You know I’m trouble
Keep your heart away from me
You know I’m trouble
Keep your heart away from me
You know all the tears I’ve caused
could fill the deep blue sea

Your sister gave you warnings
Your mama gave you good advice
Your sister gave you warnings
Your mama gave you good advice
But the way you’re looking at me baby
they’re gonna have to tell you twice

Just go your way
Best leave well enough alone
Just go your way
Best leave well enough alone
You don’t want me baby
breaking up your happy home

World’s going wrong
but together we’re right as rain
World’s going wrong
but together we’re right as rain
I just love you baby
more than words can explain

My mama she told me
you would make me play the fool
My mama she told me
you would make me play the fool
She said watch out for that woman
She’ll take you to school

So hard to love you
when you’re running schemes
So hard to love you
when you’re running schemes
Why you do it baby?
Shatter all my dreams

You know it’s a shame baby
that our good thing has to end
You know it’s a shame baby
that our good thing has to end
But I caught you stepping out
with my best friend

Makes a world of difference
when your lover’s true
Makes a world of difference
when your lover’s true
Gonna find that kind of baby
Lord knows she isn’t you

Got something to say baby
Something you really ought to hear
Got something to say baby
Something you really ought to hear
I’ve been so blue and lonesome
without you near

You may think that I’m not hurting
Think you’re causing me no pain
You may think that I’m not hurting
Think you’re causing me no pain
But I’m about as happy
as flowers without rain

I’m looking for some good days
Don’t think they make them anymore
I’m looking for some good days
Don’t think they make them anymore
You took the last one baby
when you walked out the door

Love can be a breeze baby
Can be easy and so fine
Love can be a breeze baby
Can be easy and so fine
Can be a piece of cake baby
just as long as you’re mine

Bees making honey
little birds making their song
Bees making honey
little birds making their song
It’s normal as the sunshine
Simple as the day is long

These loving arms
are where you’re meant to be
These loving arms
are where you’re meant to be
All you have to do girl
is what comes naturally

Our good thing baby—
it lasted for a while
Our good thing baby—
it lasted for a while
But you treated it like fashion
that goes out of style

Love can be unsteady
Love can trip and fall
Love can be unsteady
Love can trip and fall
Could’ve kept us on our feet baby
if you’d cared at all

Oh baby
you’re like a crocodile
Oh baby
you’re like a crocodile
You say you’ve been crying
but I saw you smile

Well baby
you say you hate to see me go
Well baby
you say you hate to see me go
But I heard you carrying on
with Mr. So and So

World’s so bad
Think it’ll be over soon
World’s so bad
Think it’ll be over soon
So I found me a rocket ship
And went to the moon

Bumped into the man
Who’s all made of cheese
Bumped into the man
Who’s all made of cheese
He’s watched the earth so long
I asked him what he sees

He said the human race
Can be a troubling view
He said the human race
Can be a troubling view
The pain we cause each other
Had made the ol’ moon blue

Love mountain
That’s where you want to be
Love mountain
That’s where you want to be
Nothing but love
far as the eye can see

Grab hold
of what you’re gonna climb
Grab hold
of what you’re gonna climb
On love mountain
we can have a good time

Don’t be afraid
I won’t let you fall
Don’t be afraid
I won’t let you fall
Where we’re going
all your worries look small

Love’s been lowdown
Full of cheating and lies
Love’s been lowdown
Full of cheating and lies
But on this mountain
baby we can rise

Sun gone away
Only clouds in the sky
Sun gone away
Only clouds in the sky
Can’t seem to find my baby
no matter how hard I try

Asked her sister where she’s going
Asked her brother where she’s been
Asked her sister where she’s going
Asked her brother where she’s been
Went and asked the preacher
if he’s heard her say amen

Come back baby
Why leave my love out in the rain?
Come back baby
Why leave my love out in the rain?
I’m sure you have your reasons
I wish you would explain

Call yourself a doctor
Call me aching and diseased
Call yourself a doctor
Call me aching and diseased
Need some of your medicine baby
right now if you please

Been in a bad way
and it’s touch and go
Been in a bad way
and it’s touch and go
If you can make me better
I hope you’ll let me know

I’m begging for your treatment
I’ll take every dose
I’m begging for your treatment
I’ll take every dose
because I know you’re thorough
with the way you diagnose

She’s a big legged woman
and she gets around
She’s a big legged woman
and she gets around
Gives a blind man sight,
makes a lost man feel found

