The first time I ever heard R. L. Burnside was when his CD Too Bad Jim came out a few years ago. From the first notes of the first track, it was clear that here was the blues unhinged and returned to its deepest level. Playing music that sounded like it was made before electricity but was coming out of an electric guitar and being forced through an amp anyway, with a whole lot of fight, Burnside sang

If you come to my house,

Don't see me no-

Where around,

You know I'm somewhere, Lord,

Shakin' 'em on down.

The wacked-out, simple brilliance of the music and those words convinced me that this was a fight Burnside was going to win.

Beck-cohort Tom Rothrock, Beal Dabbs, and Atari Teenage Riot-member Alec Empire took the music of the 71-year old North Mississippi blues guitarist and remixed it to produce ten of the twelve tracks on this CD. The other two are unadulterated Burnside. (It's just him on the live recording of "Come On In," and on "Just Like a Woman" he's joined by drummer Calvin Jackson, a peer.) As misguided as this project sounds (even the press release admits it), especially following A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, Burnside's uninteresting collaboration with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Come On In is impossible for even the most hard-core blues purist to dislike. And if "Rollin' Tumblin'" or "Let My Baby Ride" aren't hits, it proves that fans of electronica just aren't listening. Come On In is better than a million Stereolab CD's. Now that it's come out, you have my permission to take Emperor Tomato Ketchup et al., to the Salvation Army, where they can rest in shoeboxes until their unfortunate rediscovery by the generation after the next.

Come On In doesn't just sound like some guys fucking with his music. The Burnside sound—haunted, scary, thundering—is not abandoned. Playing slide guitar in a style far, far removed from what Stevie Ray Vaughn knew as the blues, and singing like he once got it in the neck but decided he didn't care, Burnside gets locked into grooves he forgets he's even in. His repetitions aren't smooth and funky, like his late label mate Junior Kimbrough's, though. Burnside's groove sounds like it's being dragged across the floor by its boots in a state of semiconsciousness. It's defiantly unpretty and glorious. He plays like, yeah, he wants to save his soul and all that, but he's realized the only way to do it is to keep doing what he's been doing all along.

In addition to Jackson, Burnside is joined by his grandson Cedric on drums, and sometimes Kenny Brown, another of R. L.'s contemporaries, plays additional guitar. There's something great about an electronic music album built around musicians who would never even consider using a bass. The whomp all comes from the drums and the guitars. Rothrock plays this up on "Let My Baby Ride," turning the track into an insistent chant. In fact, the way Burnside's voice is used on Come On In is always interesting and sometimes really amazing. That's why this CD rises above so much other technology-based music and cutesy sample-orgies. Burnside, to paraphrase a line of his Rothrock uses in the third part of "Come On In," is "the only sanctified guy on there."

The conclusion is this: More old people should make electronica CD's. In fact, more old people should have access to this kind of technology and be able to make whatever kind of music with it they want, even if they're not frighteningly inspired kick-ass ex-sharecropper bluesmen who've played a thousand nights in juke joints in the middle of nowhere. And then they should make videos and put them on TV, and not on some jive old people channel, either. I want them right next to the other videos. We'd see about "youth culture" then. Until that happens, if you don't have the restraint to involve a person who's still alive in your remix project like Tom Rothrock did, please don't go and fuck up any Hound Dog Taylor records just because Come On In is so good.