Monthly Archives: December 2015

One of the longest lasting, most impactful and boasting the widest scope of all music genres has been the blues. Originally hailing from small, southern African American communities in the late 19^th century, the blues has since spread to all corners of the world and has become one of the best examples of American culture being exported across the globe (Bloomingdale School of Music). The blues was created from the bonds of slavery, mixing spirituals, field songs, shouts and personal stories to create the classic narrative style, beat driven and rhythmic form known today (Bloomingdale School of Music). But how did 19^th century folk survive and continue to thrive 150 years later? It did so by transforming itself for the modern age by combining with the styles of rock and roll thus creating blues rock (Bloomingdale School of Music). Exploding in popularity in the 1950’s and 60’s, the music movement was spearheaded in England and made popular by the likes of Jimmie Hendrix and The Rolling Stones. Today, blues rock has evolved and continues to thrive in the form of dozens of high profile musicians and bands as well as thousands of local groups across the country.

Blues rock is made of a fairly simple structure; it can even be completed by just one man maintaining a steady beat or by a few inspiring music enthusiasts in a garage, which many advocate is a major draw to its popularity. The blues consists of, for the most part, of a narrative style vocal part, often focus on a depressing event, misfortune or a broken heart. The guitar is crucial and extremely important; it is steady, strong, rhythmic and can be played either acoustically or electronically. Electric bass and drums, while not required, often share these traits. Instruments of all types can be played in the background or even as the center piece, such as the harmonica, various string instruments and piano (Little Bill and the Blue Notes). Recently, blues rock has seen the integration of computer synth into its music (Auerbach).

These traits and even the most traditional style and elements of blues can still be seen today in the work of the contemporary artist Gary Clark Jr.; most notable in his song “When My Train Pulls In”. It’s an original piece, but would not in the slightest sound out of place in blues rock’s heyday. From its long guitar solos, distortion and narrative, the song could easily be a cover of Jimmie Hendrix. Listening to the lyrics: “Everyday nothing seems to change. Everywhere I go I keep seeing the same old thing and I can’t take it no more.” (Clarke). Shows that same emotional styles that connects it to the legends of the past is still popular and can be replicated today. Gary Clark Jr. has several songs in the same throwback style and has experienced great acclaim for it, proving the genre’s longevity and appeal across time.

This extreme appeal across time and distance is enough to warrant its own closer examination, what makes the blues rock of the 50’s-70’s the go to ‘classic rock?’ What about this style makes it endure up to 60 years into the future? For many there is certainly a sense of nostalgia and quite a bit of generational bias for many which can certainly be passed from generation to generation. But there is certain timelessness in that period of music that will never be forgotten and it will continue to be emulated by future generations as time carries on. The blues rock of that era in my own opinion is the golden standard because it dictated specifically the style of blues rock; the heavy guitar, the melancholy and repetitive vocals and a strong continuous rhythm. This throwback style illustrated by Gary Clark Jr. is so successful because it plays to that nostalgia and also is simply barebones blues rock which will always be remembered as the standard for the genre.

Blues rock however does not always need to conform to the old style. As said above, blues rock has been rapidly experimented with in the past few years and has achieved great success with the album Turn Blue by The Black Keys released just last year (Fricke). In this album The Black Keys, an already extremely acclaimed blues/garage rock band, experimented with mixing psychedelic beats, hip hop elements and The Black Keys signature blues sound (Fricke) to create an extremely unique set of music still grounded in its genre. It remains in the genre despite adding in many new features into a fairly rigid type of music because the added features are just that, features. The core of the song is still the rhythm and the story being told, just like the blues of the early 20^th century. The song “Weight of Love” I feel really excels at keeping the classic bluesy guitar riffs and emotional vocals while mixing with a psychedelic flow in the background creating something truly unique. “Weight of Love” and the rest of the Turn Blue album really shows how adaptable the blues can be pressing forward into the modern era and that the genre has a secure future.

