A few days ago, a song came to my mind that I had heard and liked some years ago, “Natural Blues,” but that just happened to be played on the radio for the first time in a long time. I had not forgotten the song, simple and somewhat repetitive in terms of its lyrics but filled with surprising depth in its combination of blues singing sampled from a groundbreaking collection of somewhat obscure southern blues songs [1] and Moby’s own dance-pop. Being someone who (perhaps surprisingly) has an interest in both blues and dance music, and who in general likes the tuneful combination of vastly distinct genres and elements in a harmonious whole, it is perhaps unsurprising that I would have appreciated this song in particular, and to have thought fondly of hearing it more frequently on the radio because of its emotional resonance, even if the fact that it was not a huge hit means that few stations would probably think to add it to their restricted playlists.

Earlier today, I read about some threats that Australia-born rapper Iggy Azalea is facing from the hacker group Anonymous. This particular group, which has a vigilante populist agenda and an openly avowed hostility to elite corruption in business and politics, claims to have enough goods on this particular performer to make her life a torment and to completely destroy her popularity because of some sort of x-rated sex tape they have acquired somehow. Now, without being too profane, it seems hard to imagine that any sex tape would ruin a performer’s career in our present decadent times, unless there was some sort of crime involved. I must also openly admit that I think Iggy Azalea as a singer is more than a bit of a fraud, coming from a reasonably comfortable background as an Australian raised in Georgia who nonetheless presents a persona as someone who has lived a hard-knock life. That said, I still have a deep and visceral hostility to seeing people bullied and threatened with blackmail, or having archival research used to make their private life public and to bring them suffering.

As it happens, one of the key figures in recording the archival collection of blues songs that ended up being so prominently sampled in Moby’s album “Play,” including “Trouble So Hard,” the song sampled in “Natural Blues,” was a fellow named Alan Lomax [2]. Like many people of his time, Alan Lomax was passionate about social justice, being a Jew opposed to racial and ethnic discrimination, and holding what was viewed as particularly left-wing political views. Among his passions was recording the music of sharecroppers and others suffering from debt peonage, blues music richly infused with injustice and abuse and exploitation. Ironically enough, as a result of his passion against exploitation and to preserve the memory of the beautiful but gloomy blues music created at the peripheral regions of the South, Lomax was hounded as a possible Communist sympathizer, blacklisted, and forced by the continual pressure from the FBI to move to Europe for many years. The move merely internationalized his folk archival research, allowing him to bring obscure but beautiful music to the attention of the world, and eventually leading to a great deal of personal vindication of his work and his lack of taint with association with Communism despite the slanders and libels he suffered.

Archives serve as the memory banks of civilization, the raw material that allow people to dig up facts and research and to connect the recorded experiences of the past to serve as the source of insight for the present world. Those facts and lives and accounts that fail to be preserved are lost to history, and are known only to God, like our own deeply private and heartfelt cries to God in the darkness when no one else is around. The very act of preserving some of these heartfelt cries against the injustice of our world led Alan Lomax to be blacklisted and an exile from the land of his birth. Yet this same archive allows people to be blackmailed and tormented by those who wish to pursue their own aggressive political agenda. It is perhaps a sad irony that an archive of the suffering of people can be turned into works of beauty and pleasure, while the archive of private and personal pleasure can be exploited for great suffering and torment, or that an archivist can be the target of political pressure and torment and a different archivist can torment and pressure others who happen to be a part of that archive, but our lives are filled with sad ironies.

And yet we should not be surprised that the collective memory should be filled with such ironies when our own individual memories are often the source of great pleasure and great pain. When we listen to a song that takes us back to a different time, it often resonates with us because it speaks to our own memory or our own present emotional state that is, if it is fortunate, destined to become a memory to be drawn upon in the future for reflection. And yet as our memories can be the source of our insight and even of our pleasure, they can also be the source of much torment, whether that torment is being reminded of horrors as we go about our daily business, or whether the traumas of our lives seep out into our nightmares when we are at our most vulnerable. Just as our memories are drawn from our experiences, so that the potential they have to bring us pleasure and pain depends in large part on the lives that we have lived, the same is true for our collective memory. So long as injustice and exploitation are an integral and common part of our world, the archives of personal and societal memory will be a source of torment for those who feel compelled to speak as well as for those who wish for those memories to sink into oblivion. If we desire to have better memories, we must live better lives than we know how to live.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_%28Moby_album%29

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Lomax