The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  A hierarchy of sorts was generated among blacks when relocated Southerners who had been in place for even a year looked down on and teased their more recently arrived compatriots. It was pretty hilarious for barely seasoned former Southerners to view their kindred as hicks or “Bamas”—the sometimes affectionate catchall term for a country bumpkin or hayseed that derives from a shortened form of Alabama. Like some second-generation Mexican immigrants who were among the most visible and articulate opponents of further immigration because it challenged their own space and security, as well as their ability to smoothly assimilate, many black migrants expressed the most vocal outrage at newly arrived hicks, when they were barely “unhicked” themselves. Chicago was little more than a suburb of Mississippi, and you can trace that genealogy all the way from blues icon Howling Wolf to the stable of stars on Chess Records and the blues lounges along 43 Street, most famously, perhaps, the Checkerboard Lounge. So these racial contretemps within black culture were part of the black modernist experience as blacks negotiated between the margins and the mainstream.

  Talk about the musical establishment and their criticism of this new music, jazz.

  As already noted, the first jazz record was made in 1917 by an all-white group, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, led by Paul Whiteman. How suggestive can that be, if you break down and parse Paul and white man, which is both Freudian and Jungian, since the symbol and the archetype converge? Paul, we remember, was the first great missionary of Christianity into the gentile world, and so Paul Whiteman as a missionary of sorts, acclaimed by whites as the first great king of jazz, is just too much of a signification to overlook. And “white man” as the acceptable ambassador of this music to the white world was surely glimpsed in Paul Whiteman’s Aeolian Hall concert, which marked the aesthetic mediation and economic commercialization of a black music harshly demonized by dominant society. The first jazz record and Whiteman’s Aeolian Hall concert tell us that part of the music establishment wanted to commodify and control this music—to package, market, and distribute jazz to consumers in the marketplace, benefiting its white distributors, appropriators, and dilutors. Even as the music was being dissed in elite white circles, the white musical establishment still wanted to make a buck off of jazz. The artists weren’t making the biggest money; it was the producers who were cleaning up. If you were a songwriter, you might sell your music, but you weren’t going to accumulate enough capital to really make a living from that. So the white record producers, executives, and owners who were interested in jazz reaped enormous financial remuneration from black creativity and genius, a pattern, by the way, that continues to this day in some artistic circles.

  Still, there were huge debates about whether this was real music, in the European sense. Moreover, conservative elements of the musical establishment railed against jazz because they couldn’t control the music. Jazz just wasn’t the conservative music establishment’s ideal of good music. It was similar to what happened later on when ASCAP got caught with its pants down, so to speak, and was unable to control rock ‘n’ roll music because it was exclusively promoting the music of Tin Pan Alley, with artists like Cole Porter and later Frank Sinatra. As a result, ASCAP missed a huge cultural moment and overwhelming financial opportunity. Since the conservative elements of the music industry hadn’t anticipated the degree to which jazz would invade white youth subcultures and become influential in significant white circles, it settled on curtailing the music’s circulation. Louis Armstrong made a very good living because he appealed to blacks and whites. The same was true for Duke Ellington and Count Basie and the swing movement. In one sense, mainstream white swing music was the attempt to domesticate the hot beats of ragtime in early jazz into lightly syncopated orchestral riffing. But again, it wasn’t Jimmy Lunceford or Count Basie or Duke Ellington who got the biggest advantage from the swing they helped invent. Rather, it was Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Woody Herman, the Dorsey Brothers, and Gene Krupa. Harry James, who was Benny Goodman’s trumpet player, was routinely favored over Louis Armstrong in jazz polls. What’s up with that?

  How do you reconcile a lot of the musicians feeling honored with appropriation?

  I think it’s the contradiction between individual artistic expression and the burden of representation. You’re an individual but as a well-regarded musician, you’re inevitably a race man; you’re representing more than yourself.

  On the individual level, I’m sure that black artists were honored that white musicians who greatly admired their music imitated what they heard and duplicated it as nearly as possible in circles that black musicians might never be allowed to darken. Some black artists took great satisfaction in the belief that America was indebted to them, even without name or attribution, for having created an art form so powerful that white musicians paid it the compliment of emulation. But we can’t deny that the failure to reap recognition and reward for their achievements greatly disturbed many a black artist.

  As a member of the race, as a representative of a larger agglomerative interest, there’s no doubt that such appropriation was damaging. Not only were these black musicians being exploited, but there was a feeling that they should actually be grateful that white musicians were taking their music into arenas they could not enter. The coercion to black gratitude is a staple of dominant white culture in most areas of endeavor. Black students, it is felt, should be grateful for getting into good schools, despite their excellent qualifications. Black voters should be grateful for the attention from politicians that other voters take for granted. And black citizens should be grateful to live in America and hence should not criticize the nation’s inequalities and injustices, especially when the nation is at war. Black jazz musicians, like any other artists, were certainly grateful in the strictly generic sense of that word, to be able to exercise their gifts. But why should they have been grateful to be exploited? Only the logic of white supremacy, with its punishing mission to make blacks actually desire their domination, could explain this phenomenon. Many of the musicians were not overtly political, even if they quietly resented the restrictions on their livelihood. Many black artists simply took things on face value, knowing what they could and could not expect. They knew they would never make it into prime time, into mainstream venues, where manifestly inferior white musicians were Pat Booneing jazz, if you will.

