A new record has just come out by a band called Audioslave. They are being touted as a ‘supergroup,’ and feature the lead singer from Soundgarden teamed up with Rage Against the Machine’s guitarist/bassist/drummer. I’ve heard some of it and I like it. It’s right up my alley.

Rage’s guitarist, Tom Morello, is near the top of my list of guitar greats. He won me over with an album called ‘Renegades,’ which is actually a collection of covers done by Rage of other bands’ tunes, ranging from Volume 10 to the Stooges to the Stones.

I think it’s a brilliant album, but also illuminating in how it lays bare the similarities between styles of music one might think have nothing to do with each other. The riffs for rap numbers like EPMD’s “I’m Housin’” or Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man” could have been done by any hard rock band from 1966 to the present, and could have in turn been pinched from any blues great from Robert Johnson to Willie Dixon. ‘Renegades’ does a nice job of linking all this stuff together, most of it built on a foundation called the blues scale; a musical staple that forms the basis of blues obviously, but also of rock, and much of soul, funk, and rap.

The Blues--I’ll call it that for simplicity’s sake but I’m not just talking about the stuff you hear at the Yale--is like a language, with different dialects spoken by different ‘tribes.’ Robert Johnson recorded a song in 1937 called ‘Love in Vain.’ In 1969 the Rolling Stones did a superb version of the tune that is very much their own; it’s still bluesy, but with more rock and a touch of country. In some ways it’s hard to recognize, and yet you can still hear Johnson in some of the antique lyrics....

“I felt so sad and lonesome, that I could not help but cry.”

It’s absorbing to listen to the two versions back-to-back. To see how things changed over 30 years. To think that this language, spoken by some penniless, nomadic Southern black man living during the Depression came to be adopted by suburban English boys a generation later, who in turn cultivated their own idiom. And how far back did the roots of the song go before Johnson himself picked it up?

I love all this music. It is a language I love to immerse myself in. Not just music, THIS music. For the most part, if you can’t lay the blues scale on it in some way I start to loose interest.

I have often felt that learning and spreading this language is a valid pursuit. Maybe even something more than that. The 'Renegades' album takes it’s name from a song called ‘Renegades of Funk’ by Afrika Bambaataa. I like one of the lines in it:

“Now renegades are the people with their own philosophies
They change the course of history
Everyday people like you and me”

The last line is especially great, as it offers everyone a chance at something more than banality. There’s an unsung quality to the blues. Like folk, it offers the possibility of a kind of stardom without limelight, and the possibility that you can build on the language and create a dialect of your own.

But there’s another old songwriter I like. His name is Robert Burns. He has a line in a poem that, roughly translated, laments that we need someone to “give us the power to see us as other see us.”

That line came to mind over the past week. A relatively insignificant event transpired, and I won’t go into great detail, but will provide a brief summary. A gig was set up with three bands. On the evening of the show the gig gets cancelled. Some incovenience was incurred. For our part, we had turned down at least two other opportunities, and had to scramble to notify those who we knew were coming out that night (and judging by a rather irate message in our guestbook were not entirely successful).

Immediately the blame was assigned. At first on myself, which I bitterly and...how shall I put it...snarlingly refuted, and then on others, back and forth, up and down, all fucking over the place. All over a show in a pub by three bands few people know.

I suppose people have a great need to express themselves, and when that gets stifled they feel frustrated. In fact, the debacle I’ve just mentioned hinged on a band breaking up over the matter of which members’ songs would get played and who would sing them. Whether anyone else on the planet was listening to the songs was not the point. When someone needs to say something, and they can’t, they get upset.

When you use music as your language, the possibilities for rancour are greater, as you can become more dependent on others to say what you need to say. That dependence breeds resentment. The problem is, when things deteriorate it no longer matters whether it was over anything significant. The bitterness that builds along the way becomes the cause.

I have often found it curious to observe the musical behavior of Rob 'The Mule' Hughes. He has for some time painstakingly created albums on his own. He makes them all by himself. He releases them to about 20 people. And that’s that. They’re good records; I keep going back and listening to them, anyway.

Rob has always steadfastly refused to have any part of the “get your stuff out there” credo that I and most others have adopted as our mantra. I’ve never really asked him why. He’s a fundamentalist of sorts, but not a missionary. And it’s not that he needs everything his own way. When he makes his own records, they sound exactly as he wants them to, and yet when you play in a band with him it’s all good. Any idea is valid, any style is welcome. Just don’t send any of it to the local radio station.

Why is this? Is it because he figures that you have to keep this craving to express yourself in check to a point, or it will get the better of you and the way you deal with the people around you? That once you get beyond the basic purity of musical expression the rest can only be a distraction, or even a toxin, keeping you from further creativity?

I’ve always found it exhilarating to be spreading the musical gospel as I see it, even if I’m the equivalent of some kind of missionary preaching to a handful of disciples on the fringes of civilization. But at some point maybe you stop even being that. You become like Aguirre; you’ve wrecked everything and you’re floating around on a river in the jungle hectoring a bunch of monkeys.

You’re less and less in command of any language. You’re under the command of an addiction. Everything else suffers. I’ve rarely been as unhappy or as incomplete in my life as during those periods when I’ve been most immersed in music. You need more and more of it. You neglect things and people you shouldn’t neglect. Your behavior is destructive. Occasionally, when you step out of this opiatic place, you realize that you’re just like a junkie, encrusted in the same dissolution and decay as any addict, consumed by only one thing. The only option is to fix up and go back in.

Unless you break the habit completely. This language sounds sweeter to me than ever, but I worry that it’s just a Sirens’ song, and that maybe it’s time to salvage what I still can of the rest of myself.