Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.
Interpretation
Audiences appreciate raw emotion in blues music, often associating it with the pain and struggles of the artist.
Janis Joplin's quote highlights the paradoxical relationship between blues singers and their audiences; it suggests that fans often prefer artists who convey suffering and misery, as these emotions resonate deeply with the theme of blues music. This expectation can place a burden on artists to maintain a persona of despair in order to connect authentically with listeners, reflecting a complex interplay between performance and personal experience.
In practice
During a speech on the emotional power of music, you might quote Janis Joplin to illustrate how artists connect with their audience.
I gotta go on doin' it the way I see it...I got no choice but to take it like I see it. I'm here to have a party while I'm on this earth...I'm gettin' it now, today. I don't even know where I'm gonna be twenty years from now, so I'm just gonna keep on rockin', cause if I start saving up bits and pieces of me...man, there ain't gonna be nothing left for Janis.
When I sing, I feel like when you're first in love. It's more than sex. It's that point two people can get to they call love, when you really touch someone for the first time, but it's gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills.
Like most girls I'm always really self-conscious about do I look fat, if my legs are short, if I'm weird shaped, but when I go on stage, man, it never occurs to me. I think I look beautiful.
I won't quit to become someone's old lady.
You can feel all things at once, so why not wear all things at once?
Wait a minute, maybe I can do anything.
Hail, hail rock and roll / Deliver me from the days of old.
I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... It's the best part of us probably.
I don't really look at the charts at all. If anything, I try to out-do what I've done before. I try to make music that I like and I trust my own judgement with what will work with a wider audience. If you compare yourself to the charts, you lose perspective on what you're doing and why you're doing it.
Blacks own so little of the music business, it's pathetic. But I see that changing soon. Black artists, black businessmen and women will unite.
To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
The whole of life itself expresses the blues. That's why I always say the blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling and understanding. The blues can be about anything pertaining to the facts of life. The blues call on God as much as a spiritual song do.
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