BLUE - Manchester

23/11/2022

KYŌGEN live at FAC251 9/11/22

📸

21/11/2022

KYŌGEN X LUST FOR YOUTH

FAC251 9/11/22

📸

04/10/2022

GANGSTA BITCH MUSIC, VOL.1 - CARDI B (2016)

Her first full-length release, Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol.1 is one of two mixtapes released by Cardi B, off the back of her two-season stint on US reality TV show Love & Hip Hop: New York.

Her music has been criticised by singer CeeLo Green as “salacious gesturing” aimed at getting ahead in the rap industry. Fox’s Tucker Carlson worries about her effect on our “young American girls” (“we’re not being prudish here, this is not James Brown being s*xually suggestive onstage”) and slammed Joe Biden for agreeing to interview her. Former Republican Congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine tweeted that Cardi B and Meghan Thee Stallion were “completely wrong” if they thought the song WAP “does anything to empower women”.

What baffles me is that anyone would still be shocked by women creating s*xually explicit music. Why have male rappers not been held to the same standards for decades of misogynistic, s*xually explicit lyrics? Not only this, but Cardi B is far from the first female rap artist to own her s*xual agency and empower women not to be ashamed of their own. Think Nicki Minaj, Missy Eliot, Foxy Brown, Trina, and of course Lil’ Kim. Moreover, these artists are not even the first working class female black artists to do so - the s*xual allusions in the songs of female blues singers such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey in the thirties have caused them to be labelled “quasi-p**nographic”. Angela Davis comments that while s*xual metaphors abound in these songs, the female characters are clearly “in control of their s*xuality in ways that exploit neither their partners nor themselves”.

Dismissed by Republicans, boomers, prudes and squares the world over, Cardi B is a feminist, Bernie Sanders supporting, gun control advocating, openly bis*xual, Grammy award winning ex-stripper from the Bronx who is vocal about police brutality. I know whose side I’m on.

[K]

17/09/2022

This is a print of Blue N**e II (1952) by Henri Matisse in my mother’s kitchen. It’s been there for over 20 years and I’ve sat and eaten thousands of bowls of noodles under it. This is one of an iconic series of four blue lithographs by Henri Matisse made from cut-outs depicting n**e figures in various positions (Blue N**es). Although it is currently housed in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, it will always remind me of the kitchen in Milton Keynes. 💙

[K]

**e **es

02/09/2022

Come and dance with us tonight! 💃 🍺 The Talleyrand’s 4th birthday is tonight and we will be spinning blues, rock n roll, jazz, and hip hop.

FREE ENTRY/8-LATE

💙💙💙

31/08/2022

FRIDAY 💙 Come down to to celebrate their 4th birthday 🥳

We will be spinning blues, jazz, girl groups, rock n roll and hip hop all night, 8-late.

Painting by .rathmell

29/08/2022

Friday

26/08/2022

Come on down to The Rose And Monkey Hotel to hear us spin some tunes 8-late 💋 the usual Blues/Jazz/Rock n Roll/Hip Hop, this week featuring new tunes from the likes of English Teacher, Alewya, Working Men's Club, Aitch, Kahreign, and Yard Act.

follow on insta: instagram.com/blueblogmcr

Art Mark Rathmell

22/08/2022

BLUES AND THE POETIC SPIRIT - PAUL GARON (1975)

This book is considered a blues literature classic. The author passed away only last month at the age of 80. Not only is he considered a heavyweight on the subject of the blues, he was also an active participant in the surrealist movement. This book explores the poetry of the blues not only through a surrealist lens but also one which is psychoanalytical.

What I enjoyed was the humour of it - which, if you’d have asked me after reading the first chapter (which he spends the vast majority of relentlessly pouring scorn on other authors’ own studies of the blues) I would have thought highly unlikely. I soon realised his cantankerousness simply revealed his absolute burning passion and protective feelings towards country blues. He rails against the “white country blues” milieu at the time of writing - essentially those playing urban electric blues - and that they “invariably do something to identify themselves to the listener as white. The most favoured mechanisms are having the entire band perform lead solos at the same time; playing much louder than any black blues band, trying to jam many more notes into every bar of every solo…”. (It made me laugh anyway).

