Janis Joplin's transgression in blues tradition: focusing on blues performance

블루스 전통에서 바라본 제니스 조플린의 위반 : 공연을 중심으로

While Janis Joplin is generally known as a hippie rock star of an untimely death to Korean audience, she is more strongly evoked in the image of blues mama in American context. Blues, definitely based on African-American vernacular tradition, is defined as a matrix, which is "a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit," to borrow Houston A. Baker's expression. This article explores how her life and music can be understood in blues tradition, especially in terms of personal and social transgression for which she was criticized, focusing on her blues performance. First of all, born and growing up in southern Texas between 1940s and 1960s, she expressed her innate suspicion against segregation and white supremacy, actively embracing rich black musical heritage of the area. Second, against the normative social and moral expectation of a middle class white woman to be a suburban housewife, she sought her own desire, whether it was professional ambition or sexual possibility. Third, beyond the selling image of a heterosexually lascivious blues mama, she dared to be a homosexual and bisexual, while it was not publically acknowledged. Along with her alcohol and drug dependence, such transgressions against normative social expectation were not made without her inner conflict, leaving a trace of trauma, hesitation, and the blues. While she was "buried alive in the blues," as a sacrifice at the altar of the 1960s, she still remains "alive" provoking "fire inside of everyone of us."