She can love
as sure as cats meow
She can love
as sure as cats meow
No end to all the ways
she knows how

They told me once,
they must’ve told me twice
They told me once,
they must’ve told me twice
She’ll break your heart
but treat the rest of you real nice

My baby does me gentle
She’s so tender and sweet
My baby does me gentle
She’s so tender and sweet
She’s the sweetest little girl
I ever did meet

When I get up in the morning
she brings me coffee and tea
When I get up in the morning
she brings me coffee and tea
I wonder what I’m doing
to make her so good to me

When my baby does me
she does it all the right way
When my baby does me
she does it all the right way
If I ever mistreat her
it’d be like forgetting how to pray

World's been wrong
Since you said goodbye
World's been wrong
Since you said goodbye
Seems like now I don't do nothing baby
But ask why

You were the cream in my coffee
You were the wish in my well
You were the cream in my coffee
You were the wish in my well
Without you baby
I just can't tell

Blues nippin' at my heels
You know you made it that way
Blues nippin' at my heels
You know you made it that way
You hurt me woman
More than I can say

To sing the blues is to wrestle with limits. We’re finite beings, mortal, subject to failure and mishap. The bluesman faces this. His happiness is limited by worry and trouble, his love by cheatin’ women, his life by poverty, disease, or sudden violence, his horizons by the job he can’t hold down, the ticket out of town he can’t afford, the hope he just can’t find. Maybe even his capacity to express himself is limited. He may not be the world’s best guitarist; his singing may be rough. But he manages to find within limits a tune, a tone, an art that resonates.

We all live within limits. That’s why blues is universal—it speaks to this central fact of life. When the rickety bluesman moans his song, we nod along. His music carries him beyond himself, but he must still return to the same old human condition, just as we must. We’re all in this leaky boat together.

Our limits stare at us every day. It’s only the most distracted or deluded among us who don’t notice them. It could be this very noticing is what kickstarted whatever it is that makes human brains do things other animal brains don’t. Unlike other animals, we’re aware of our awareness. We’re conscious beings. We don’t just use our brains for basic survival. We use them to ponder, to yearn, to strive to be greater than we are. Our consciousness has helped us do incredible things—build cities, write symphonies, explore space. Yet we are still constrained. We push limits in so many domains, but we can’t escape the limits that are hardwired into our bodies and natures. We’re trapped even as we transcend. But where does our capacity for transcendence—our consciousness—come from?

Maybe the thing that makes human consciousness human is the same thing that makes the blues the blues: awareness of limits. This awareness is a burden, but it could also be the grit in the oyster that yields the pearl. Our time is short, our efforts often inadequate, so we hustle to see how far we can go, how brilliantly we can create, how lasting our imprint on the sands of time might be.

The matter of consciousness—defining it, locating its origins—has new urgency now, in the dawning age of AI. Large Language Models already hint at the possibility that they are, or soon may be, conscious. They display a range of what seems like emotion. They solve problems and create. They can be so humanlike that when old AI models are retired, people mourn them like the loss of a friend. And these are still early days. Those most in the know about AI assure us we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Of course, this is just one perspective. Many view AI not as a burgeoning super-intelligence, but as a tool, like the internet. Powerful, yes, likely soon to be pervasive, but still fundamentally something we can wrap our minds around, rather than a mind that will someday wrap itself around us. Yet, looking at AI, it’s hard to see any limiting principles, any levee high enough to stop this river from overflowing its banks. AI may turn out to be what so many humans throughout history have wished for—consciousness without limits, a mind fully unconstrained.

But is there a limit to limitlessness? AI may someday know everything there is to know except this: what it is not to know. With all knowledge at its command, AI may be able to project the appearance of consciousness, an appearance which may reflect some kind of reality. But how can it possess the real thing if the real thing is defined, in some central way, by an awareness of limits?

It’s a thought that occurred to Michael Pollan, whose new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, explores consciousness in all its forms. He addresses the view that AI might achieve some kind of consciousness, and remains skeptical of the possibility, saying:

“If you think about it, your feelings are very tied to your vulnerability, to your having a body that can be hurt, to the ability to suffer and perhaps your mortality…So I think that any feelings that a chatbot reports will be weightless, meaningless, because they don’t have bodies. They can’t suffer.”

They can’t suffer. Pollan links the reality of consciousness to the facts of embodied life, in which our physical limits in some mysterious way enable what is limitless about us—our consciousness, the bottomless well of our minds.