However the real popularity of the blues is that it can be created by anyone; remember, that the genre only even came about because of slavery, created by people who had literally nothing but a story and the rhythm to tell it with. This is still true today, thousands of people in ‘garage rock’ bands write, play, cover and perform the blues all across the country, using the same style and instruments as the legends of the genre and famous contemporary artists above. One such example is the small garage band “The Dead Tapes” recently experienced massive fame over the internet, achieving nearly half a million views on their homemade video “Where Did She Go”, a feat many contracted bands cannot boast. The band consists of two friends, a guitar, a drum set, a megaphone, a metal rod and some duct tape in their backyard, it doesn’t get much bluesier then that (Leon). Their performance even attracted the attention of professional music critics, hailing their work as “genuine in a way that attracted me along with 467,843 other viewers” (Leon). While obviously taking influence from the famous guitarist Jack White, their spin on the style has not only led to online fame but to an actual record deal (Leon). Once again showing the longevity and popularity of the genre.

As one can easily see, the blues, despite being around for over a century, is not going away anytime soon thanks to its continued and prominent role in American and world culture. The classics of the genre remain incredibly popular across the world, contemporary artists regularly replicate this style and continue to change its form through their own individual styles and ideas and the younger generation obviously has interest in it and continues to produce their own homegrown blues across the country.

As the most physically, mentally and emotional semester of my life comes to a close, it is important to look back at what I did in this class, just as it was important to look ahead at what my goals were in the beginning of the semester. In my ERH 101 class, it was assigned for us to keep and maintain an online blog where we would post all of our papers and reflective essays. Among which was a ‘writer’s development plan’ in which we outlined what we wanted all of which we wanted to improve upon as writers, where I listed some of the things I sought to improve on as a writer. The largest items on my list of improvements were grammar and my ability to efficiently find a method to answer a prompt and in correcting these issues I found others with my writing process that also need to be worked out in later semesters.

Beginning with grammar, I felt like I really have not improved much; however, that was not one of the main goals of the class and was something easily corrected after having a draft reviewed. In fact I think it was even a good thing, in high school grammar seemed like the end all be all of many essays and was often a major component of my grade for an assignment, I was essentially conditioned to believe it was THAT important of a thing that I had to make special note of it. Coming out of my semester, I realize now that grammar is really just a part of cleaning up a draft and be constantly changing as you write. While it is good to know it is something that can be solved by taking your paper to be checked and not be beaten into you class after class. Regardless, grammar is still something I hope to continue to improve on and not rely so much on others to assist me with.

The other primary issue I wrote about, being able to quickly and efficiently make my point, answer a prompt and finish a draft on the other hand is actually an extremely important skill to have, especially as a rat at VMI. In this regard I feel I have improved drastically since high school. This change can be seen from my reflective essays, I never stated that picking my topic was challenging or that actually sitting down and writing out the prompt was the most challenging part of any essay; in fact, one of the most common sentences in my reflections was “The easiest part by far was picking the topic…” Part of this is due to the nature of the ratline of course, never before have I been so pressed for time that I had to get words on paper in a matter of less than an hour and move on to the next assignment, as well as not having the luxury of thinking about essay prompts in my head throughout the day, as well as the nature of the course itself whose rubrics did not restrict our writing as much as High School’s. What really got me out of the rut however was drafting, I used to view drafts as simple busy work and I would often not do them, opting instead to dive right into an essay with everything thought out (often the night before) and be fine. With drafting however, I have a means by which I can hustle my ideas done, add things later, get it looked at and be overall happier with what I hand in because I know it isn’t just the first thing to come to mind; every line has been worked on, thought out and rethought out. I have reorganized whole essays before, noted especially in my discourse community reflection where I stated: “Essentially I had to completely rethink halfway through the writing process how to do this paper…” which allowed me to improve my grade and my confidence in the paper tremendously. Drafting is by far the most major positive change in my writing style and I will no doubt continue it through my cadetship.

As an overall writer I feel I improved, though not exceptionally, but I am happy with how my writing as progressed and adapted under these extreme circumstances. As said above, drafting is my biggest take away from this semester, however I have also started using many prewriting techniques like free writing or making paragraph points for more research orientated essays. I still have much to improve on and there are things I wished I was better at, primarily sourcing. Being at VMI where keeping proper sourcing is crucial, being able to readily find and use quotes and information from outside sources is something I need to master. This can be seen in both the essays where outside sources had to be used (the genre discussion essay and the discourse community essay). I also struggled heavily with time management and had to finish those last few edits a little too close to the time the assignment was due; however, this is primarily due to the ratline and will hopefully not continue as my cadetship goes on. Finally I need to learn how to change my tone when writing. When I reread my assignments I found that I often wrote in my own voice and never actually changed from essay to essay, even from works like the initial more creative piece portrait of a writer to the analytical discourse community essay. I also find it when rereading my research papers from my other classes as well. Being able to change up my writing style and still making it sound natural is a skill I will have to improve upon especially in other classes and write more essays with more varying standards.

