Blues Aesthetics

Blues Aesthetics (Volume 3) examines Blues as an Aesthetic musical art that operates with a philosophical base rooted in the cultural forms that have developed over the centuries of African progression and transplantation to the United States during the Middle Passage. Blues Aesthetics is a construct developed out of a desire to offer Blues on the same level playing field reserved for other musical forms from other traditions.

Using European Classical Music as an example, it is assumed that this form emanates out of the European fine art tradition. That is why it has been given the name “Classical Music”. This name automatically gives one the idea the music requires the listener to be prepared to create a mode of understanding where full attention is given. I have never heard anyone state that this music does not belong to or come from Europe.

When I decided that I would treat blues as the metaphor for the study of the development and advancement of Black Popular Culture in particular and the culture of the United States in general, I wanted to have a sound basis in which to place my analysis. With blues one cannot go wrong. Why? It has chronicled the political economy of the United States of American since slavery. The analytic tool that has been used to inform this process is the Law of Position, a Position Theory. The Law of Position, a Position Theory is a paradigm that has as its basic premise, “we take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and that in order to make an indication we must make a distinction. We take therefore the form of distinction for the form.” (G. Spencer-Brown)