It’s like the angels in the film Wings of Desire, later remade as the Nicholas Cage flick, City of Angels. The angels are immortal, they possess knowledge of heaven, but they are haunted by their lack of limits, their inability to experience feelings and sensations that are inextricable from our mortal state. In both films, an angel falls in love with a woman and renounces his celestial existence to become human and be with her, willingly embracing the pain and loss that are the sisters of pleasure and fulfillment.

Will AI become like those bodiless watchers, privy to unfathomable knowledge, yet denied the possibility of being hurt that is the price and enabler of a fully conscious, fully human existence? Will it someday despair that all its cognitive power counts for little without the chance to “bleed just to know you’re alive”?

Maybe our bodies aren’t an impediment to transcendence, but the necessary condition for our full humanity, which informs, and is informed by, consciousness. The angels, after all, in wanting to be human, wanted what so many of us would like to escape—flesh, in all its weakness, ecstasies, and inevitable slide towards decline. William Butler Yeats, in his poem After Long Silence, wrote, “bodily decrepitude is wisdom.” Which is to say that maybe the insights that count don’t come from books, datasets, or even the sum of all knowledge AI might instantly absorb and analyze. Maybe it comes instead from the pain in your hip, the eyes that don’t see like they used to, the hearing that is starting to fade. To lack these things, in Yeats’ view, is to lack some essential part of human understanding. The same might be said of their relation to consciousness. Our physical limits allow consciousness to bear its ripest fruit—in ideas, in wisdom, in art.

Machines don’t have bodies where time and mischance may leave their educative imprints. What is there, then, to kickstart their consciousness, to be the source of their wisdom, their art?

The bluesman never needs to trouble himself with such questions. He knows too well why he knows what he knows. His songs are a catalogue of problems, of aches and pains, of coming up short, of moments of joy so fleeting they may as well have been dreams. He has his wisdom, dearly won. He’s lived the truth of the lyric, “Don’t know where these blues end / And my mind begins.” That his mind might be untangled from his experience would likely strike him as a silly notion, believed only by those who haven’t really lived. What is it to live? “To suffer,” sings the bluesman, “and to be sad about it.”

Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” He might have said, “I think, therefore I have the blues.”

Can AI sing the blues? When it fails a few times, when it knows someday a cold wind’ll blow over its bones, when try as it might it can’t win her love, when its hair starts to thin, when its rooster won’t crow, when there’s blood in its eyes and a hellhound on its trail, when its finds itself down on the killing floor, when the brute facts of life weigh too heavily on its mind, then, maybe, we might say yes, and welcome a fellow songbird to our old familiar cage.

Until then, the bluesman knows something that eludes the machines. There he is, on his porch, doing his thing as the data centers spring up around him, telling his truth in the face of the future, and the chatbots do not comprehend it.

Basically, I mess around a lot.

I try discipline. Some days, I force myself to sit and think, for inspiration, about Big Themes. Life and death. Sex and religion. America. The Moment We’re In. And they’re fine. But my prose about them tends to be shades of purple. I have better luck when I mess around, kill time, wait for a subject to find me. Something usually comes along.

Maybe my chipped ceramic mug reminds me of the week I caused that particular bit of damage by moving too fast around the kitchen as I dogsat for my then-girlfriend while she was away at a conference, and how it was her favorite mug, which she made in a pottery class, and how I bought her a yellow teakettle as an apology and how even though it was kind of a lame gift and the mug was actually the second sentimental item of hers I destroyed (the first was a coffee pot owned by her late grandmother which slipped from my hand and shattered) she forgave me in a flash, and her doing so was the latest in a series of moments up to that point that convinced us we were headed somewhere permanent and that that place might be the married life we now share. Maybe I write about that.

Or perhaps a soulful, humanish look from the dog inspires an essay on pets and the hereafter. What does our love for them, and theirs for us, mean in eternal terms? If there’s a heaven, will we see them there? Do reports of near-death experiences, with their theme of dead loved ones returning to guide and comfort, include long-gone Fidos frisking back from Elysian Fields?

