We need more evangelists

Every revolution needs its instigators, and every instigator needs his prophets, evangelists, propagandists and advertisers. Just as it was true for religious and political, so it is for the cultural rebels. It's not always by design: contextualisers might be fellow travelers, but the most powerful aren't in the employ of those whom they evangelise.

In these anodyne days, magazines are a great example. They provide context for you and tell you what, how, where and why to buy. No matter that what they say is often patently absurd. Take, for example, this example from the current edition of What Hi-Fi Sound and Vision: It's a review of a power cable - the thing that plugs into your power socket at one end, and into your appliance at the other. This power cable - a regulation 1.5m in length - costs £60. It is carefully constructed, apparently, in terms of "many aspects of the content and construction of the cable - the number and arrangement of conductors, the insulation, the mains plug at one end and the three pin plug at the other." Trust us; it's very technical.

Sixty quid. For a power cable. What Hi-Fi has been quite unable to say what is so special about it: just that it really is carefully constructed. The benefits, it says, over a normal cable are "...abundant. Used in a video discipline, [it] offers greater certainty where movement and edges are concerned, deepens black shades and offers great punch to the high-contrast scenes. Colours are bolder, details more numerous."

The assertion, therefore, is that the construction of a power cable qualitatively, meaningfully, affects the representation of pictures on your TV. Can you imagine anything more preposterous? To catch a magazine reviewer out getting completely carried away isn't the point: the point is that, without this sort of independent publicity legitimising such a transparently absurd idea as a £60 power cable, no-one would buy it.

And so it is with all cultural artefacts.

So Elvis benefitted from Dewey Phillips - a brain-fritzed hillbilly who sounded like he was on speed - a Memphis DJ who championed That's Alright Mama on his Red Hot and Blue show. Later in life Greil Marcus was a leading contextualiser of Elvis, Bob Dylan and many others.

A prime moving evangelist begets other evangelists - gets a movement going, and from then anything can happen. But had Dewey Phillips not played that record on his show, the cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century might have been very different. Sun Studio, 706 Union Ave Memphis, is a small and unprepossessing place. Just making the music wasn't enough. Someone independent, with credibility, needed to broadcast it; validate it; vouch for it.

Lester Bangs - whose many best works can be enjoyed in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung - was another evangeliser. What he wrote about - punk rock in the seventies - was a base, greasy, countercultural mess that didn't have a shape or a context and stood about as much chance on its own of overcoming its meagre origins as did Elvis, Bill and Scotty's acetate. But - like Greil Marcus did with other artists - Bangs gave it shape, context; consequence; significance. Writing passionately and eloquently about an inconsequential subject gave others a prism - any old prism would do - through which to relate to it. Much of what Bangs wrote was, like the What Hi-Fi review of the £60 power cable,  on its face absurd, but that really wasn't the point. Or perhaps more accurately, that was the point.

This is the point. There's a new blues revival brewing in the UK. I only found out about it by accident: searching on the wonderful Spotify for Ram Jam's sprawling seventies' bastardisation of Leadbelly's Black Betty, I came across this one, by 18 year old Norfolk guitarist Oli Brown.

Norfolk?  Don't smirk. It's no more provincial or parochial than Memphis, Tennessee was in 1953.

Brown's take on Black Betty is less gaudy, less louche; a bit more respectful than Ram Jam's, but then, there's time. Oli Brown's not old enough to have experienced a real Black Betty - bam-a-lam - so hardly surprising he doesn't sing with total conviction about her. But he does have chops, and it was enough to buy the record. There are other interesting youngsters kicking around, too: Joanna Shaw Taylor, for example, from Birmingham (in the England's Black Country, not Alabama) looks a little like a young Kate Winslet, but her demure bearing belies a muscular voice and a bitching guitar tone - it sounds like she's channeling Bonnie Raitt of the voice, and Jimmy Vaughan of the guitar. They're all on an independent blues label, Ruf, which appears to be managed from Germany.

They're all a little too in the thrall of Stevie Ray Vaughan, truth be told, but they'll grow out of that: Given the cultural wasteland wrought by Simon Cowell and his kind, this is exciting to behold: The last time there was a British Blues Invasion, the cultural world turned forever.

But they can't do it alone: they need an evangelist. That, I suppose, is our job.

My green and your green

You may recall, once upon a time, wondering whether your experience of the colours, shapes, sounds and smells of the world was the same everyone else’s. Perhaps your picture of the world was completely unique. After all, how would you ever know it wasn’t?

You could compare what you knew as “green” with a me, but that wouldn’t help: even if we agreed that, yes, that patch of grass is green – even if we were more specific: a bleached out sort of lime green, since it’d been trapped under a brick for a week – we still could not know we were having the same experience. Your green might have been different from mine: what you saw as green I might, if I saw it, see as maroon. For all I know, you may even perceive colours as smells or sounds, but so long as we couldn’t directly share each other’s sensations, we would remain none the wiser. Richard Dawkins sums it up nicely:

Perceived hues – what philosophers call qualia – have no intrinsic connection with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model of external reality, to make distinctions that are especially salient to the animal concerned.

I imagine most of us have, at one point in their lives, been through that thought process, and most resolve it in the same way. While we can’t really be sure, we just shrug our shoulders and suppose we must perceive the same things the same way – for how else could we understand each other?

A few years ago, I came across a poem by Ogden Nash – unusually for him, a serious poem, entitled Listen ...:

There is a knocking in the skull,
An endless silent shout
Of something beating on a wall,
And crying, “Let me out!”

That solitary prisoner
Will never hear reply.
No comrade in eternity
Can hear the frantic cry.

No heart can share the terror
That haunts his monstrous dark.
The light that filters through the chinks
No other eye can mark.

When flesh is linked with eager flesh,
And words run warm and full,
I think that he is loneliest then,
The captive in the skull.

Caught in a mesh of living veins,
In cell of padded bone,
He loneliest is when he pretends
That he is not alone.

We’d free the incarcerate race of man
That such a doom endures
Could only you unlock my skull,
Or I creep into yours.

To me, this poem, reflects on this very dilemma. We are social animals. We have evolved to communicate and co-operate yet, deep down, we never quite know whether experiences we take to be common really are. We never know for sure that our sentences are understood exactly the way we mean them, with every subtle and unspoken nuance conveyed. Nor do we ever know we understand, they way they’re meant to be, other people’s sentences.

We remain incarcerated in our own skulls, hoping against the doom, but never knowing, that we’re getting through.