> -B.^^^^^^CB: Punk seems to carry on the"lowdown and dirty" spirit of the
> blues.I remember a liner note sayingthere's a recording that
> capturedBessie Smith saying before theystarted the song "Wait a
> minutewhile I spit."My great uncle buried Bessie Smith.
A friend once said to me, in an off-hand comments, that punk rock is the blues of the neoliberal era. Because it came from the dispossessed and expropriated, and had the same power to mobilize audiences and scandalize authorities.
Though with the astonishing media boom of the 2000s, something similar seems to be happening to other working-class musical forms from Latin America, West Africa and South Asia.
-- DRR