Boogie Man (63 page)

The process of Hookerization – a central facet and primary tool of Hooker’s creative method, a form of ‘organic sampling’ by which Hooker annexes, adapts, customises and
ultimately transforms devices
and motifs derived from traditional and contemporary material from both within and without the blues canon – is simultaneously ancient and
modern, African and European. It is as old as the folk process itself: which is to say that it is a fundamental of human communication, older than either language or music. And in contemporary
incarnations like sampling or postmodernist intertextuality, that same process is at the very heart of millennial art, wherein the century is, so to speak, tipped on its side, and all of the
cultural debris of the twentieth century tumbles from its original context to roll up against the millennial barrier in new and startling juxtapositions amongst which we can wander, scavenge and
rearrange.

The folk process, the mechanisms of which are deeply embedded in human consciousness, traditionally worked with the materials in the immediate vicinity of an individual or community: the tales
and songs of a specific place and time, cross-fertilized with those introduced by travellers passing through. The mobile arts – first printed, then electric, currently digital – have
broadened that catchment area to take in all of known space and time. As a species, we’re doing what we’ve always done, except that – in the late twentieth century –
we’re doing it with samplers and computers rather than simply with memory and flesh. Learn a song, rearrange it for your own instrument, write some new words about something that happened
round the corner, play it to your friends and neighbours. Download an image or a chunk of text, mess with it, upload it again. It’s all the same stuff. It’s all
‘Hookerization’.

Bearing Hooker’s background in mind, it should therefore not be particularly surprising that first-stage Hookerization would bear as strong a resemblance as it does to the way a preacher
works with a biblical text. Leaving aside – for the moment only – the outright plagiarism of Percy Mayfield’s ‘Memory Pain’ (the latter aka ‘It Serves Me Right
To Suffer’ in the Hooker canon), we find exercises like ‘I Cover The Waterfront’, ‘Frisco Blues’ (derived from ‘I Left My Heart
In San
Francisco’), ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch And One Beer’ (derived from Amos Milburn’s ‘One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer’) or ‘Messin’ With The
Hook’ (a Hookerization of Junior Wells’ ‘Messin’ With The Kid’, itself also transformed by the highly unkiddish Muddy Waters into ‘Messin’ With The
Man’). In all of these Hooker uses bits of the original piece – a chorus, a lyrical fragment, an opening couplet or even simply a title – as ‘text’ and then moves on
to ‘preach’ his own ‘sermon’. And it is his own: Hooker’s ‘One Bourbon’ is no more Amos Milburn’s than, in a vastly different context, Kathy
Acker’s
Great Expectations
is Charles Dickens’s. No one would call a preacher a plagiarist because the springboard for his sermon is a chunk of the Bible: it is understood both
that a preacher is supposed to quote the Bible, and also that the most fundamental essence of the preacherly art lies in the preacher’s ability to create an original, affecting and relevant
sermon around the theme of the biblical extract he has chosen.

Similarly, if we look at the origins of bebop, we find that the ‘head’ of a tune – its principal melodic motif – also serves as the pegs on which to hang the
improvisations which are the real meat in the musical sandwich. Way back at the music’s primal roots – the marathon ’40s jam sessions at Teddy Minton’s club in Harlem during
which Charlie Christian, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and others hewed the basic tenets of the form from the living rockface of earlier musics – the musicians often deliberately chose to
deploy quite banal 32-bar pop tunes (‘Tea For Two’, ‘I Got Rhythm’ and the like) alongside blues themes as springboards for their improvs. Or – to be more precise
– as scaffolding for their constructions. The original melody or chord sequence is of little or no intrinsic value or importance: it’s simply there to facilitate the creation of the
final artefact, and once that ‘building’ has been completed, the scaffolding becomes utterly superfluous. Despite the similarity of method, this is conceptually a very different vessel
of seafood from the aural firestorms into which John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix transformed, respectively, Rodgers &
Hammerstein’s ‘My Favourite Things’
and Frances Scott Keyes’ ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, wherein recognition and familiarity with not only the original melody, but the context in which it first appeared and the
emotional and cultural luggage it carries, are an intrinsic and essential part of the experience which the performers are attempting to deliver.