  White appropriation of black jazz has to be placed in a social context that explains the efforts of individual white artists. What was it like to be Bix Beiderbecke, a blessed borrower, and to know that the acclaim you receive for originality of expression in fact derives from the appropriation of the artistic heritage of unheralded black artists, including a palette of aural shadings, a grammar of timber, and a tonal structure that supports their artistic endeavors. On the other hand, as a working white musician, you realize that the fate of any musician, regardless of color, is to experiment with borrowed sounds until you find your own voice. Although it was never simply a one-to-one correspondence between white appropriation and black exploitation, the larger social structure within which such dynamics take place underscores how crucial a factor race is.

  Without being essentialist or romantic about these black musicians’ humanity, many black artists recognized they would never get the fame or make the money they deserved, but they took solace in the fact that the aesthetic values they cherished would in some form make a contribution to the national and global cultural good. These black musicians were being called every name in the book except child of God, as they were pelted with epithets like savage and barbarian while displaying the most ennobling version of individualism, the highest vision of American idealism, and the most democratic conception of artistic creation imaginable. What purer artists can we imagine? So my hat’s off to them.

  What was the relationship of the mainstream white community to jazz?

  From the beginning, jazz was caught in the technological forms that drove the music industry. As already noted, the first recording of black musi
c involved its packaging, dilution, and distribution by white cultural forces. The mechanics of industrialization are coterminous with finding an available market for black music, a market that was created by the urges and desires of the masses and was shaped by the desire of white producers and record companies to make money from an art form that the doyens of American taste found morally reprehensible. On the other hand, there was the sense that the moral overtones of jazz were quite hostile to white aesthetic sensibilities and cultural authority, since blackness was perceived as polluting and contaminating white purity. To paraphrase anthropologist Mary Douglass in her classic book Purity and Danger, there was a sense of taboo associated with black bodies, beliefs, and behaviors.

  At the same time, many whites were drawn to this allegedly polluted culture and were, in the view of their critics, fatefully sucked into the vortex of the black libido. The unlicensed and unchecked expression of sexuality, sensuality, and eroticism in jazz culture was antithetical to the repressions and virtues of Victorian culture that were selectively observed by the white elite. Unsurprisingly, the black aesthetic carried political meanings. Powerful whites sought to control the transgressive expressions of black music by suppressing its public exposure. They kept it off the radio waves, and they restricted race records for the most part to their intended black audience. When whites began to buy these records, influential whites in the recording industry began to market black music to other whites. If they couldn’t whip black music into shape, they figured they’d at least benefit from the sale of this sonic pathology.

  The first positive mention of jazz music in official, public white circles didn’t occur until around 1933; between 1895 and 1933, jazz was evolving and undergoing tremendous transformation even as it was being demonized. In the end, to pinch the title of Robert Pattison’s wonderful book, jazz proved the “triumph of vulgarity.” That’s not only because the music ultimately proved to be compelling to the masses and superior to its critics’ aesthetic objections, but because the music, through the humanity of its greatest creators, helped America concede the vulgarity of its racism and antiblack hatred. That’s not to suggest that pockets of black America weren’t upset with the music as well. The vicious stereotypes of black hypersexuality made many blacks uncomfortable with openly embracing a music shot through with double entendres, sexual innuendo, erotic play, and sensual evocations. Already saddled with notions of savagery and beastlike behavior, many blacks spurned jazz as the devil’s music. Many black people resented elements of jazz because they believed it compromised the complexity of black art by capitulating to white people’s notion of the savage. These blacks believed that jazz culture played up the image of blacks as sensate animals and sexual predators to the exclusion of the image of the morally circumspect black. That’s an argument, of course, that we hear repeated now by the black opponents of the worst elements of hard-core rap, who claim that it plays up black savagery to the pleasure and benefit of largely white producers. The only difference now, they say—a difference, by the way, that sickens the opponents of hard-core rap—is that contrary to musicians in the Jazz Age, black artists today are being paid for piping black pathology to the white world.

  Then too there was a big dispute about whether black music could be said to exist at all. One of the most famous debates about this issue took place between Langston Hughes and George Schuyler. George Schuyler wrote a piece for the Nation called “The Negro Art Hokum,” arguing that there’s no such thing as black art; according to Schuyler, it’s American art. Schuyler contended that there was caste art because lower-class black people produce a certain kind of cultural expression, but it’s not the result of an indigenous or unique black artistic gift. Of course, other critics argued the opposite. Anthropologist Melville Herskovits in his book The Myth of the Negro Past writes about the “deification of Accidence” that is a defining feature of black identity. For Herskovits, black culture deifies accidental, contingent occurrences by integrating them into the vocabulary of black purposefulness.

