“Mercedes Benz” was recorded this day in 1970. “Mercedes Benz” is a lonely blues tune about the illusory happiness promised (but rarely delivered) by the pursuit of worldly goods, a hippie-era rejection of the consumerist ideals that Joplin saw growing up as a self-described “middle-class white chick” in Port Arthur, Texas. She had come to California in the early ’60s and quickly earned a place as one of the leading musical lights in a generation that shared her utopian anti-materialism. When Joplin sang, in the second and third verses of “Mercedes Benz,” for “a color TV” and “a night on the town,” she knew all too well that neither would bring her peace. “It’s the want of something that gives you the blues,” she once said. “It’s not what isn’t, it’s what you wish was that makes unhappiness.” youtube/watch?v=Qev-i9-VKlY
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 21:44:42 +0000
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