Leon Bridges - Blue Mesas

Most theories on modern popular music center on the premise that this music is controlled to serve the economic and political interests of the businesses that create and distribute it. Such an early influential treatment was offered by Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno placed popular music within the capitalist state as a product that is mass produced for public consumption. For his examples of popular music, he used popular songs from his native Germany and Tin Pan Alley songs from America. Adorno theorized that music mediated between the state and its citizens. The corporate apparatus created music that affirmed government hegemony, packaged it as a commodity, then mass produced it. Popular music stripped the audience of power by making them passive receptors of its sounds.

Blues music’s rhythms give a good example of its oppositional quality. Blues songs feature syncopation, the accenting of beats or pulses typically unaccented in metric music. African music had long cultivated polyrhythms, with layers of rhythms that complemented and played off each other like a musical conversation. A dominant meter, around which most Western music is centered, was never the intention. This metrical patterns in blues was both an active preservation of African rhythms and song structure and a conscious undermining of the rhythms of most Western music... Different approaches to rhythm reflect the natures of the different cultures. The polyrhythms of African music suggest the timing of the natural world and the human body. Western rhythms are more like artificial, regularized time units necessary to an industrial society, like a mechanized machine. African rhythms reflect a culture not regulated by clock time and one that used music to get out of time, as in the attainment of ecstatic states of consciousness during religious rituals... the first pulse being the action of a body to raise a hand to strike and the second louder pulse being the sound created when the hands hit the instrument, be it drum, guitar, or piano. An example of this would be the syncopated work songs associated with chain gangs or railroad workers. The rhythms of the songs sung by the workers reflected the natural syncopation of their work, the action of lifting a hammer up and a second louder sound of the hammer hitting a railroad spike.

Source: Rock 'n Roll Stew: The Rolling Stones and Blues Music through the Looking Glass of American Culture in the 1960's by Henry Canning Woodward

Leon Bridges - Blue Mesas

• Released on: Gold Diggers Sound album
• Release Date: July 23, 2021
• Genre: R&B, Soul

"Leon Bridges albums resulted in four Grammy nominations and a win in the category of Best Traditional R&B Performance. Bridges soon expanded his audience with featured appearances on songs by artists ranging from the similar traditional roots."

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