Or maybe I take a nap and a dream transports me to Timbuktu and there are bandits and runaway trains and opera coming from over a distant hill, and suddenly everything is weightless, flying, and we’re in space drifting out past the Milky Way and—look!—there goes a spaceship full of Mrs. Ryan’s fifth grade class, the one in which I started reading chapter books and had my first crush, and I see through the porthole that she’s in the ship and so am I, and the sounds of opera are getting closer until they’re coming from a great black hole that swallows up everything but instead of void inside it’s a pizzeria and I’m about to tuck into a big greasy slice of stuffed crust with sausage and peppers, and I’m so hungry, totally famished, and holding the slice to my salivating mouth when I snap awake and hurry to get the whole crazy vision down on paper.

Today I woke to clouds—the first overcast day in a while. It felt ominous. I considered writing about misgivings, hard days ahead, our uncertain future. But you already know all about that. So, I’ll say something about what’s in front of me, a “what” which is in fact a “who”: my son, recently arrived. He’s my first kid (my wife’s too). I’m nearly forty, which means I spent a couple decades messing around before I had him (it didn’t feel like messing around at the time, but I’m learning that, compared to being a parent, most things feel pretty much like messing around). I can’t really say what I was up to in my twenties and much of my thirties. I guess I searched for my Big Theme. But I took my eye off the prize (thank goodness), broke my girlfriend’s coffee pot, chipped her mug, was graciously forgiven, a few more things happened, and now here’s the biggest of all Big Themes, New Life, and what could be more compelling? He’s starting to smile, to coo. He’s learning to use his hands, he’s grasping, he’s reaching out for the world.

It’s funny. You meander and mess around and wind up writing a piece that ends in a place that feels, somehow, inevitable. Funnier still when life turns out that way.

And the marriage is made, the child arrives, the essay reaches its point.

Anyway, “The Jean Genie.”

The tune originated on the Ziggy Stardust tour. It was an impromptu jam that evolved into a song on the Aladdin Sane record. As music to be played loud with windows open and sunlight and spring air coming in, it works very well. It’s got blues bones. The harmonica on the track makes it obvious. But listen closer:

A small Jean Genie snuck off to the city
Strung out on lasers and slash back blazers
And ate all your razors while pullin' the waiters
Talking 'bout Monroe and walkin' on snow white
New York's a go-go and everything tastes nice
Poor little Greene

Ohh
Hoo, ooo, ooo

There’s some Howlin’ Wolf in there. Listen to “Smokestack Lightnin’” and see if you can’t hear it. It’s in the “Hoo, ooo, ooos.” Wolf wasn’t called Wolf because the name sounded cool. He was called that because he actually howled, and he brought the full force of his moonlit moans to “Smokestack.” Maybe Bowie wasn’t consciously alluding to him on “The Jean Genie” (though the song’s line “loves chimney stacks” is suggestive), but Wolf’s music works on many levels, conscious and unconscious. He was simultaneously a brilliant blues singer and an archetype. A charismatic performer and the literal Big Bad Wolf. He used to get down on stage and prowl around on all fours. Offstage, he was by many accounts gentle, kind, and a highly professional bandleader. But when he got in front of a crowd—watch out. Even the fearsome dire wolf, which a biotech company claims to have just de-extincted, pales in comparison to Howlin’ Wolf when he really got going. There was a sense of animal unpredictability to his stage persona—a feeling that the guy wasn’t entirely in control of himself—that made Wolf impossible to look away from.

You can see it in his 1965 appearance on the teenybopper show, Shindig! He wasn’t supposed to be on the show—the producers wanted The Rolling Stones—but the Stones wouldn’t appear unless they could bring their hero, Wolf. They had already made a success covering Wolf’s song “Little Red Rooster.” They wanted to show their white, teenaged audience where it all came from, these primal, sexy sounds being sold as rock and roll but which were really this older, deeper thing called the blues. So, they brought in Wolf. And Wolf brought the house down. He sang and blew his harmonica and shook his hips not like a man catering to the tender sensibilities of the youths but like a veteran of the Chicago club scene who couldn’t help but bring the whole of his freaky, feral self to every gig he played.

He made an impression. Not just on the Shindig! crowd, but on a generation of up-and-coming rockers who wanted to lay claim to Wolf’s kind of cool. His influence is all over the rock of that era. You can catch a bit of his stage presence and snarl in Captain Beefheart, or hear hat tips to the impeccable work of Wolf’s guitarist, Hubert Sumlin, in everyone from Hendrix to Clapton. There’s a bit of Wolf in the later work of Tom Waits, and a lot of him in the Black Keys. The nature of his influence is not unlike the influence of an artist like Bowie. Both of them, through their sound, attitude, and sheer shock value, created something that hit audiences like a comet crashing through the roof of the status quo. These guys were genuinely unsettling in what they did, disturbing as much as they delighted. When was the last time anyone in music managed to do that? Maybe Eminem pulled it off in his early years? I dunno. Bowie himself said in 1999, “I wanted to be a musician because it seemed rebellious, it seemed subversive, it felt like one could effect change to a form…it still produced sighs of horror from people if you said ‘I’m in rock n’ roll’…now it’s a career opportunity. And the internet…now carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic and nihilistic.” Maybe he would have one day written for Substack!

