Crossroads: A Celebration of Humanity
An Eclectic, Unbound Music Newsletter/Essay-series
Substack was originally intended for newsletters.
I came on here to write essays. And I will keep doing that. If you came for the essays and articles on history and religion, do not worry, history and religion is my lifeblood, and those essays and articles are not going anywhere. However, in a less literal way, music has been my lifeblood too. And as such, I am going to try simply putting together little “newsletters” every now and then, covering musical artists of different kinds, recently published, or published 100 years ago, that I just happen to enjoy. This is a less “academic”, less formal series, but most likely, a bit of history and religion may sneak into these too. My hope is that this series can serve as a crossroad of very different kinds of music, and that this crossroad can serve a twofold purpose: You get a chance to hear about very different artists you may not have encountered before (I have very eclectic taste), and I get to talk about music I like and write some less academic musings.
So, welcome to the first issue of Crossroads!
Genres are a funny thing. For some people, the kind of musical genre(s) they enjoy the most form a large part of their identity. That used to be me as well! There was a time when I refused to listen to anything but ‘metal’ (which I had my own, strange definition of - I still vividly remember ‘offending’ two of my teachers by calling Deep Purple “pop” when I was 12), and as I started learning to play music, I later became highly snobby about blues and classic rock (Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and so on). That time is a faint memory in the fall breeze by now, but I still remember the uncanny feeling of commitment to one genre, and the strange self-imposed aversion to any other genres, even if you knew deep in your soul that you loved Nickelback’s ‘Rockstar’ when it came out.
This way of imposing limitations and indulgences upon ourselves because of our self-understanding - as in, what we decided our selves are - is probably very human. It is probably also, and I may be wrong here, accentuated particularly in the teenage-years? At least, as I left those years behind me and matured (very slowly), I could suddenly listen to “Waterfalls” by TLC, or “Mandy” by Barry Manilow, without this weird anxious feeling telling me I was for some reason “betraying my own self” - a strange kind of existential anxiety that seems to haunt humans in most things they do.
As Plotinus reminded us approximately 1750 years ago: We have a tendency to mistake our ego for our soul; Our, other’s, or our ideas of other’s experience of our self (or identity) with our true self (soul). In my estimation, the ego is best negated with internal silence, and the magic of music that speaks to our soul is its ability to, ironically, provoke a deep silence in our otherwise busy minds, allowing us in fleeting moments to live in the moment, unburdened by the unending thought streams and anxieties of ego.
So, this newsletter-essay exists to get some potentially soul-soothing tunes out there! In this series I will with each issue give a brief list of music recommendations, typically it will be a single song with a tiny bit of background on the artist, and typically as varied in genres and years of publishing as the religious and historic texts I deal with in the more academic sections of the blog, ranging from newly published music to songs and albums considered classics. Sometimes, recommendations will be followed by some piece of history, religion, or some other reflection, other times it will simply be given cause it’s hella funky. Now, without further ado…
Robert Johnson: Sweet Home Chicago
The name of this newsletter is very incidental with regards to its first point, as Robert Johnson was the creator (as far as we know) of the Crossroad Blues, a song, as well as a legend, in guitar-pickin’ circles around the world. According to this legend, Robert was an up-and-coming musician, traveling the Mississippi Delta, but also playing bars and establishments as far away as Chicago, Houston, or New York. While Johnson’s life is extremely poorly documented and still immersed in mystery, his recordings in 1936 and 37 became landmarks of blues music, and Johnson would inspire countless musicians, forgettable and unforgettable, from Chuck Berry through Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, the list goes on.
The legend goes that as a young man living on a Mississippi plantation, Johnson dreamt of becoming a skilled guitar player. He was told to bring his guitar out to a crossroad, today referred to as ‘the Crossroads’, though there are a few different theories about which exact crossroads he supposedly went to. But what is certain according to Legend is that Johnson met the a tall, dark stranger at this crossroads, in the middle of the night. The stranger turned out to be the Devil, and he tuned Johnson’s guitar, picked a few tunes on it, and handed it back to him. When Johnson returned from the crossroads, he returned as a master guitar-picker.
Now, this story has many parallels in much older literature about demons and devils, and whether this story in this Mississippi Delta-context was even about Robert Johnson to begin with seems debatable, as it may have been about Tommy Johnson, a completely different and unrelated man.
