blues people
so i'm re-reading leroi jones' blues people, the first book about jazz i ever read, and realizing just how dramatically it shaped my views and attitudes towards music and, um, society.
sure, the world's changed a lot since 1963, when the book originally appeared. not long after that, the poet jones reinvented himself as amiri baraka, reflective of the changes that were happening the larger culcha at the time. (the book's subtitle is negro music in white america, which should give you some insight into its contents.) what i learned from reading jones/baraka was that music, no, _all_ art is reflective of the social context in which it was created, and that _matters_. out of context, a song like, say, parliament's "mothership connection" might be construed as just stoned bullshit. in context, it signifies and invokes the power of myth, so that when george clinton sings "swing down, sweet chariot, stop and/let me ride," the line conjures visions of a dead african king rising from his funeral boat just before it goes over victoria falls and ascending to...you get the idea.
when i was still writing for _that paper_, i did a cover story once on lady pearl, a great (if underrecognized) blues singer from right here in the fort. later, i had the privilege of interviewing and writing about the locally born-and-bred jazzmen ronald shannon jackson and dewey redman. talk to any black person in this town over, say, 50, and you'll hear about how fort worth was -- hell, still is -- a segregated city. one of the musicians i interviewed for the blues story even talked about how one reason for robert ealey's tremendous popularity with white people was "because he used to _pop his eyes_" (spoken while the musician did a pretty convincing imitation of a lawn jockey). race is _always_ on the table when you're talking about america.
and yet, and yet. after the blues story appeared, another local muso (a white one) took me to task in a letter to the editor for giving the race angle so much play. "it's all about the music, maaan," he essentially said. and while i agree that in a perfect world (which you and i both know doesn't exist) that'd be true, we're not there yet. dewey (who remembers his family once having their car doused with urine by joyriding white kids) told me that back in the '90s, around the time of the ken burns jazz documentary, the political economy of the time dictated that black jazz musicians could once again get contracts with major labels (most of which had gutted their jazz divisions in the '80s) -- _if_ they were young and good-looking (like dewey's son joshua). when the burns doc ran and jazz failed to surge in popularity, even that avenue was shut down. now, i know that absence of commercial outlets doesn't necessarily equate with the absence of creativity and vigor in an art form, but still, it wouldn't surprise me if, in a generation, what we've historically thought of as jazz (and no, i don't count the room spray they play on the oasis) existed only in academia.
what happened, i think, is that the mtv era made role models whose appeal was primarily visual so accessible to american kids that music became almost superfluous. in today's commercial arena, image isn't the main thing, it's the _only_ thing, and today's performers are marketed like reality tv personalities: plastic popstars, laden with bling-bling, and faceless simulacra of simulacra. like non-alcoholic champagne, it's all fizz and no lift. a guy in nashville whose website i used to write for keeps waiting for the hard times in bushamerica to raise the level of political content in music. he's going to be waiting for awhile, i think. in general, the social and political dialogue in this country has degenerated to the level of talk radio, the electronic equivalent of the drunk guy at the end of the bar who won't shut up. ("i like toby keith." "i like the dixie chicks." "i'll kick your ass.") so, entertainment-wise, what we get is probably what we deserve: commercials for conspicuous consumption on the one hand, solipsistic psalms to self-absorption on the other. sure, there's interesting stuff happening on the fringes, maybe more now than ever before, but who's listening?
will "we the people" ever again agree on anything the way we supposedly did on elvis (or the beatles, or michael jackson, or jfk)? probably not: as a nation, we're as divided now as we ever were back in the '60s, maybe more so. polarized? shee-it. the few decades of the mass marketing model (in a nutshell: divide and conquer) that we've experienced have left us so segmented that a real consensus (not a stage-managed consensus) is almost unimaginable. in an environment like this, it actually seemed _brave_ to me when i heard conor oberst from bright eyes open his set at trees with a song about walking away from a fight on the eve of the iraq invasion. (it's on his new "folk" record.) so what, you ask -- do you really wanna hear what, say, ludacris has to say about the war in iraq?