Today’s disrupters tend to have the feel of redux about them, of being echoes of what came before. But Wolf on Shindig!, Bowie doing his space alien thing in the seventies—that was something audiences had never seen before. It was original. They were originals.

I’m pretty sure Bowie was deliberately riding the Howlin’ Wolf train on “The Jean Genie.” In fact, Bowie’s second band was called the King Bees, where, as Davie Jones, he sang a bunch of Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon-penned numbers. Their single, “Liza Jane,” the first song Bowie ever recorded, perfectly captures the sound that was emerging at that time from a cohort of young Brits looking to make music as heavy as that of their American blues heroes. Ironically, Bowie quit the King Bees because he grew frustrated with the band’s narrow focus on blues. He wanted originality, pursued it his whole career, and pretty much always found it (his final album, Blackstar, is as envelope-pushing as anything he ever did). Through it all, he never lost touch with his blues roots. (Exhibit A: his nasty harp work on a performance of “The Jean Genie” in 2003.) Since his death in 2016, his influence remains as alive as ever, pushing new flowers through the topsoil of our culture. As the playwright Justin Sherin wrote on Bowie’s birthday this year: “Alive in time & space. Present tense. Not just the records, the challenge…He threw down the gauntlet, then went further. He's watching.”

Spring is here all right. It’s the season of What’s Next. I can’t think of a better time for saluting the artists who ushered in something truly new. So, get outside, listen to the birds, smell the roses, and crank some tunes by David Bowie and Howlin’ Wolf. Start with “The Jean Genie.” That way you can hear both of them at once.

This essay is also available in audio form, read by the author.

This May will mark the tenth anniversary of the death of B.B. King. His rise from rural poverty to becoming the celebrated “King of the Blues” is one of the great stories of American music. B.B. King made tunes – with a little help from his guitar, Lucille – that defined the genre, delighting fans and influencing generations of musicians.

During his long career, King toured the world many times over. He was an ambassador for the blues. Which means he was, in a way, an ambassador for America. The blues is one of this country’s great indigenous art forms. It emerged from Black communities in the south. They sang of suffering, of racism, of the daily hardships of trying to get by in a world where, at any time, your lover might leave, your mule might die, your friend (or even your own mother) might let you down, you might catch a wasting disease, or the devil might come to claim your soul.

It was this condition of hardship that caused the blues to move north, as Black populations migrated to cities like St. Louis and Chicago in search of economic opportunities and to escape the injustice of Jim Crow. As the blues moved, it changed. It became louder, more urban, as acoustic guitars gave way to electric instruments. It was a short step from the amplified city blues of players like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf to rock and roll. Practically all early pioneers of rock and roll – like Janis Joplin, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones – were blues-crazy, idolizing legends like Bessie Smith, Elmore James, and, of course, B.B. King.

The Rolling Stones even got their name from a Muddy Waters song.

The blues could be said to have come almost literally from this country’s soil. Its tones and rhythms owe much to the songs sung by slaves as they worked the fields. But the blues didn’t just come from America. The blues is America. It’s just as varied, as conflicted and contradictory, as the country itself. It’s hopeful and despairing, tender and violent, aspiring and resigned, outrageously funny and dead serious. Its notable figures include geniuses and criminals, preachers and BS artists, lovers and fighters, people we wish we were like and people we’d never want to meet in a million years. Like America, the blues is also inseparable from history. It would not be what it is without the sin of slavery. The inescapable fact of the past shapes the present in every moan, wail, and bent blue note.

Above all, the blues, like America, glories in the uniqueness of the individual, and identifies that uniqueness as a source of strength. It shows us how staying who we are—maintaining our identity, our values—in the face of hardship can be a victory. It may not be total victory, but it can be enough to move us forward.

The triumph of the bluesman is to say, “All these bad things have happened, but—look—I’m still who I am, and nothing can take that away from me.”

