The Blues Masters - Slide Guitar Classics

To understand this album you need to understand Rhino Records. Started out of a physical store in the 1970s, the label specialized in re-releasing singles from the 1950s and 60s and pressing recordings of the best of the stand up comedy underground. The philosophy of the company rests upon making sure pop classics are fun and accessible to new generations. As such their business model was built on acquiring copyrights for undervalued, important works and repackaging them in a fun and accessible way.
            The original owner was eventually bought out by Time Warner, and the current iteration can no longer be said to represent this in its purest form, but even the modern incarnation specializes in re-pressings of the critically acclaimed classics of their parent company’s vast holdings. For example, many modern repressing of The Ramones are Rhino products, as are any and all pressings of The Monkees.
            So a best-of compilation by Rhino is going to be less an album than a curation: music selected, organized, and vetted with an eye for high quality recording and song writing, crystallized in tracks that represent an artist at their best, in context, but also in a way the listener maybe hasn’t heard before. The track listing has everyone you could want, from Muddy Waters to the Alman Brothers, and nary a boring moment in site. The tracks are clear enough to be understandable, but rough enough to preserve that gravely, spontaneous feel that gives blues its soul. The songs are about things blues songs should be about. Lust, love, social injustice, pain. The song I am currently listening to, “Dark Was the Night,” has been going on for a minute and a half and all that Blind Willie Johnston has said was a series of inarticulate moans. I approve.

And yet, it is still a best-of album. If you are already a huge blues aficionado, there is probably no reason to buy this, since the tracks are probably available on other albums. As someone who is Blues literate but still has an awful lot to learn i would usually try to figure out what artists are important on the internet, and then go to a store for their album. Having to wade through someone else's choices, especially since that someone is usually motivated by taking what is on hand and cheaply repackaging it, tends to strike me as dumb. 

But this is kind of great! The liner notes have all kinds of information on each artist, and a really fascinating description of slide guitar’s birth in Hawaii and subsequent wholehearted adoption by itinerant delta bluesmen. This is obviously the point of these albums. Begun in an era when albums were expensive, musical history hard to find, and radio often unhelpful, best-of albums served to help people find out what they should be listening to. Though subsequent generations of best-of producers have focused more on low costs, high quality products like this album once served to introduce music lovers to the history and context of new genres. Indeed, samplers and mix tapes, which are really just best-ofs by amateurs, were what gave punk rock and essentially all of its children their odd ability to self promote without the internet and without mass media support.
            But that was then. Nowadays we have the internet. I discovered the punk and ska movements from fan pages on Geocities. I sampled music by The Clash on Real Video streams posted on fan sites, and got into The Mighty Mighty Bosstones from songs they posted on their own site. Nowadays we get into scenes that are being created in foreign cities in nearly real time, and have an accurate record of the events for subsequent generations to follow if they chose. If you want an example i draw your attention to the explosion of Canadian indie bands and say good day.
            Perhaps we really have been missing out. I don’t see myself dropping a ton of money on best-ofs any time soon, and I will never be so déclassé as to describe one as a favorite album, but there is definitely something to be said for curation. Though we in this internet age often resent having other people press their views on us, a well done curation can help a viewer understand a subject with the kind of richness that could take a person years to acquire by trial and error or even through careful research. I have had the temerity to describe myself as a punk rocker for over a decade, and despite all the effort I have put into familiarizing myself with the genre there are still albums I kick myself for not owning. Though one could suggest that a person who can use the word “temerity” in a sentence is probably not that punk rock to begin with, there is a definite advantage to guided instruction, and I see no reason recent music history should be any different.

So yeah I guess I have to recommend this album. It does seem a bit like homework, as the album is 18 tracks long, each of which is by an artist whose albums I now have to buy, but I am glad I now know what to look for, and the liner notes will give me something to read in the bathroom. Cheers!