Johnson played many songs that have become famous, “Crossroad” is about the very event described above, for example. “Sweet Home Chicago” is in fact a relatively well-known blues-classic, particularly because of the Blues Brothers rendition of the song, yet Johnson was the first to record this song, in 1936, and personally, I think his version is still the best 88 years later.
Tinariwen is a group of Tuareg musicians, hailing from the Saharan areas in Mali and Algeria. The name is Tamasheq, meaning something like ‘deserts, empty places’. The founder of the group, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, is the man with the gorgeous Danelectro (guitar) in the middle of the above image.
Alhabib saw his father killed during the Mali uprising in 1962-64, a Tuareg uprising that happened following independence from France in 1960, which was stomped into the ground with the assistance of Algeria, Morocco, and the Soviet Union. Inspired by a Western movie, Alhabib built a guitar from a plastic water can, a stick, and some fishing wire, and began playing guitar. In 1979, he founded Tinariwen, and the band has been active to this day, publishing 9 albums so far and winning a respectable amount of awards, including several Grammies.
The genre Tinariwen occupies is often called “Desert Blues”, mixing elements of traditional Tuareg and Saharan music with Western blues and rock (Alhabib having mentioned particularly Dire Straits, Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix and such). The band’s career from the 70ies until the early 90ies has in many ways blended the absolutely typical experience of a band working its way up, playing weddings and other such gigs for minimal pay, while also being a band of semi-nomadic political rebels.
Several band members received military training from Muammar al-Gaddafi’s new revolutionary regime in Libya, shortly after his revolution in 1969. However during their training, they connected with other Tuareg musicians, and created a makeshift studio in the desert, making music about the lives and conditions of the Tuareg for anyone who could supply them with a cassette tape to record on. Several band members were directly involved in insurgencies against the sitting government in Mali after that, too. Only after 1991, the band fully dedicated itself to music. After the 90ies, and particularly since 2010, the band has increasingly gained international recognition.
I could have recommended several songs or albums, and really, Tinariwen’s music is fantastic. But I chose the album Emmar, as the song Toumast Tincha, which appears on here, is my absolute favorite with this band.
The Tallest Man on Earth: Love Is All
For our last recommendation today, I present to you Kristian Mattson, or The Tallest Man on Earth, as he goes by as an artist. Mattson is Swedish, more specifically from the village of Leksand, in the province of Dalarna (“the valleys”), deep in the pine-clad heart of Sweden. He began his solo-career in 2006, and has at no point in his life been a Tuareg rebel nor a travelling Delta-blues legend. However, his music speaks as much to the soul as the former two.
Mattson is often compared to Bob Dylan, and certainly, if you heard him and then listened to Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Letter”, the point of comparison is clear. However, where Dylan was often under-played, Matton’s sounds and compositions lean strongly into both melancholy and beauty in a way more reminiscent of the lofty grandiosity of 80ies glam-ballads than 60ies folk music. In the end of The Wild Hunt, his first album from 2010, he even has a few ethereal, lonely piano songs (Of which “Kids on the Run” is one of the most gorgeous songs I heard in my life).
Listening to Mattson’s music, for me personally, takes me back to the deep forests I grew up in. The smells of decomposing leaves, damp moss, pine wood, the sound of wind grazing the tree crowns above, of a small creek snaking its way across the forest floor, the mosquitoes dancing in the chilly evening air, a sun setting over a lake wrapped in trees. And at the same time that it may bring you to a very specific place, the melancholic etherealness of his songs takes one outside of time. A lot of Matton’s songs almost seem like reminders of how small we all are, how everything that has a beginning will naturally have an end.
Yet even though life is made up of a seemingly eternal flow of beginnings and ends, and even though the realization itself may indeed incur a sense of melancholy, that melancholy, the melancholy of being, is at the same time a beautiful reminder that in the exact episode of transitory evanescence we have been witnessing, more or less consciously, since our birth, we are, ultimately, the catalysts and agents of our experiences and actions. This sensation, of feeling small, in such an enormous way, is a silencing revelation, indeed.
Thank you for reading! If you liked this one, you may also like this essay on early hip-hop and the definition of “Religion” I wrote a while back - stay tuned!