The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  A quote: “Beware of a change to a strange form of music, taking it to be a danger to the whole, but never have the ways of music moved without the greatest political laws being moved.” That’s Plato’s Republic.

  Well, there’s no question that the high purpose of music was captured in William Congreve’s phrase: “Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast.” It has been widely, and wrongly, quoted as saying “the savage beast,” which appears on the surface at least to be redundant. In any case, music from either perspective is a modifying element with a modulating effect: It brings sensibility and order to chaos. Those musical forms that reflect chaos are seen to be, from a hegemonic, elite perspective, unworthy of recognition or respect. In fact, they don’t count as music at all. The aesthetic value of these nonmusical, chaotic forms—the frenzy of ragtime, the frenzy of jazz—reflected in part the chaos of the social circumstances faced by its artists, including Creole musicians losing their jobs downtown, where they were playing European-inspired music in New Orleans, to go uptown, where they had interactions with these more indigenous Negro populations. That meant that there was some kind of fusion going on, and therefore the musical and aesthetic values of the musicians were being “corrupted,” so that the “high” and redemptive purposes of the music—to regulate the savage—was compromised by the influence of the very forms of chaos that the music sought to relieve.

  The perception of music’s purpose is always indivisible, I think, from the political and social contexts through which folk, including critics, interpret the music. Remember in, I think, 1918, the Times-Picayune, the newspaper in the birthplace of jazz, New Orleans, the Crescent City, argued against the uncivil-like behaviors of musicians, as well as the uncivil character of the music. “This is not music that is fit for polite society,” they opined, and I’m paraphrasing here. “As a result, we should suppress it.” So musically speaking, the aesthetic representation of the Western conception of music, with melody and harmony and thematic resolution and tonal structure and so on, was juxtaposed in the minds of the cultural elite to musical forms that fell outside of the realm of music’s purpose, or, in keeping with the Greek philosophy of your quote, its telos. The rhythmic intensity of African music, emerging from racially subordinated communities, subverted the telos, the goal of music as determined by dominant society, resulting in a huge bifurcation of musical priorities and aesthetic choices. For the dominant, elite society, music facilitated the rituals of intimate social interaction in close quarters. For the masses, music accompanied big social events that facilitated a sense of social cohesion and personal agency in chaotic and conflicted social circumstances. Now that bifurcation, like all dualities, isn’t pure, since social phenomena are fluid and complex, but I think it’s a functional definition of the social and aesthetic tensions that prevailed.

  From a social place, what is being said?

  Well, in a sense, I think we can look at what was happening in New Orleans at the time, from the late 1890s to about 1915 or 1920, as a precursor to the culture wars that are now going on as we debate the differences between Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, multicentrism, multiculturalism, and the like. There were racial forces behind distinctions between European music and so-called non-European, or African-inspired, music. Those distinctions were really about racial caste, about keeping Negroes in their place, and about assigning less merit to African cultural products and forms of music than to European ones. The irony, of course, is that white musicians later appropriated African forms of music. The first jazz recording, which appeared in 1917 from the Original Dixieland Band, was a whitened and diluted and domesticated version of African-inspired black music. If it wasn’t quite rhythmically challenged, it was certainly a watered-down version of black music rendered palatable to a wider, whiter American audience.

  The racial distinction between European and African music was sometimes coded as the differentiation between what’s good and bad music, what’s productive and nonproductive music, and what’s edifying and what’s debased music. Folk were trying to figure out the place of African people in American culture, and the arguments over music were key to the process. So the aesthetics were politicized. The question of what to do with ragtime, and then blues, jazz, and gospel, was never simply a matter of taste, or should I say, that taste was never merely a matter of musical preference extracted from the prevailing racial context. Syncopation indexed race as surely as black skin. Plus, the caste question was never far away, since these ragtime musicians were not often educated musicians who had absorbed the finer points of European music. Their musical trace had to be washed away from the palette of American music, which was little more than an imitation of the so-called classical forms flowing in from Europe. The kick is that across the waters, European classical musicians and composers are digging this indigenous American music being created by mostly black musicians of an ostensibly degraded and inferior pedigree. Figures like Debussy and Stravinsky, and even Charles Ives, are being influenced by ragtime, even as the aesthetic guardians of Western culture are dissing ragtime.

