9.1.11

Hail to the queen; the Exquisitely Painful; Billie Holiday


"There's two kinds of blues; there's happy blues and there's sad blues."


She stripped down the popular common songs rather than dressing up the lyrics, it feels raw, and real, and like reading a book that transports you to a depth of emotion and suffering you have never been. She is the jazz trumpet, “If you find a tune that's got something to do with you, you just feel it, and when you sing it, other people feel it, too,” (Holiday)

The general feel of her music reminds me of a line from the film 'Anna and the King', when the king's concubine Tuptim is about to run away to be in the monastery, (disguised as a man, so as to be near the man she loves) and responds to Anna's questioning; "Love is not a choice, If love was a choice, who would ever choose such exquisite pain?"

It is that old existential fetish of mine coming out that i connect this to Jasper's thought that life is painful, but not embracing life (despite it's pain) is a worse aching to endure. Holiday's music expresses this bravery, but is paired with an honesty of emotion and desire which is uncommon if not completely extinct today.

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