Thursday, December 27, 2012

Metal Heart, Amazing Grace

Cat Power
24" x 12"
oil on luan, 2012
She has a brand new look, a brand brand new hair style, a brand new music style too. She's Cat Power. Her song Metal Heart has been in the the Top 100 before, before I even blogged about those songs. I really thought of Cat Power back then as her having a metal heart (metal as in heavy metal). Can't be so sure anymore as she seems to have traded it for a hip hop heart now. Metal Heart is a Cat Power song that quotes from the classic Amazing Grace hymn. It's a blues song really (years ago I also likened Cat Power's music to the oral history of the blues traditions in American music). Metal Heart was featured on her third recording, an LP called What Would the Community Think, as well as on her second to last one Jukebox, recorded with the Dirty Dozen Blues Band. I've heard claims made that hip-hop is the linear ancestor to the blues, and that Grandmaster Flash and the Wu-Tang Clan could be considered as part of the same long line of African-American oral history traditions as Son House, and Muddy Waters would have been. I've done about 28 or so Cat Power paintings over the years, enough that you would think it's a career in and of itself but even the 2,000+ musicians overall that I've painted still don't add up to much of a career... There is still hope, the hobby continues, I'm still that fan.

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