavioral standards. The Black Keys have taken their tattered egos into the privacy of abandoned nostalgia, seen in their choice of setting, seen in their blues gyrations and parred down rock n’ roll signification; the music practically emanates from them spewing forth in a smoothly gutteral YAWP. By doing this, by mediating the music with another form of technology–the camera–another element is introduced: the loss of the aura that Walter Benjamin discussed at length. This loss is compensated for by the home audience’s construction of their own meanings; this interaction is no longer about the immediate interplay between artist and audience that viscerally occurs during a live performance, but rather about the intimate transformation that occurs as a video is watched multiple times, being synthesized and taking on new meanings that can be substituted for the fact that there is no actual exchange occurring between the two parties because one party, the artist, has been divorced from its essence.
This is unsettled ground, this is a dust-filled, sun-lit room from your childhood transported to the now and filled with your current musical obsession. The Black Keys are speaking to a necessity to be left alone, to be left in peace in order to be (and being is an accumulation of dusty reminiscences), in order to create and have that creation take on significant weight and meaning enough to displace some of the current dominant narratives in music.
Filed under: Music, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: blues, Music, philosophy
No Responses Yet to “The Black Keys: An Insight into Blues and Dust”