sure. for starters.
sure, the world's changed a lot since 1963, when the book originally appeared. not long after that, the poet jones reinvented himself as amiri baraka, reflective of the changes that were happening the larger culcha at the time. (the book's subtitle is negro music in white america, which should give you some insight into its contents.) what i learned from reading jones/baraka was that music, no, _all_ art is reflective of the social context in which it was created, and that _matters_. out of context, a song like, say, parliament's "mothership connection" might be construed as just stoned bullshit. in context, it signifies and invokes the power of myth, so that when george clinton sings "swing down, sweet chariot, stop and/let me ride," the line conjures visions of a dead african king rising from his funeral boat just before it goes over victoria falls and ascending to...you get the idea.
when i was still writing for _that paper_, i did a cover story once on lady pearl, a great (if underrecognized) blues singer from right here in the fort. later, i had the privilege of interviewing and writing about the locally born-and-bred jazzmen ronald shannon jackson and dewey redman. talk to any black person in this town over, say, 50, and you'll hear about how fort worth was -- hell, still is -- a segregated city. one of the musicians i interviewed for the blues story even talked about how one reason for robert ealey's tremendous popularity with white people was "because he used to _pop his eyes_" (spoken while the musician did a pretty convincing imitation of a lawn jockey). race is _always_ on the table when you're talking about america.
and yet, and yet. after the blues story appeared, another local muso (a white one) took me to task in a letter to the editor for giving the race angle so much play. "it's all about the music, maaan," he essentially said. and while i agree that in a perfect world (which you and i both know doesn't exist) that'd be true, we're not there yet. dewey (who remembers his family once having their car doused with urine by joyriding white kids) told me that back in the '90s, around the time of the ken burns jazz documentary, the political economy of the time dictated that black jazz musicians could once again get contracts with major labels (most of which had gutted their jazz divisions in the '80s) -- _if_ they were young and good-looking (like dewey's son joshua). when the burns doc ran and jazz failed to surge in popularity, even that avenue was shut down. now, i know that absence of commercial outlets doesn't necessarily equate with the absence of creativity and vigor in an art form, but still, it wouldn't surprise me if, in a generation, what we've historically thought of as jazz (and no, i don't count the room spray they play on the oasis) existed only in academia.
what happened, i think, is that the mtv era made role models whose appeal was primarily visual so accessible to american kids that music became almost superfluous. in today's commercial arena, image isn't the main thing, it's the _only_ thing, and today's performers are marketed like reality tv personalities: plastic popstars, laden with bling-bling, and faceless simulacra of simulacra. like non-alcoholic champagne, it's all fizz and no lift. a guy in nashville whose website i used to write for keeps waiting for the hard times in bushamerica to raise the level of political content in music. he's going to be waiting for awhile, i think. in general, the social and political dialogue in this country has degenerated to the level of talk radio, the electronic equivalent of the drunk guy at the end of the bar who won't shut up. ("i like toby keith." "i like the dixie chicks." "i'll kick your ass.") so, entertainment-wise, what we get is probably what we deserve: commercials for conspicuous consumption on the one hand, solipsistic psalms to self-absorption on the other. sure, there's interesting stuff happening on the fringes, maybe more now than ever before, but who's listening?
will "we the people" ever again agree on anything the way we supposedly did on elvis (or the beatles, or michael jackson, or jfk)? probably not: as a nation, we're as divided now as we ever were back in the '60s, maybe more so. polarized? shee-it. the few decades of the mass marketing model (in a nutshell: divide and conquer) that we've experienced have left us so segmented that a real consensus (not a stage-managed consensus) is almost unimaginable. in an environment like this, it actually seemed _brave_ to me when i heard conor oberst from bright eyes open his set at trees with a song about walking away from a fight on the eve of the iraq invasion. (it's on his new "folk" record.) so what, you ask -- do you really wanna hear what, say, ludacris has to say about the war in iraq?
sure. for starters.
posted by stashdauber at 9:22 PM
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