Humour is also a device used in the poetry of the blues, which he explores like Angela Davis does in Black Legacies and Black Feminism, dispelling the myth that blues is strictly a music of pain and sadness. He pushes the surrealist notion that humour is actually an “all-encompassing moral attitude” - subversive, lodged in the context of the denial and rejection of bourgeois morality. He throws Freud into the mix: “Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious”. It was a pleasure to read this apt characterisation of a very powerful essence of the blues.

Danny, is the frog related to a haiku do you think?

[K]

#1975

17/08/2022

Last Friday of the month, 8 til late, at the Rose & Monkey

11/08/2022

💙 TOMORROW 💙

Catch KYŌGEN at The Talleyrand with support from Voxish. This is their last Manchester show for a while so don't miss out!

The Talleyrand is an independent venue and a traditional boozer-meets-Euro beer-cafe in Levenshulme with a very s*xy performance space.

Photo by Sinead Ferguson

05/08/2022

Thanks to everyone who came down on Friday!

23/06/2022

Tomorrow night at The Rose And Monkey Hotel we’re back with another BLUE baby 😎

Come dance 💃 free entry as always

🔥🔥 🔥

22/06/2022

I’ve been flip-flopping of late as to whether there is anything endearing whatsoever about Robert Crumb. Having recently watched Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary film, Crumb, I had decided he - and his family - cut a rather sorry figure. Lonely oddballs with questionable personal hygiene and even worse social skills. I decided perhaps these images – impressive in their vividness and mesmerising to behold – were painted by an artist who never commanded much respect in his own life, but lived his real life on the many pages of vibrant, sometimes revolting, but undeniably brilliant work, which he churned out in impressive abundancy. My sympathy soon wore off.

Crumb: “I suppose I am a s*xist. I’ve tried to raise my consciousness...I have this recurring vision that I’m standing in front of a tribunal of feminist women and they’re demanding that I answer for my exploitation of women in my cartoons. The only answer I have is that I’m telling the truth about myself – take it or leave it. The bitter irony for me is that…most women still are drawn to the powerful, dominant, alpha-male type, and that’s not the kind of guy I am at all. I’m just basically a shy wimp, so...people wonder why I’m bitter.”

The problem is, it just doesn’t stand up now. In the first instance, it’s lazy – “yeah, I know I’m in the wrong, but, y’know...I am what I am, accept it.” Secondly, his admission that he is bitter towards women for being attracted to “alpha-male” types is going to be very hard to squeeze any sympathy out of, especially in this day and age, for obvious (incel) reasons. Maybe it used to be endearing – it isn’t now.

That said, one thing I do like is his Heroes of The Blues cards. A set of 36 cards in total, containing colour portraits of the great singers and musicians who were among the first to record the blues. This portrait of Memphis Minnie is the only one of a female in the whole collection, and is, like the rest of the cards, vibrant and full of colour and life. Memphis Minnie herself was a blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose recording career lasted for over three decades, recording over 200 songs, one of the best known being "When the Levee Breaks”.

[K]

20/06/2022

FAMOUS BLUE MOVIES #1: BLUE MOVIE AKA 'F**K' BY ANDY WARHOL

Strange to think it was Warhol's 1969 film which sparked the so-called Golden Age of P**n, and that it was that very era - with its Deep Throats and Devils in Miss Joneses - which allowed po*******hy and the mainstream to embark on a relationship. The artist had shot s*x before (penetrative in Couch, oral in Blow Job) as a central trope in his celluloid snoopings, but marketing Factory stars Viva and Louis Waldrom doing the deed in a loaned apartment gave p**n a pass into cinemas, allowing a new breed of stag film to sneak in in the guise of the 'date movie'.