  Struggles over music were about social regulation because music was the front line of breaking down racial barriers. Later in the twentieth century, black musicians would play a crucial role in brokering an acceptance of African Americans, limited though it was, within the regime of American apartheid in the South, where segregation ruled. It sounds trite to say but black music, to a degree, united peoples of different races and genders and cultures in this kind of polyphonic expression of African sensibility. But they had to fight through the social stigma attached to blackness, even though, interestingly enough, in New Orleans, jazz music is also being created by Creoles. I think James Lincoln Collier, the jazz critic, has read this entirely wrong. He says because those musicians were Creoles, they weren’t black, and therefore we can’t claim that jazz music has black origins. But as Mike Tyson might say, that’s ludicrous. Such an argument as Collier advances denies the complexity of race, how it is not simply a biological fact but a socially determined identity. The notion that jazz is not a “black” music because it was created by Creoles not only is a reflection of phenotypical literalism but ignores the politics and history of racial identity in America. A crucial feature of the American racial contract has involved the thorny question of interracial or mixed race identity, or what is anthropologically and sociologically termed miscegenation.

  That debate has been renewed recently with the rise of Tiger Woods to prominence in golf. Is Tiger black or Thai, or both, and how do we talk about being both and hence not exclusively either, and how does that nuance our comprehension of racial identity? Contemporary debates about miscegenation were precipitated by the sorts of arguments around race and music that occurred in the Creole–influenced Crescent City of New Orleans back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was an Americanization of New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase in the early 1800s. New Orleans, racially and ethnically speaking, was a mixture of French and Spanish and indigenous American elements. The Creole, or the lightskinned Negro, the French-inflected mulatto, was the product of a fusion of black and white. Creoles began to create ragtime and jazz music only after they had interactions with indigenous Negro or African-inflected musicians in New Orleans, a fact that causes me to be skeptical about Collier’s argument that jazz is not identifiable as black music. One can hear in such denials reverberations of the stigma of blackness—of black skin and skill, of black blood, metaphorically speaking, of black styles—that was rife in American culture at the turn of the twentieth century. It’s a stigma that persists to this day, even if, ironically enough, black popular culture is the idiom, is the grammar, through which America is globally articulated.

  Finally, I think piano-based ragtime accentuated percussive features of black music that were later expanded in ensembles, which highlighted the shift to the multi-instrumentality of jazz music, including, say, a saxophone, a trumpet, and a drum, which facilitated the process of improvisation
that was strictly forbidden in classical music, which had to be read note for note off a sheet. It was eye music versus ear music, music that had to be read versus music that had to be heard and learned by ear, the visual versus the aural, so to speak. Since there was initially little sheet music in jazz, at least not to the degree or in the manner of classical music, musicians were free to improvise, to remake the song as they played it each time. There was a structural freshness to the music’s improvisational quality, allowing the musicians to enlarge or diminish themes, to rearrange musical elements, to alter tempos and tones, as the occasion or mood dictated. There’s still a corpus there, a body of ideas and themes and techniques, but they are the raw material of the riffs that constitute and extend the impulse to improvisation. A huge feature of the debates over African versus European music was over what sorts of music contained our cultural and, really, our political values. If democracy is what jazz is about, glimpsed in the equal participation of varying elements in the construction of a whole, European classical music is about a kind of oligarchy of aesthetic taste; that is, there is tight control over what can be played, what can be said, what can be articulated, and who gets a chance to play it.

  Talk about the imagery.

  An interesting feature of African music is how it incorporates the communal basis of racial and cultural survival into its aesthetic vocabulary. That’s number one. Number two, African-inflected music, at least in the case of black music in America, existed and eventually flourished in a foreign land, in a context where black folk had to struggle to create a culture of signification among each other as a survival strategy in an oppressive culture. So the double entendre, from the spirituals, blues, and so on, allowed blacks to communicate with one another in liberating fashion. When slaves sang “Green trees are bending/My soul stands a’trembling/Ain’t got long to stay here,” white plantation owners were being entertained while black slaves were being emancipated, since they were signaling each other about when Harriet Tubman was coming through to liberate slaves and lead them along the Underground Railroad to freedom. So the double entendre fused emancipation and entertainment in many African and African American musical forms. But black emancipation and white entertainment weren’t the only functions of the double entendre.

  In jazz music, the double entendre went secular as it funneled sexual play into the aesthetic creations of black folk culture. Or should I say, the aesthetic creation funnels the sexual play of certain subcultures in black life, especially among working-class black folk. But the sexual did not exhaust the double entendre in the cultural realm, since black folk through our music signified on what we understood ourselves to be and played with those images, whether of the barbarian, the savage, and so on, even as we enlarged on the narratives of complex humanity that all great art promotes. We could parody the stereotypes of black identity even as we extended our creative freedom to engage our libidos, to revel in sexual mischief, to take utter joy in what Richard Wright called the “erotic exultation” of some forms of music. He was referring primarily to gospel, but I think it can be applied equally to early ragtime and jazz as well.

