Queens of the Stone Age - Make It Wit Chu

Within and without music we each know the balancing act between autonomy and the

placation of authorities. The popular music industry is wrought with struggles between its

structures and participants agents. Blues, though it can be structured and formalized too, allows

for transition between other genres. After all, blues lies at the roots of all American popular

music, arguably all North American popular music... adopting a phenomenological stance favoring the socially informed experience of live performances, and suggests that one should focus on performers’ and listeners’ interpretations of the signs of a historical musical culture out of which musical works arise.

As I consider Dawn and the ways in which a blues singer must wrestle with the

frustrations of structure, I wonder about the way I’m writing this ethnography, too. The

negotiations of structure and agency, as a blues singer in Quebec or as a ethnomusicology

student in New York, are as opaque as genre or improvisation. What of this writing is fabrication

for the sake of satisfying the institution and the reader and what are the words that I really can’t

keep off the page. How could anyone, even me, parse it out? Part of the irony of performance is

that no one person can ever truly know which permutation of a performer exists at any given

time on a stage or a page. The juggling of Industry and autonomy is hazy. Agents, singers,

musicians, writers, and structures, the Industry, the Press, all improvise. Blues, however,

provides a means through which to ellide structures and exhibit agency.

Source: The Ethos of the Blues: An Ethnography of Blues Singers and Writers by Zoë Emilie Peters Ford

Queens of the Stone Age - Make It Wit Chu

• Release in: 2007
• Duration: 11:03
• Genre: Pop/Rock

"Queens of the Stone Age have been nominated for Grammy Awards seven times, four times for Best Hard Rock Performance, twice for Best Rock Album, and once for Best Rock Performance."

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