Film Zero in the 70s p**n pandemic is difficult to track down these days, despite its celebrated director, and experiencing it dubbed into German without subtitles brings its own perspectives. "A film about the Vietnam war and what we can do about it" is how the artist chose to pitch his 105 min feature to the public, ten minutes of which comprise the s*x act with the rest made up with frolicking, fried hamburgers and shooting the Late '60s breeze. That narrative aimlessness which marks Warholian accounts of existence...is it po*******hy? It seems remarkably tender if so.

13/06/2022

Not that you could apply the term at the time of this song’s writing, but in a contemporary sense, the lyrics of Ma Rainey’s “Tough Luck Blues” could be called absurdist. The song opens with the superstitious image of the black cat, who crosses the path of such an exceptionally unlucky person that it drops dead. Another peculiar image is presented later on in the song – “If it was raining down soup, thick as number one sand, I’d have a fork in my pocket and a sifter in my hand”.

Sandra Lieb, author of Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey, argues that the apparently non-sensical lyrics actually reveal a “pattern of sardonic frustration and confusion”. But it could also be said that these strange images can be interpreted as an expression of the incoherence of a society organised around the demented logic of racism. The images are humorous, as often blues lyrics are, and yet capture the predicament of working class African Americans at that time. The black cat falls dead, rather than bringing the rightful share of bad luck to those whose path it crosses. Wealth and food is in abundance, but the money is thrown away, the soup is raining down, but the protagonist cannot take advantage - this is an evocation of social injustice. Even the short lines at the end (“My friend commited su***de, while I was away at sea, They want to lock me up for murder in the first degree”) portray a familiar experience – corruption in the criminal justice system resulting in fraudulent charges.

These lyrics are a magnificent example of blues lyrics using absurdism with flair and humour, to confront pressing social issues in the lives of working class African American people at the time of its writing. Ma Rainey is naming the problem, and opening up conversation the difficult routes black people had to navigate in life. Angela Davis states that “listeners would not have found it difficult to extract a metaphorical evocation of the affluent society”. Ma Rainey was provoking the beginnings of a community consciousness of the need for change, and certainly the women of the blues used abstraction as historical preparation for political protest.

[K]

09/06/2022

Check the hands...Cedell Davis (1926 - 2017) was already a proficient guitar player when at the age of ten he contracted polio. It left the Arkansan unable to use his left and severely restricted his right. The method he devised to overcome the impediment - a ham-fist take on slide guitar with a butter knife jammed between his digits - may not quite have earned comparisons with Django Rheinhardt. But in the clunking, dysfunctioning noise he made can be heard the essence of that strange last generation of delta bluesmen.

It was the musician and musicologist Robert Palmer who in the 1990s went back to Mississippi to see who had been left behind, and Davis was one of the rag-bag of artists he turned up. He'd played with Robert Nighthawk during the blues legend's fallow years in the '50s, and had had his legs broken in a nightclub stampede which left him permanently in a wheelchair. Along with the likes of Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside he made some of the most interesting records of the late C20...authentically 'of' the tradition but also misshapenly outside it.

For authentic Cedell the 'Best Of' Fat Possum released in '95 captures earlier efforts to pair the unpredictable bluesman with a rhythm section playing in tune. But check out Feel Like Doin' Something Wrong from the year before, and in particular the singer's conspicuously soulful pipes. The sour notes in the slide technique are, of course, infamous but listen to the wrong ones he hits as he sings. There's a knowing interplay going on, but the voice is so good he pulls it off like a star performer. If you don't even need to be in tune to play the blues then what is it that carries the sentiment of the song?

[D]

31/05/2022

Join us tomorrow night at Peste {AD England} for a special BLUE in an intimate, plague-themed cafè/bar amongst books, records and art💀 📚 6-10pm.

[K]

28/05/2022

28/05/2022

Big thanks to everyone who came down to Blue with KYŌGEN live last night. Our best Blue yet we think.