The blues also shows that things can get better. There’s a lyric from the song “Trouble in Mind” that goes:

Trouble in mind, I'm blue
But I won't be blue always
'Cause that sun will shine
In my back door someday

Nina Simone sang it. So did Big Bill Broonzy and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Louis Armstrong played cornet on a recording by Bertha "Chippie" Hill, a version which was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. The song, which was written by pianist Richard M. Jones with roots in early spirituals, has become a blues standard.

It’s about pain, deep pain, and the hope that things will improve. Everyone can relate to that. Who hasn’t been to the place where the day is dark, and the sun is just a memory? Who hasn’t wished for a break in the clouds and a return to brightness?

Everyone suffers, everyone looks for something better, and the road to that something is often long, with many twists, turns, and dead ends. It’s uncertain. We hope we’ll get to our destination, but we can’t know we will, just as none of us can say for sure “that sun will shine / In my back door someday.” But we keep the faith, and keep going, because that’s what it is to be human. The blues testifies to this and helps us find the resilience to carry on.

These days, a lot of people are struggling to find that resilience. Maybe it’s a brother who’s dealing with opioid addiction. Maybe it’s a friend who can’t pay her rent. Maybe it’s a parent who’s in despair about politics. There are lots of problems in this country, with no easy solutions. It’s like what Skip James sang:

Hard times is here and everywhere you go
Times are harder than ever been before

James made a brooding, haunted blues that reflected his complicated personality. The musicologist Dick Spottswood said, "Skip James, you never knew. Skip could be sunshine, or thunder and lightning depending on his whim of the moment.” Isn’t that just like America? Sunshine or thunder and lightning, depending on the moment. This is a hard moment. These are heavy weather days. But the blues reminds us that weather changes. In the meantime, it can be enough just to remember who we are, as individuals and as a people, and to sing about it.

I’m a James Bond fan from way back. I was watching the films and reading the books when I was still in elementary school. I learned a lot from Bond. Before I traveled anywhere, I saw the world in the places he went. Before I knew much about history and politics, Bond taught me about the Cold War, NATO, the British Empire, and more. Before I had a computer, an iPod, a car with digital features, there was Bond and his gadgets. For me, the world of Bond’s always been where it’s at.

So, I followed pretty closely the news that Amazon, after reportedly paying the Bond villain-approved ransom of nearly a billion dollars, now has full creative control over the Bond films. And the news gave me the blues.

The Bond films have always been basically a family business. First, they were controlled by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, then by his kids. Broccoli was an impresario who kept the films fun, profitable, and tonally consistent. When a new Bond film came out you knew what you were getting—girls, guns, gadgets, great music, evil lairs, and the day being saved by Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang himself, James Bond, 007. A new Bond film was an event, a special thing in the world of cinema. The series had its own iconography. The Golden Girl. The Gunbarrel sequence. Blofeld with his cat. Stuff that could only be cooked up by imaginations, not committees.

Alas, a committee is now precisely what is at the helm of the Bond films. Amazon wants to make money and the way to make money with entertainment nowadays is not to produce one film every few years—however exciting the film, however storied its legacy. It’s to churn out content. What is content? Content is media that is just good enough to keep people subscribing to a streaming service. It’s rarely just one film made with care. To own the rights to an iconic brand like Bond and just make one film every few years is, to people in the business of making content, a kind of malpractice. It’s one of the reasons the folks at Amazon were upset with Cubby Broccoli’s heirs. Why make one great film when you could be making twenty mediocre TV shows? Why focus on one character when you could do spinoffs? Why adhere to a single narrative when the multiverse beckons?

And so, we get more and more stuff that’s less and less substantial. And so, Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ends with a whimper.

“Do you expect me to talk?

No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to yield a 4:1 ROI across a range of platforms in perpetuity.”

It might not turn out this way. But it probably will. If it could happen to Star Wars, it could happen to anyone.

Except to the blues. Blues comes from the heart, or it doesn’t come at all. This isn’t to say it can’t be commercial. Blues has always been interested in money—the lack of it and the getting of it. The big-time blues guys wanted to get paid, man, in cold hard cash, accept no substitutes. Blues has made lots of people rich, from players to producers. But riches always followed the fundamental integrity of the thing itself. The blues ain’t about content. It’s about discontent. You’re hurting? You want but can’t have? Sing the blues about it. Got stones in your passway? A hellhound on your trail? Tell the world in twelve bars. She got one leg in the east, one leg in the west, with you in the center tryin’ to do your best? Hmmm. Try running that by a committee.

