work aesthetic #2

Like "Workin' In A Coalmine", another working man blues

selling your time / life, in  by-the-hour chunks, dirt-cheap

"and i'm highly embarrassed / ev-er-y time i get my pay"

it's a wage-packet racket

"somebody doin' something slick / yeah they are"

wage-slave en route to an early grave, the graft getting to feel so futile

"might as well go uptown / and dig a ditch"


And how about this for "this shit is systemic" analysis - from the preamble to "Ain't That A Bitch":

“Everything is outta pocket! / Somebody do something! / The present situation is abstract!”


One thing I quite like in an artist - admire the shamelessness, maybe, or the canniness, not sure which-  is that thing where they have a hit, and they immediately try to have another hit that is essentially the same song: thematically, sound, feel, stance, emotion.

Sometimes they will even repeat the same key word in the song title (see Pete Frampton with his successive smash singles with the word "Way" in them)

Johnny 'Guitar' Watson doesn't go quite that far with "Real Mother For Ya", but it is essentially "Ain't That A Bitch Pt 2"



Actually, "Ain't" was never a single as such, but it was the killer tune on his first really successful album, so in that sense fits the syndrome

"Mother" was actually a big R&B chart hit and grazed the outer edge of the Billboard Top 40

I bought these tunes some time in the early Eighties, I think they were rereleased as flipsides of the same 12-inch or something like that. (Or maybe not - can find no trace of this on Discogs. Perhaps they were separate rereleases).

Never got around to the albums though.

This is the one where some claim he's inventing rap




Another real-talk, cost-of-living, themed tune, in a way.

Also quite like that thing where  musicians (this is particularly common in black music, but really in most music if you think about it) just fairly brazenly jump on the latest sound - - and keep on jumping on the latest sound, successively if not always successfully.

I mean, why not? They wanna sell some records. Probably they gotta sell some records.

(It's a different angle on the "work aesthetic" theme - this music thing isn't some higher calling or anything airy-fairy like that; it's a job, a livelihood, my means of production, and I gotta stay competitive in the changing market).

I suppose he's trying to do a George Clinton / Zapp with this next  tune, sonically,  while also striking a "microchips gonna put all of us outta work" stance, lyrically. A/k.a having your cake and eating it.




stop press: an entire essay on the "proletarian funk of Johnny 'Guitar' Watson" by Dominick Knowles at Viewpoint

work aesthetic #1

"Course I make a little money
Haulin' coal by the ton
But when Saturday rolls around
I'm too tired for havin' fun"

Man, I used to love this song

My memory of it sounds better than the actuality of it now (which is still pretty fabulous)

The radio memory - the 'pick axe' snap of the drum cutting right through the sound  - the whole track sounded so odd, so minimal -  clanking mechanistic blues, the grind of regimented labor rendered as joyous celebration.

The flipside of "work" as dance music / club culture buzzword - in this case, for once, literally referring to labour... the travails of being a fleshly "appendage attached to the machine".

You can see why Devo wanted to do it

Although they did a pretty dreary job with it really - or perhaps simply redundant, they couldn't make it anymore rigid or machinic



Bought that Charley collection of Lee Dorsey tunes with the Joe Strummer liner note (literally a note - hand scrawled!) perhaps a year or two after it first came out

Great stuff, but nothing quite as odd and emaciated as "Working in the Coal Mine"

I  think this was my next favorite (what with Funk being my new religion in that 1980-81-82 period)



Actually probably the next fave was really "Ride Your Pony" -  pumping, so tight.




(Backing band = The Meters - a word with a technological undertone as well as its musical connotation)

Back to "Coal Mine"...

"Lord I'm so tired
How long can this go on?"

Apparently neither Dorsey nor producer-writer Allen Toussaint had ever been in a coal mine

But Dorsey knew about hard 'n' dirty work and the man-machine interface, what with running his own auto repair shop. A job he went back to during the dry spells between hits.

"He was a body and fender man when he wasn’t singing and even at his peak, when he would come off the road at the end of a successful tour, he would go and get into his grease clothes, his dirty work gear and go and work on cars. Straightening out fenders and painting bodywork" - Toussaint.