Blues. Mose Allison. 1957. Prestige.

 Well before cool became the much coveted, and universally recognized, style signifying teenage alienation, sociopathy, and pretense, it was a coping attitude adopted by individuals who were forced to bear the brunt of irony’s cruelest truths. Cool is the immeasurable distance an individual puts between himself and his interior life to mask the true temperature of his intelligence. Mose Allison, a white pianist marketed to American blues and jazz audiences from the mid-fifties onwards, endured more than his share of irony throughout his career, and projected so much cool that the Who made his best composition world famous and the Clash scratched his name onto the Sandinista! lyric sheet. The irony of two of England’s most powerful exponents of hard rock separating themselves temporarily from the root of their crafts to lend their singular sense of urgency to this country’s most polished purveyor of cool is only one example of how irony’s slow drip found its way into pop marketability. Rock and roll is the post-atomic age origin of American energy that, along with the roar of nuclear fission, burns off nuance and subtlety, those niggling qualities of mind that stymy impulse. The intensity of focus that Allison masks with the camouflage of cool gives Blues a modern cogency that touches our contemporary taste for multiplicities of genre: blues, jazz, pop, all held together with a tension we still recognize as our own, and that ultimately may be all that remains of rock and roll’s brief residency among us. A hint of southern gothic prophecy, of religious terror, escapes Allison’s performance, the key to its compelling magnetism. Blues is both warmth and warning, the democratic, hopeful voice of an intelligence who could see well beyond the limitations of the pop market but could not stop himself from laughing into its face along his way. His laughter will still be heard years from now in the privately curated playlists of the refugee children of future wars, creators of the coming rock and roll.

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