  Another level of double entendre reflected the utter playfulness of linguisticality and orality at the heart of black culture. Long before poststructuralists who were hooked on European traveling theories of postmodernism talked about the playfulness of culture and language, black folk comprehended jouissance, the sheer hedonistic pleasure and delight of experimenting and playing with black cultural forms, including music. A crucial feature of double entendres was the articulation of culturally coded messages and styles that signified on white dominant cultural structures while promoting black self-definition. Even though the dominant culture may have viewed blacks as barbarians and savages, as dumb animals incapable of abstract reasoning or “high” culture, they nevertheless reveled in the robustly playful elements of black cultural creativity. At their best, black folk refused to get stuck in narrow Victorian modes of identity where they repressed consciousness of their sexual selves while exclusively engaging their spiritual nature. They didn’t buy into that bifurcation between mind and body. As critic Michael Ventura argued, African cultures often overcame the Cartesian dualism of the West because they contended that there was no such thing as being mental and spiritual over here and being physically embodied over there.

  The double entendre was about black folk having their cake and eating it too, so to speak; it was about healing the rift between body and soul; it was about playfulness while contesting white power in signifying fashion; and it was about enjoying and celebrating their culture even as vicious stereotypes abounded. That was terribly liberating to black folk who had been indoctrinated with the belief that they were inferior, that they were, in the words of Margaret Walker Alexander, “black and poor and small.” You must remember that at the turn of the century, black popular culture was broadly assailed in magazines and journals. A title from one magazine asked, “Did jazz put the sin in syncopation?” The Ladies’ Home Journal argued that young people listening to jazz music would produce a holocaust of teen births. Now where have we heard that recently? There was an enormous groundswell against black and white Americans who embraced jazz music, especially as cultural guardians were attempting to control the sexual chaos and erotic frenzy of this rhythmic, syncopated music.

  That’s because ragtime was associated with the brothel, and jazz music in the 1920s was associated with the speakeasy. Given my earlier analysis about how the physical and social contexts in which the music was played shaped its use, the brothel and speakeasy provided a space for blacks to exult in their own bodies. The speakeasy, the brothel, and other dens of ill repute are where ragtime and jazz were regularly played. So there was an association in the public mind of morally suspicious behavior and black music. This was not strictly a contention between blacks and whites, since during the Harlem Renaissance, upper-class Negroes were inveighing against the vagaries of ghetto gutter music. When you went to the cribs of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, they were playing Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms. They were not engaging the debased folk culture of the masses. Even politically progressive figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, the young A. Phillip Randolph, and Chandler Owens spurned jazz music. At some level, there’s an internalized self-abnegation, a disparagement of quotidian blackness displayed by the Negro upper crust who spurn black folk culture while uncritically deferring to European canons, codes, and norms. Thus the black cultural double entendre was directed against not only white supremacist culture but also the Negro bourgeoisie, which lacked serious appreciation for its indigenous art forms.

  Was it starting to creep a little too close to home? In modern times, we see as many white as black kids buying rap music. Is that maybe an issue?

  Absolutely! The degree to which ragtime and later jazz—especially through figures like Baby Dodds, Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and later Louis Armstrong—reached out beyond the confines of black culture certainly sparked wide cultural controversy. There’s no question that when jazz penetrated the husk of white cultural circles, there was a great deal of consternation among the white artistic and political elite. Just as with hip-hop culture today, there was an enormous degree of anxiety about black art forms like jazz darkening white artistic enclaves and social settings. As a result, white elites stepped up the policing of boundaries between black and white cultures, even as jazz inspired interracial cultural exchange. The music facilitated what Jim Crow with its segregated social practices failed to prevent: different cultures connecting and interacting. Jazz helped promote the syncretic moment, the fused moment, the moment of cultural contact and cooperation between races that existed beyond the restrictions of custom, code, and law.

  That’s why Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong, who was the young cornet player in King Oliver’s group, and others like them were dangerous to the white musical establishment, especially when jazz and its musicians flowed down the Mississippi, fanning
out from the Crescent City to Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. The music and its musicians were now mobile, and many critics deemed them even more harmful because they could reach a much larger audience, especially white youth. Jazz culture was seductive to white kids, and they turned from the quadrille, the mazurka, the waltz, and the polka of their parents to the slow drag and the hoochie-coochie, while reveling in the blues of the Delta filtering into New Orleans from Mississippi. This explosion of African creativity constituted a veritable Negropolis, a black cosmopolitanism whose influence sprawled beyond its original indigenous borders to capture large segments of American society.