All in all I feel I benefitted from ERH 101, I feel that more time could have been spent teaching more research orientated topics, as many of us in the class are humanities students and as such will be writing essays of that type far more then creative pieces or self evaluations. Also all the essays were around a thousand words and did not vary much in terms of overall form and style. I feel I would have benefitted a lot from different styles and lengths of essays even if it meant having two or three more thrown in with the larger ones. On the other hand, the temporally escape of just being able to write during the various stresses of the ratline was a godsend early on. I did not however plan to become a perfect writer this semester, only to improve, so in that regard I am content with how my writing has progressed.

For this assignment, we were instructed to write to an audience unfamiliar with whatever topic we were writing about. This put tremendous pressure on picking a genre that I was well versed in so I decided on some sort of music given my interest and familiarity with the genres and decided on doing blues rock as it presented a music type I was both familiar with and consistent enough to allow me to explain it concisely; this combination was very much opposed to my original plan to write about indie rock, my personal favorite genre, but is all over the place style and form wise. The writing skills felt fairly basic, simply connecting my points with the overarching theme, being the genre conventions of blues rock, and then connecting the points together. It was however a challenging thinking exercise. As said above, I picked a topic I was very familiar with which in the end hurt me because I needed to work in citations after the fact, causing very heavy revisions later. An important note I made for future research projects was to get my sources BEFORE writing and build my paper around them, not the sources around my paper. I relied too heavily on my own knowledge and ended up hurting the quality of my writing. This can be seen throughout the paper, mainly around the in-text citations, where I felt they seemed choppy and almost off-putting. Limited time was also a heavy influence on this paper and was definitely a lesson in proper time management. To accommodate this issue simply involves handling my other work and focusing solely on the task at hand when writing.

For this assignment we were tasked with picking a discourse group, a micro-culture based around individuals with similar hobbies, abilities, interests and the like, and describe why they were a discourse group using Swale’s six defining characteristics of an interest group as a guide. I picked long distance running as mine, given that I’ve ran and loved running for going on 7 years now and have been on a team for a similar amount of time, I felt I was more than comfortable in explaining the means runners communicate, our vocabulary, or lexis, and the other key parts of what makes running its own little culture. Describing running, as apparent from above, was pretty easy and I had no problem completing the assignment block by block. It was until I realized that I lacked a central theme and that I was really only answering questions, or filling in blanks described by the rubric and not really writing anything of value at all. Essentially I had to completely rethink halfway through the writing process how to do this paper. Originally the paper was described as something I could complete, as said above, block by block; rather it was the opposite, I had to think of the paper as cohesive, fluid unit and not just pieces to be put together. So I built around the theme of cross country being quite low on the totem pole of interscholastic sports when compared to sports like football or baseball. From there, the paper meshed much better and I had a common theme to base the sections around, making my conclusion feeling much less tacked on at the end. I took away from this assignment the importance of always having theme or reason to write and not just throwing sections together and calling something done.

This first essay is a creative writing piece detailing a particular experience I’ve had with writing; more specifically, my response to the letters I had received during hell week and how each one varied wildly in its details, description of events and overall tone. The easiest part by far was picking the topic; this experience popped into my mind as soon as the project was assigned. However, I sat for a long while debating what the overarching thesis for this paper was going to be. In fact, I only completed the last three paragraphs, arguably the most important as they tie together the paper, the morning of the first draft’s due date and included an entire extra paragraph that was cut out completely. I also struggled a lot with overfilling my sentences, some of which upon rereading I still notice, where I go on with comma after comma describing something. Which brings me to my biggest issue in editing. After having my paper reviewed it was suggested and I agreed to have four separate paragraphs for each of the letters in place of the two I had originally. This created an extremely daunting task of changing, copy and pasting, adding and rewording sentences all over the paper. This created what I felt was a lack of cohesion in the paper as a whole and even more typos as I attempted to fix them, a terrible butterfly effect. All in all, I’m happy with the outcome of the paper, but need to manage my time better in order to allow better editing and review.