How do you solve a problem like The Blues Brothers? They’re the goofy novelty duo whose enduring popularity says a great deal about our country’s thorny racial history and the commercial cooption of great American art form. To people around the world the Blues Brothers have become the face of blues: the pale, pasty, Caucasian, half-Canadian face of a deep strain of black music. The Blues Brothers leave behind a deep and complicated legacy.
They helped popularize blues and gave crucial career boosts to an army of blues, soul and R&B legends by covering their songs and featuring them in The Blues Brothers and to a much lesser extent, The Blues Brothers 2000 yet it seems both sad and inevitable that millions of Blues Brothers fans would rather hear standards performed by a pair of enthusiastic white amateur chuckle-merchants than grizzled old black professionals.
The Blues Brothers have been lionized as heroes and icons and demonized as cultural parasites. So it’s worth noting that in their very first appearance on Saturday Night Live, which just so happens to be today’s episode, they’re introduced by Don Kirshner as a blues band who had been transformed by various super-Crackers of the industry from a humble denizens of juke joints in Chicago into a “viable commercial product”. So there was definitely a sense of self-awareness wired into the Blues Brothers phenomenon from its very inception.
I am surely not the first to note that there is no real joke behind the Blues Brothers. They don’t perform parodies or do zany stage banter or appear in sketches. Nope, they pretty much just show and bang out enthusiastically amateurish and amateurishly enthusiastic renditions of blues classics. It’s an odd, joke-light conceptual bit but audiences loved John Belushi and Belushi clearly loved performing blues so perhaps it’s not terribly surprising that audiences loved the Blues Brothers as well.
As “Joliet” Jake Belusi gets by on charisma, energy and enthusiasm though when he attempts a growly talking croon he sounds disconcertingly like Dewey Cox singing “You’ve Got To Love Your Negro Man”. Today’s episode was filled with glorious firsts and iconic moments. It was also a great musical episode. Steve Martin donned kitschy Egyptian gear and struck Hieroglyphics poses to perform “King Tut”, Steve Martin and Gilda Radner united for a glorious homage to Astaire and Rogers that alternated between grace and spazziness and “Shabba Doo” and his merry band of poppers and lockers performed a funky version of “Swan Lake”. Yes, it was a great fucking episode all around.
In his monologue Martin riffed brilliantly on the old, “I’ve furtively pilfered your wallet/watch without you noticing” magician trick by inviting Bill Murray onstage and very conspicuously taking his belt and underwear by ripping them off his body.