Whilst the original tunes unquestionably ‘belong’ to their original composers, the final results are the exclusive property of Coltrane and Hendrix. Nevertheless, while it’s
certainly possible for a listener unfamiliar with the original melodies to enjoy the performances and even to be ‘reached’ and transported by the sheer emotional power and musical
prowess displayed by Jimi and Trane, the full impact and resonance of the finished work are lost on anyone who doesn’t know the tune, or who lacks a highly specific awareness both of the
significance of the ‘original’ (a cute song about furry animals, snowballs
et al,
or the American national anthem) and the distance which the improviser has travelled from the
tune’s point of origin – or rather, the distance which the improviser has forcibly dragged the tune and, by extension, the listener.

In other words: the listener is required to bring something of his or her own to the party. You’re
supposed
to know the tune. If you don’t, you’re welcome to gatecrash,
but please be aware that you weren’t actually invited. Most modern listeners, for example, aren’t ‘invited’ to Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony
: its ominous four-note
intro motif is one of the most famous and instantly recognizable licks in European concert music, but it wasn’t original to Beethoven, and would have not been perceived as such by hipper
nineteenth-century listeners. The iconic
ta-ta-ta-tummmmm
was one of a group of themes ‘sampled’ by ‘lovely lovely Ludwig Van’ (as Anthony Burgess so affectionately
nicknamed him in
A Clockwork Orange
) from the works of a group of revolutionary French composers, including Rouget de Lisle, who wrote ‘The Marseillaise’. Beethoven’s
allusions to their work were
designed to be decoded by the cognoscenti as specific, but nevertheless ultimately deniable, indications of potentially incriminating revolutionary
sympathies.
¹²⁷

In the world of hip-hop, so despised by those members of the blues community – including Hooker himself – we once again find the old pressed into service as an essential ingredient
in the process of the creation of the new. Sly & the Family Stone’s ‘Everyday People’ becomes the core of Arrested Development’s ‘People Everyday’. The
Detroit Spinners’ ‘It’s A Shame’ signposts Monie Love’s ‘Mi Sista’. The Gap Band’s ‘Ooops Upside Your Head’ – the spontaneously
adapted source of any number of English football chants – does double duty as the foundation stone of Snoop Doggy Dogg’s ‘Snoop’s Upside Your Head’. Buffalo
Springfield’s summer-of-love protest anthem ‘For What It’s Worth’ rises from the tomb as Public Enemy’s ‘He’s Got Game’. It was inevitable that some
form of legal framework for dealing with this stuff would ultimately have to be developed, if only to accommodate hip-hoppers’ wholesale pillaging of the works of James Brown and George
Clinton. Only a Polygram lawyer could tell us how many records have shoplifted Brown’s legendary ‘Funky Drummer’ break (played by the Great Clyde Stubblefield), and during a few
lean years in his four-decade career, Clinton’s principal income was derived from sampling royalties.

Even in rock and roll, where ‘originality’ is more highly prized and copyrights more valuable, the same pick-it-up-and-kick-it principle applies. The Beach Boys’ first big hit,
‘Surfin’ USA’, was built on the chassis of Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ (signature guitar licks and all) to the extent that Berry ended up sharing the
songwriting credit and royalties with Brian Wilson, ‘Surfin’ USA’’s ‘actual’ composer. The Sex Pistols’ ‘Holidays In The Sun’ replays the
principal riff of the
Jam’s ‘In The City’. And Noel Gallagher, mastermind-in-residence of that truly postmodern band Oasis, publicly and repeatedly boasts of
the riffs and techniques he’s lifted from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Mott the Hoople, David Bowie and countless others. We are, he tells us,
supposed
to spot them. Our appreciation of
West Side Story
is diminished if we don’t know that it’s
Romeo And Juliet
; of
Forbidden Planet
if we’re unaware that it’s
The Tempest
; of
Kurosawa’s
Ran
if we can’t connect it to
King Lear.
By the same token, in Tim Burton’s
Batman Returns
, we’re
supposed
to notice when he riffs on
the celebrated opening shot of Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane
. If we don’t, we’re excluded from part of the fun. And, if we have no idea of whence the artist started out, how
are we supposed to recognise how far (s)he’s come?