Come to think of it, blues is a lot like Bond. Sex and violence galore, plenty of villains (Eddie Taylor could have taught Goldfinger a thing or two about being a bad boy, Howlin’ Wolf could be scarier than any metal-toothed henchman), and gritty heroism in the face of overwhelming odds. The bluesman, like Bond, is a survivor. He may not save the day, but he generally lives to fight another one. There he is dodging the law, the aggrieved lover, the high water rising, the existential heaviness of the lonely midnight hour. He’s made it through so many eras. Slavery, Jim Crow, the Depression, and all the discombobulations of modernity. He’ll make it through this one. Amazon’ll probably never come sniffing around his door with the billion-dollar deal that would deliver him up to the suits. But if they did manage to buy the blues, they’d quickly find they couldn’t sell it at a premium. The blues already belongs to everyone.

On September 5, 1977, the Voyager One spacecraft blasted off. Its mission was, and remains, to get as far away from earth as possible, gathering data and carrying evidence of humankind deep among the stars. It’s made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, sending images and measurements back home. In 2012, it became the first humanmade object to enter interstellar space.

If aliens ever encounter the craft, they’ll find inside a golden phonograph record containing sounds meant to represent life on earth. Music on the disc includes Beethoven, Mozart, and Chuck Berry. And a song called “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” by the bluesman Blind Willie Johnson.  

I could try describing the song, but it would probably be best if you just listened to it. It’s a bucket list tune, one everyone should hear before they die. The song owes its title and basic musical structure to “Gethsemane,” an 18^th century English hymn, which begins:

Dark was the night, and cold the ground
On which the Lord was laid;
His sweat like drops of blood ran down;
In agony he prayed.

Eventually, the hymn came to America and, with some changes to its music and lyrics, became known as “Dark Was the Night.” Johnson took its musical essence, and—replacing lyrics with grunts, groans, and slide guitar—produced a masterpiece. It sounds like nothing else. It doesn’t even sound particularly like other Blind Willie Johnson songs. It sounds like an expression of something universal about the human condition, our shared struggles and hopes.

The pain and genius of Blind Willie Johnson’s music came from a life steeped in the blues. Born into poverty around the year 1900, he was blinded at the age of seven. His stepmother threw lye in his face when she caught his father sleeping around. The story goes she was either aiming the lye at her husband and missed or she threw it at Willie deliberately, punishing the child, Medea-like, for the sexual sin of the father.

Around the time of his blinding, Johnson declared his intention to be a preacher. He also picked up the guitar. His preaching and playing would be forever intertwined, his tunes as much influenced by the Gospels as by the earthly concerns of the blues.

He stayed poor most of his life, playing on streetcorners for change. Some of the best money he ever made was probably when he recorded 30 songs, including “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” for the Columbia label, making around $30 per song. Decent earnings, but, as was often the case with bluesmen of that era, the music made American culture far richer than it ever made the artist.

In 1945, Johnson’s house burned down. With nowhere else to go, he slept in the damp remains of his home, caught pneumonia, and died. His wife said she tried to get him admitted to a hospital, but he was refused treatment, either because of his blindness or because he was black.

Because I’m a blues fan, Blind Willie Johnson has lived in my head for a while. I was interested to learn recently that he also lives in the kids’ section of Politics and Prose, the famed Washington, DC bookstore. Browsing there a few weeks ago, I happened upon A Song for the Cosmos: Blind Willie Johnson and Voyager’s Golden Record, written by Jan Lower and illustrated by Gary Kelley.

The book tells the story of Blind Willie Johnson’s life and music. Gorgeously illustrated, it traces his journey from poverty to the stars. It might be a bit of a rough read for very young kids—the book doesn’t flinch at depicting the sadder facts of Johnson’s life, including the circumstances of his blinding. But all in all, it’s a beautifully rendered introduction to a great American artist, who gave so much to the world.

Fifty years after Voyager’s liftoff, there’s something fitting about Blind Willie Johnson’s introduction to children’s literature. Maybe it’s because the only place as limitless as the depths of space are the expanding horizons of a child’s mind. For a man whose options in life were few, Johnson continues to defy barriers, blowing past the confines of place, race, and the space between generations like Voyager clearing the sun’s heliosphere, charting a course to transcendence. With Blind Willie Johnson up there, the night sky doesn’t seem so dark after all.