Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz

["Ralph Dumain" <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: simon smith <clov@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tuesday, May 04, 1999 6:43 AM


>"The Negro spirituals, antecedents of the blues, were slave songs and as
>such combined the lament of unfreedom with its oppressed confirmation.
>Moreover, it is difficult to isolate the authentic Negro elements in
>jazz. The white lumpenproletariat also participated in its prehistory,
>during the period preceding its thrust into the spotlight of a society
>which seemed to be waiting for it and which had long been familiar with
>its impulses through the cakewalk and tap dancing."
>
>        Adorno, 'Prisms' p 122


This quote says nothing at all, serves no other function here than as as
incantion from the great Frankfurt master.  This sort of behavior leads me
to believe that the academic knowledge industry is even more banal than the
so-called culture industry.

>My impression is that the upholders of 'black culture' in America have
>an interest in treating it as a fairly pure statement of resistance to
>oppression and also paradoxically cocooned from the influence of the
>dominant culture. I strongly doubt whether this approach can be
>sustained.

So far no one but you has said anything about purity.  However,
acknowledging resistance as a topic would be a start.  It is impossible for
black culture to be insulated form the majority culture, as its whole
history is conditioned by confinement and pressure from the majority
culture.  Nothing is pure, because nothing falls from the sky.  Nonetheless,
there is a great sea change between both daily life and the marketing
strategies of business under segregation and what we've seen since the
1970s, in which both the "colonization of the life world" by the mass media
and the integration of black people into mainstream consumerism and the mass
media has created a situation where the cultural formation of black youth
becomes a direct product of mainstream media consumer influences in a way
that was impossible 40 years ago.  Are you old enough to have lived through
this change?  Do you have a clue?

Ironically, the last time I became embroiled in a debate over music, I took
a position against hip-hop while certain academic mandarins of
Frankfurt-school footnote-whoring defended it, and this from the people who
supposedly know something about the corrupting influences of the culture
industry.  Despicable academic mediocrities and shits!

>Adorno heard jazz as a populist cultural form because that
>was what he was concerned with - the ease with which it had become such,
>the role it played.

OOOh, jazz must be bad becase it's popular.  If it gives anyone pleasure, it
must be suspect.  Oooooooh.  The role it played.  What did he know of the
role it played?  No, don't experience pleasure, have no fun.  Be grim and
miserable, listen to your dreadful Shoenberg.

>One can hear a great deal in the inner form of a
>piece of music - and it is always a reflection of the society around it.


And what do you know about this?  You've said nothing at all.

>Similarly with dance. It is not hard to see what is happening with the
>jitterbug - it is there in the form of the dance - the self-reduction to
>tight, spasmodic movements, to the position of a helpless insect who
>revels in his helplessness because he cannot imagine another way to be.


What is this shit?  A purely arbitrary judgment.  Adorno somewhere once
equated rhythm with fascism.  Vile European shit!

Please keep these responses coming.  Display your pathetic intellectual
mediocrity for your tiny audience to see.  Show the world how intellectually
useless and dependent you really are.