Come On In My Kitchen. Robert Johnson. 1961. Columbia.

Writing about Walter Benjamin in 1978, Susan Sontag describes the great German essayist as “a collector, weighed down by things; that is, passions.” Expanding upon his interests, she notes his fondness for the miniature; “To miniaturize is to make portable—the ideal form for the wanderer, or a refugee.” In this same way, we come to understand the obsessions of the 21st century’s vinyl fetishists, those happy collectors whose unstated aim is to collect the world by owning its immense and varied songbook. Taking possession of the world in this way—from the seat of the imagination, powerlessly, without danger of causing anyone any harm—is to understand the broad contours of human behavior by arranging our verisimilitudes within intelligible formats; playlists. Whether by the LP deep cut, the 45 single, or the densely compressed MP3 file, putting world history into your pocket and carrying it with you to the beach to celebrate it, or making a Kabbalah of it with your friends, procuring evidence of one’s place in the world is a human right that extends, in this country, as far back as the words, “the pursuit of happiness.” Thomas Jefferson’s creative delirium, still loaded with contradiction, has lost its power to shock our 21st century sensibilities, yet it’s still possible to recognize humanity in his historical self-aggrandizement, something akin to the Jagger and Richards of Brown Sugar or Robert Johnson’s stark vision of female inequality and suffering, Come On In My Kitchen. In a sequence from Nicholas Roeg’s Performance, his 1970 film about the malleability of identity, Mick Jagger’s character Turner strums an acoustic guitar, singing a verse from Johnson’s 1937 record. It’s an acutely ironic performance, highlighting Jagger’s sexy narcissism, and urging us into its allure, where perspective is brilliantly, artistically, manipulated to convince his listenership that we are an integral part of that allure. Johnson does something else entirely; he performs from inside of another’s loneliness, and, projecting sympathy, he anticipates, with extraordinary vision, the democratic, commercial value of human empathy. According to blues artist Johnny Shines, who often saw Johnson perform, once in St Louis, a Johnson performance of Come On In My Kitchen reduced an adult audience of both sexes to tears. It’s no small significance that Johnson probably had more in common with Gustav Mahler than he did with anyone living today; that is, his artistic sensibilities were trained more on live performance than on the recorded, disposable product. That quality of disposability, which the modern imagination equates with orgasm and drug use, death and democratic ideals, haunts the best rock and roll, allows it to advertise its self imposed, and altogether unrealistic, proximity to the apocalypse with uncensored exhilaration. If Thomas Jefferson could perform a mythological trick with justice, reducing it to an accessible totem both within and without everyone’s grasp, our musical heroes perform a similar magic; rock and roll amplifies, with powerhouse distortion, the democratic kernel at play within its sensual, cultural experience until it and the erotic impulse behind all of popular art are blurred into a sprawling mass of poetic free expression whose origins can be found with a 

restless Mississippian, partner to the woman who “gets in trouble…everybody throws her down…looking for her good friend…none can be found.” Born within a native tradition of casual violence that extends back to, and beyond, Sally Hemings, the rock and roll experience is freighted with sympathy, a spirit of conscience that our intelligence—always skeptical, always critical—thirsts for if it isn’t to atrophy into a pulsing data processor for sadists and goon squads. The shadow of authoritarianism respirates on this sallow inhumanity.