27/05/2022

Tonight

25/05/2022

THIS FRIDAY 💙 BLUE PRESENTS:

KYŌGEN will be playing an intimate show at The Rose and Monkey

FREE ENTRY - STAGETIME 9:30pm

Ft BLUE DJ Danny Moran 💙

📸

[K]

17/05/2022

Black women were the first to record the blues. Angela Y. Davis’ Black Legacies and Black Feminism looks at the works (and lyrics in particular) of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, and explores the ways they divulge unacknowledged traditions of feminist consciousness in working-class black communities.

Rainey and Smith were role models for “untold thousands of their sisters”, delivering messages that defied male dominance encouraged by mainstream culture. Reading this book I was surprised how women’s blues history has been so marginalised. Davis suggests this is due to the fact that the most frequently recurring themes of women’s blues music “revolve around male lovers and...problems posed by heteros*xual relationships” complicated by “expressions of autonomous female s*xuality.” These songs paint a rich and complex picture of working-class women’s lives, exploring rivalry, friendship, sisterhood, love and s*xual love between women:

Say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me,
Sure got to prove it on me
I went out last night with a crowd of my friends
They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men

It’s true I wear a collar and a tie
Make the wind blow all the while
‘Cause they say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me,
Sure got to prove it on me

Wear my clothes just like a fan
Talk to the gals just like any old man
Cause they say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me,
Sure got to prove it on me

PROVE IT ON ME BLUES (MA RAINEY, 1928)

[K]

13/05/2022

NEXT BLUE 💙 KYŌGEN are playing live at The Rose and Monkey. Last Friday of the month, FREE 🔥

Painting

25/03/2022

Spinning right now at BLUE - guest DJs Dorian Cox and Victoria Lane 🔥

24/03/2022

2moro 💙🔥 with guest DJs Dorian Cox and Victoria Lane.

20/03/2022

💙FRIDAY💙

Come down to The Rose & Monkey for the next BLUE. Featuring guest DJs Dorian Cox and Victoria Lane 🔥

Painting by .rathmell

12/03/2022

Spinning right now 🔥 Cardi B - Gangsta Bitch Music Vol 1

06/03/2022

Currently spinning: Magic Sam - West Side Soul 🔥

24/02/2022

Your best night out in Manchester...Friday at the Rose & Monkey Swan St 8 til late, Kyoko Swan & Danny Moran with the tunes. Free!

18/02/2022

Excited to get this baby in the post today 🔥 Fat White Family

12/02/2022

Currently spinning: Blues in my Bottle - Lightnin’ Hopkins (1961)

06/02/2022

Catch KYŌGEN in Hull tonight at in the Make Noise collective all-dayer!

05/02/2022

Tonight’s listening: Billie Holiday - All or Nothing at All (1958)💙

29/01/2022

💙 thanks for coming last night to , first BLUE of 2022 & busiest night yet! get down to our next night on Friday 25th Feb 💙

art .rathmell
design

#2022

25/01/2022

🔷 FIRST BLUE OF THE YEAR 🔷

Join us for the first BLUE of 2022. Low-lit, bluesy, whiskey-soaked vibes down at THIS FRIDAY 25/1

Feelin’ Blue 💙

Love from Kyoko x

Art by .rathmell

04/11/2021

Tonight! Come to The White Hotel to watch KYŌGEN supported by

This event will be partially seated with candlelit tables and also standing space, so will be very romantic indeed 🍷❤️

Doors 8pm
£7 otd

25/10/2021

Get tickets for this very special show at The White Hotel 4.11.21

Tickets: https://www.skiddle.com/whats-on/Manchester/The-White-Hotel-/BLUE-PRESENTS-KY332GEN-I-CRY-EP-Launch-wLoose-Articles/35900099/

26/09/2021

Column for this week

2016, and I’m interviewing the late musician and musicologist CP Lee. The subject of Ewan MacColl comes up, whereupon the air turns suddenly blue. Far from being the radical saint so feared by the authorities he was being spied on by Special Branch – as repute has always had it – the fabled co...