  To borrow a nonblack example (although, arguably, he embodies profound black properties and identity traits, perhaps a black aesthetic in a postmodern white face), when Pee Wee Herman falls off of his bike in his important film, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, he says, “I meant to do that,” which captures part of what is meant in the deification of Accidence. I suppose another way of speaking about this is to call it an improvisational intentionality, that even when one did not intend a particular action or behavior, one incorporates it into one’s grammar of activity as a willed event. It’s a way, I think, of attempting to exercise control over one’s environment. Herskovits’s conception of deification of Accidence is an example of a historically constructed element of black consciousness and culture. In direct response to Schuyler, Langston Hughes argues that there is such a thing as black art in his influential essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The racial mountain refers to the inability of black folk to affirm a splendid folk culture about which they should have no shame. Hughes argued that one day black folk would wake up and love and embrace black art and take pride in the achievements of the so-called lower castes and classes. With the worldwide veneration of jazz, Hughes has proved prophetic.

  Talk about how jazz, once on the outside, is now being celebrated.

  It’s at once ironic and instructive. I think that jazz has traced the nearly inevitable path traveled by all sorts of music that has been stigmatized and morally outlawed. It finds its way into the vocabulary of American artistic acceptance, even veneration, and lands at the heart of American identity. What we now mean when we say American, we mean when we say jazz. It is now recognized as the singularly original American aesthetic achievement in music, which is why, I think, we’ve got white critics arguing that it’s not really a black musical expression. You didn’t get those arguments when the music was associated with the brothels and the brothers in the streets. In light of its history, I happen to believe that jazz musicians should lead the defense of contemporary black music that is demonized. I’m not suggesting that they have to like it, or even regularly listen to it, but that they should, on principle, articulate an informed aesthetic defense of the right of stigmatized black music to exist. I think that’s a reasonable expectation, but one that neotraditionalists in jazz constantly forget.

  I often think they need a refresher course in the history of aesthetic contusion on jazz’s developing body of work in the 1920s. For all intents and purposes, bebop was hip-hop—if you don’t believe me, just check out even Louis Armstrong’s negative reaction to Dizzy, Bird, and company. What we have turned into nostalgia was once notorious. Bluesmen, in effect, were B-boys. Let’s face it, jazz was the rap of its time. Now that jazz has been severed from its association with stigmatized blackness in the public mind, it has been elevated to an aesthetic perch from which it is favorably compared to the ostensible pathology of some contemporary black music. Of course, there are differences between jazz and, for example, elements of hip-hop, which arose under different historical and racial circumstances, but which nonetheless share a history of assault upon their early incarnations as the devil’s workshop, as examples of barbarism and savagery. Of course, that’s a lesson that hip-hoppers could absorb as well, a lesson, interestingly enough, which might supply rappers help in their defense of their artistic and cultural endeavors. Theirs is not the first black music to be dissed.

  Speak to the irony or appropriateness of dealing with art in a congressional forum, and more specifically, jazz and hip-hop.

  One can imagine a world guided by Plato’s Republic, envisioning the philosopherking as the arbiter of truth. Still, we don’t want to concede such authority to American politicians, most of whom are neither philosophers nor kings. We don’t want politicians determining and regulating “good” art or becoming arbiters of aesthetic taste. Do we really want Bob Dole telling us what films to see, or Tipper Gore, Bill Bennett, and C. Dolores Tucker telling us what music we c
an listen to? What these figures miss is that true art opposes such artificial restrictions and embraces individual self-expression, or collective articulation, as its raison d’être. What’s intriguing, and truly sad, is that black activists from the sixties who fought the racist and fascist restriction of free speech and black cultural expression have now joined forces with white politicians and moralists, whose views on other subjects put them at tremendous odds with the liberation agenda of these activists. Plus, some of these politicians opposed the very freedom struggles black folk waged in earlier decades of the century.

  Now I certainly understand, even empathize with, figures who speak against the misogyny and sexism of hip-hop culture. But it cannot be fought by legislation against the music; it’s got to be fought in the trenches, in the cultural and aesthetic cul-de-sacs where music makes its mark. We’ve got to take the message of sexual equality and gender justice to the streets, clubs—and yes, to the schools and religious institutions—where sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny thrive and are planted deep inside the minds of our youth. That’s not as sexy as sounding off before a Senate hearing, which I’ve certainly done, or trumpeting our views before an eager audience of journalists, something to which I’m not immune. But it’s harder work, and it demands a long-term commitment to addressing the underlying causes of social injustice. But I think it’s ultimately more rewarding than the simplistic pleasures of assaulting politically unprotected young blacks.

  We’ve got to remember that all black art at one time or another has been similarly attacked, and that the effort to legislate against black music’s alleged moral perversities is nothing new. Not only jazz in the early teens and 1920s, but rockand-roll music in the 1950s—of course, it’s hard to imagine that “Work With Me Annie,” a hit for Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, caused consternation, but “work” was euphemistic for a sexually suggestive motion of the pelvis—and rhythm and blues in the 1970s were lambasted. The attempt to censor black music was the attempt to censor black bodies, black voices, and black identities unleashed in the naked public square. For blacks to join Senate hearings aimed at suppressing speech, policing art, and reinforcing our second-class citizenship as producers and even consumers of music, is, I think, tragically mistaken.