Art & Creativity Quote by Alexis Korner

Korner smuggles a provocation into a throwaway "I guess": the blues is a socially sanctioned split mind. Calling it "the only form of schizophrenia" isn’t a clinical claim so much as a cultural diagnosis, a way to name what the music lets people do in public that would otherwise read as instability. The blues formalizes contradiction - joy shot through with grief, toughness cohabiting with vulnerability, resignation that somehow swings. You can be broken and still perform competence; you can confess without begging forgiveness. That double-voiced state is the point.

The line works because it drags a taboo into the open and then flips it into praise. "Organised itself" credits the music, not institutions: the form evolved a grammar (twelve bars, call-and-response, bent notes) that turns raw psychic dissonance into something legible, repeatable, teachable. "Legal" signals the larger bargain: society tolerates certain kinds of intensity if they arrive packaged as art. "Beneficial" is the sting. The blues doesn't just vent private pain; it manufactures communal use-value - catharsis, endurance, even a kind of informal truth-telling that polite culture can’t manage.

Context matters: Korner was a central broker of British blues in the postwar years, translating an African American tradition into a UK scene hungry for authenticity and release. His quip doubles as a defense of the music against respectability politics and a reminder that what looks like pathology in one setting becomes culture in another, once there’s a backbeat and a room ready to listen.