The existentialautotrip.com, this blog, asks us to think deeply about ourselves, who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.
In reference to developing into the person we want to be.
It’s upbeat and positive.

Reading the second book of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, I came across this existential bit of philosophy born of the negativism in Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism.

I include it here because however strongly I reject the negativism, it leaves us with a lot to think about.
Here’s the background.

The two BFFs haven’t seen each other in years.
In the interim, one is now a well-connected novelist and the other is very sick, very poor, raising a child as a single-parent.
The successful one in a gloating moment refers to their positions, saying that she has won life’s race.
I’ve paraphrased Ferrante’s paragraph but this is the essence.

“She explained that I had won nothing;
that in the world there is nothing to win;
that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine and
that time simply slipped away without any meaning
and it was good just to see each other every so often
to hear the mad sound of the brain of one
echo in the mad sound of the brain the other.”

The line, “Time simply slipped away without any meaning.”
Is that true?

If not, ask ourselves, “Whither goest we?”
And are we winning?
And are our eyes on a prize worth struggling for?
In this holiday season, let’s take a moment to think our lives through.
And then make our New Year’s resolutions.

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Tagging Today
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
My 251st consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
251. A nice number. The 5.02% mark of my commitment.
A different way of looking at the passage of time.
Tick Tock.
Time is 12.01am.
On Wednesday, Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 40* with less wind than Tuesday, resulting in a feels-like temperature 32*, all in all substantially warmer than Tuesday. With sun.

Dinner is Turkey Curry with pineapple-infused coconut milk.

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Question of the Day:
What is the music genre called ‘rock and roll?’

Short Takes:
APOLOGY
It appears that large gobs of information got deleted from the post just before it got mailed and that only came to my attention thanks to a couple of bloggers.
Thank you for the heads up.
My apologies.

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Answer to Question:
What is the music genre called ‘rock and roll?’

Rock and roll (often written as rock & roll or rock 'n' roll) is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s from musical styles such as gospel, jump blues, jazz, boogie woogie, and rhythm and blues, along with country music.
While elements of what was to become

rock and roll can be heard in blues records from the 1920s and in country records of the 1930s, the genre did not acquire its name until 1954.

According to Greg Kot, "rock and roll" refers to a style of popular music originating in the U.S. in the 1950s prior to its development by the mid-1960s into "the more encompassing international style known as rock music, though the latter also continued to be known as rock and roll."
For the purpose of differentiation, this article deals with the first definition.

In the earliest rock and roll styles, either the piano or saxophone was typically the lead instrument, but these instruments were generally replaced or supplemented by guitar in the middle to late 1950s.
The beat is essentially a dance rhythm with an accentuated backbeat, which is almost always provided by a snare drum.
Classic rock and roll is usually played with one or two electric guitars (one lead, one rhythm), a double bass or string bass or (after the mid-1950s) an electric bass guitar, and a drum kit.

Beyond simply a musical style, rock and roll, as seen in movies, in fan magazines, and on television, influenced lifestyles, fashion, attitudes, and language.
In addition, rock and roll may have contributed to the civil rights movement because both African-American and white American teenagers enjoyed the music.
It went on to spawn various genres, often without the initially characteristic backbeat, that are now more commonly called simply "rock music" or "rock".
The origins of rock and roll have been fiercely debated by commentators and historians of music.
There is general agreement that it arose in the Southern United States – a region that would produce most of the major early rock and roll acts – through the meeting of various influences that embodied a merging of the African musical tradition with European instrumentation.
The migration of many former slaves and their descendants to major urban centers such as St. Louis, Memphis, New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Buffalo meant that black and white residents were living in close proximity in larger numbers than ever before, and as a result heard each other's music and even began to emulate each other's fashions.
Radio stations that made white and black forms of music available to both groups, the development and spread of the gramophone record, and African-American musical styles such as jazz and swing which were taken up by white musicians, aided this process of "cultural collision".

The immediate roots of rock and roll lay in the rhythm and blues, then called "race music", and country music of the 1940s and 1950s.
Particularly significant influences were jazz, blues, gospel, country, and folk.
Commentators differ in their views of which of these forms were most important and the degree to which the new music was a re-branding of African-American rhythm and blues for a white market, or a new hybrid of black and white forms.

In the 1930s, jazz, and particularly swing, both in urban-based dance bands and blues-influenced country swing (Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican and other similar singers), were among the first music to present African-American sounds for a predominantly white audience.
One particularly noteworthy example of a jazz song with recognizably rock and roll elements is Big Joe Turner with pianist Pete Johnson's 1939 single Roll 'Em Pete, which is regarded as an important precursor of rock and roll.
The 1940s saw the increased use of blaring horns (including saxophones), shouted lyrics and boogie woogie beats in jazz-based music.