Quote, sample, allusion,
homage
. When you get down to it, it’s all the same game: that of making art out of other art, and out of whatever we happen to find around us. Thus entire
bodies of literature – ranging from Dumas to Conan Doyle to E.R. Doctorow – wherein historical characters mingle freely with the author’s own creations; and other bodies still
where these ‘real’ but reinvented people meet not only the creations of the presiding author but those of earlier authors. J.G. Ballard’s epochal coining of the term ‘media
landscape’ provides us with a vital clue: the traditional notion of a landscape is something which is simply
there
, and the artist’s job is, equally simply, to depict it. Our
contemporary landscape is
constructed
, and any reflection or depiction of it, or even passage through it, thereby forces us to engage with things which have been constructed, previously, by
others; and with the notions embedded, overtly or covertly, within those constructions. And thus Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup-can – regarded at the time by traditionalist
critics and commentators as the absolute epitome of charlatanry – becomes a still life for the industrial era, the age of mass-production. The fact that Warhol mass-produced the work itself
is both a logical completion of the process and a simultaneous comment upon it.

In quick succession, then: a brace of caveats, an analogy and a conclusion. Firstly, though it would be tempting to indulge in an act of critical mischief and declare Hooker
to be a premature and instinctive (if unwitting) postmodernist, there are more ramifications to postmodernist theory, in its formal academic applications, than the loose, pop-culch journalistic
sense in which it is used here.
¹²⁸
And secondly, Hooker has no more moved into its sphere than he has moved into anything else: rather, it is a matter of
the shared influence of common roots between this most complex and arcane body of theory and the instinctive process by which we navigate through our culture.

One small example: when a liner-note writer described Hooker as ‘a guitarist with fine jazz qualities’
¹²⁹
and other major jazz critics
concurred, Bernard Besman was appalled. ‘Leonard Feather considers him a jazz musician and wrote several articles,’ he snorted. ‘I don’t know where jazz comes in. People who
play bebop are skilled, very good, trained musicians. They have to read the music . . . here you take Hooker, who can’t read a goddam note, plays “zap” and doesn’t imitate
anybody. Sonny Stitt, who I loved, now there was a real schooled musician.’ As ever, Besman is simultaneously right and wrong: ‘right’ in that Hooker is certainly not a jazz
musician in any strict formal sense, but ‘wrong’ in that after the complexities of bebop attained critical mass, many ‘skilled, very good, trained’ jazz musicians, in the
wake of Miles Davis’s epochal performance of ‘Walkin’’ at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, discarded the constrictions imposed by those complexities and set off in search of
the free-blowing space they found in the simpler and more open structures of blues and gospel themes. These explorations led populists towards ‘soul jazz’, and intellectuals towards
what later became known as ‘free’ (unstructured) jazz; both
fields capable of learning from what an artist like Hooker had known and practised all along. Thus the
circle closed: the beboppers had to absorb all the theory there was before they could get to that space where they could afford to dump it.

Similarly, postmodernism in its ‘pop’ sense refers primarily to ‘intertextuality’, a term coined by Julia Kristeva to assert that no ‘text’ – be it a
song, a movie, a book, a painting, an advertisement, whatever – is a closed universe existing in a vacuum. The way in which it is constructed, perceived and interpreted depends on what is
already known. Popular culture in general is instinctively intertextual, and nowhere more so than in popular music; in popular music nowhere more so than in the blues; and in the blues nowhere more
so than in the music of John Lee Hooker. The bottom line is this:

Where ‘intertextuality’ and the folk process meet: in the assumption of a mutual familiarity with a shared body of culture and experience which can be freely
referred to and drawn upon. Where they part company: with the notion of distance, detachment and irony implicit in all postmodern phenomena. With the folk process in general, and in Hooker’s
work in particular, nothing is in italics. Neither artist nor audience are insulated or detached, from themselves or each other, by protective layers of quotes. Everything is ‘meant’,
and no built-in escape-hatch is provided. You either deal, or you leave.