During and immediately after World War II, with shortages of fuel and limitations on audiences and available personnel, large jazz bands were less economical and tended to be replaced by smaller combos, using guitars, bass and drums.
In the same period, particularly on the West Coast and in the Midwest, the development of jump blues, with its guitar riffs, prominent beats and shouted lyrics, prefigured many later developments.
In the documentary film Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, Keith Richards proposes that Chuck Berry developed his brand of rock and roll by transposing the familiar two-note lead line of jump blues piano directly to the electric guitar, creating what is instantly recognizable as rock guitar. Similarly, country boogie and Chicago electric blues supplied many of the elements that would be seen as characteristic of rock and roll.
Inspired by electric blues, Chuck Berry introduced an aggressive guitar sound to rock and roll, and established the electric guitar as its centerpiece, adapting his rock band instrumentation from the basic blues band instrumentation of a lead guitar, second chord instrument, bass and drums.

Left:
Bill Haley
William John Clifton Haley (July 6, 1925 – February 9, 1981) was an American rock and roll musician.
He is credited by many with first popularizing this form of music in the early 1950s with his group Bill Haley & His Comets and million-selling hits such as "Rock Around the Clock", "See You Later, Alligator", "Shake, Rattle and Roll", "Rocket 88", "Skinny Minnie", and "Razzle Dazzle".
He has sold over 60 million records worldwide and has been described as the greatest musical pioneer of the 20th century.

Second from left:
Buddy Holly
Charles Hardin Holley (September 7, 1936 – February 3, 1959), known as Buddy Holly, was an American musician, singer-songwriter and record producer who was a central and pioneering figure of mid-1950s rock and roll.
During his short career, Holly wrote, recorded, and produced his own material.
He is often regarded as the artist who defined the traditional rock-and-roll lineup of two guitars, bass, and drums.
He was a major influence on later popular music artists, including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Weezer, and Elton John.
He was among the first artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 13 in its list of "100 Greatest Artists".

Second from right:
The Coasters are an American rhythm and blues/rock and roll vocal group who had a string of hits in the late 1950s.
Beginning with "Searchin'" and "Young Blood", their most memorable songs were written by the songwriting and producing team of Leiber and Stoller.
The Coasters' association with Leiber and Stoller was an immediate success.
Together they created a string of good-humored "storytelling" hits that are some of the most entertaining from the original era of rock and roll.
Although the Coasters originated outside of mainstream doo-wop, their records were so frequently imitated that they became an important part of the doo-wop legacy through the 1960s.

Right:
Ivory Joe Hunter (October 10, 1914 – November 8, 1974) was an American rhythm-and-blues singer, songwriter, and pianist.
After a series of hits on the US R&B chart starting in the mid-1940s, he became more widely known for his hit recording "Since I Met You Baby" (1956).
He was billed as The Baron of the Boogie, and also known as The Happiest Man Alive.
His musical output ranged from R&B to blues, boogie-woogie, and country music, and Hunter made a name in all of those genres.
Uniquely, he was honored at both the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Grand Ole Opry.

Rock and roll arrived at a time of considerable technological change, soon after the development of the electric guitar, amplifier and microphone, and the 45 rpm record.
There were also changes in the record industry, with the rise of independent labels like Atlantic, Sun and Chess servicing niche audiences and a similar rise of radio stations that played their music.

It was the realization that relatively affluent white teenagers were listening to this music that led to the development of what was to be defined as rock and roll as a distinct genre.
Because the development of rock and roll was an evolutionary process, no single record can be identified as unambiguously "the first" rock and roll record.
Contenders for the title of "first rock and roll record" include "The Fat Man" by Fats Domino (1949),
Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Strange Things Happening Everyday" (1944), Goree Carter's "Rock Awhile" (1949),Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint" (1949), which was later covered by Bill Haley & His Comets in 1952, "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (Ike Turner and his band The Kings of Rhythm), recorded by Sam Phillips for Sun Records in March 1951.
In terms of its wide cultural impact across society in the US and elsewhere, Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock", recorded in April 1954 but not a commercial success until the following year, is generally recognized as an important milestone, but it was preceded by many recordings from earlier decades in which elements of rock and roll can be clearly discerned.

Other artists with early rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Gene Vincent.
Chuck Berry's 1955 classic "Maybellene" in particular features a distorted electric guitar solo with warm overtones created by his small valve amplifier.
However, the use of distortion was predated by electric blues guitarists such as Joe Hill Louis, Guitar Slim, Willie Johnson of Howlin' Wolf's band, and Pat Hare; the latter two also made use of distorted power chords in the early 1950s.
Also in 1955, Bo Diddley introduced the "Bo Diddley beat" and a unique electric guitar style, influenced by African and Afro-Cuban music and in turn influencing many later artists.

Thank you Wikipedia.

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Good morning on this Wednesday, December 19, Christmas now only 6 days away.
Less than a week.
Today we talked about a passage in a book that should lead us to introspect our lives.
We brought up a different way to measure time: 5,000 posts, to click one off each day and watch time slip away; and watch our efforts here at the blog to make sure we enrich each day. And we took a cursory peek at rock and roll!

Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?

See you soon.

Love

Dom