Music and Democracy

            America has made two great contributions to international society. Although both may appear today in corrupted form, yet has much progress been made; and we, as a shining example to the rest of the world, have much to reflect upon, when we contemplate our legacy and what we shall leave to posterity. I speak, of course, of those noblest of institutions, that any one should be ashamed if he did not promote or make aspiration thereto; the first being our democratic form of government itself which, however flawed, yet serves as a model of freedom and justice to all; and second, also, perhaps, the greater of the two, our music, or rather, the music that has been tempered in the crucible of American Democracy through the blood, sweat and tears of our African American community.

            The structure of our constitution and legal system is complex, yet its great inspiration, to those noble men who framed Her parameters over two centuries past, comes from the ancient Greek city-state of Athens. Athens valued, as we should do well to emulate, the arts and freedom, above all else. When we claim in America that we would accept death, rather than submit our liberty to tyranny from abroad or within, we are echoing the sentiments of the Athenians who led the resistance against the invading Persian Empire and were victorious through the efforts of their superior naval force. And when we host televised competitions and award a victor who through the power of song wins popular approval amid much applause, we are reminded, albeit in the most grotesquely debased form, of the dramatic festivals in which Athenians competed for the title of greatest tragic poet. Certainly, American Idolatry and the pale façade of our annual Gramophone Awards are a far cry from the Golden Age of Motown, from the deep blues of the Mississippi Delta, the raucous jazz of New Orleans, the jumpin’ boogie from Chicago, or the wave of hysteria that enveloped our nation, and then the entire planet in the wake of rock and roll. Not too long ago, television programs actually hosted real musicians, bringing their jubilant melodies to a national audience.

            Not freedom, but rather slavery, was the background for the development of this most powerful of art forms in our country. How did the highest product of culture emerge from a people who were not even considered Men and Women? Just as the pinnacle of performing art was perfected two and a half millennia ago, under the threat of civil war and Persian occupation: this seeming paradox was recognized by Friedrich Nietzsche, who could be seen as the unconscious prophet and philosopher of the rock and roll revolution, in his late work Twilight of the Idols:

           

“One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.”

In fact, we find our modern Übermenschen quite over that threshold…volumes have been written, I suppose, on the development of the Negro spiritual, or ‘slave song’ in the cotton fields of the American South over the span of 250 years; if they have not, then shame on music scholarship! The convergence of African, Christian and Native American elements was synthesized by the tireless laborers, whose voices were as mighty as their muscles, into a distinct, yet universally plaintive cry in the wilderness of America. Nietzsche’s description of the origin and function of Attic tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy has always struck me as intimately related to the development of black music in America.

            As blacks gained nominal freedom, they took up European instruments (which, for the most part, have their ultimate origin in an ancient African or Near-Eastern ancestor) such as the guitar and piano, after having been barred from playing their own native drums as part of a systematic methodology of disempowerment and cultural castration that had forced their music up to that point to be completely a cappella, as well as highly metaphorical, in order to communicate things it would be best for the slavedriver not to understand (‘til the tables were turned, and he should catch a fire.) The blues emerged from out the cotton fields where blacks now worked essentially as tenant farmers (or ‘sharecroppers’,) the same class that arose for exploitation from the earliest days of Athenian democracy, which, howevermuch we may now laud its noble principles of freedom, justice and equality, was from the first a system enacted for the purpose of concentrating capital and rebelling against the restrictions of cultural integrity that the aristocratic nobility had formerly imposed.        

            The blues bears more than superficial resemblance to ancient Attic Tragedy. Effectively the singer is a lone actor, suffering some Promethean pain or burden before the audience, who were half-satyr themselves and quite far from Schlegel’s ‘ideal spectator.’ Originally, in church or field, there would be an actual chorus who responded vocally and in harmony to the lead singer (or pastor,) just as in the old tragedies of Greece. In the blues, instrumentation comes to take more and more of the role of the chorus upon itself. The singer may be answered by the refrain of a harmonica, or a lick from his own guitar, crying over the irrevocable sorrow this man had just uttered.

            Well! So much for the blues being a democratic institution. We have seen, rather, that while arising from conditions of actual slavery (and later sharecropping) the blues actually presented, both viscerally and spiritually, a manifestation of a far more noble and proud type of man than mainstream Protestant White America had conjured forth up to then.

            If blues and spirituals represented the Dionysian element in American music, and the European traditions, such as classical and marching music, for the most part were of an Apollonian nature, it was Jazz that first sought to merge these two traditions into a novel and distinctly American art-form. This is analogous to Nietzsche’s description of the development of tragedy, and we can hear, in its ultimate development and crescendo before being drowned in the flood of rock and roll, the wild wisdom of Silenus and the echoes of Pan’s holy piping from the old forests of Paradise in the wailing of Miles Davis’s muted trumpet and flugelhorn on Sketches of Spain.

            This third deity of artistic creation, then, following Apollo and Dionysus, is Athena, patron Goddess and namesake of Athens, the birthplace of democracy. Before we discuss the democratic spirit of jazz (which may, in fact, be the purest expression of true democracy thus far) it is worth noting exactly what Athena’s cult and the political structure of the Demos had to struggle against.

            In the popular mythology of the period, Athens was hard-pressed to decide between Athena, Goddess of Wisdom (and, by some accounts, organized warfare; more specifically, battle strategy and tactics, often in conjunction with Nike, Goddess of victory) and Poseidon, the all-powerful Lord of the Sea, Zeus’s elder brother who had, in all likelihood, assumed an even more prominent role in more ancient times, before the arrival of the Dorians to the Aegean peninsula. Although the great Sea-God impressed the citizens with his control of the natural waterbodies, providing a spring to sustain their health and make civilization even possible in the arid climate of Attica, Athena gave the Hellenes the sacred olive tree and won their eternal favor! Olive oil is extremely useful, for cooking and food, as lamp-fuel and to ‘anoint’ (the Greek source of the word ‘Christ’) one’s scalp and body. We would also do well to keep in mind the story of Noah’s flood, when the dove returns to the father of all modern peoples with an olive leaf (also possessive of many healing properties itself) in its mouth, signifying the recession of Jehovah’s wrath and a new era of peace and prosperity, also symbolized by the rainbow.

            But what had been lost, with the abandonment of the rites of Neptune? (I use the Romanized name simply for variation; any writer worth his sea-salt detests repetition of terms.) But what great progress had been made! The barbarian had become Greek! No more would we sacrifice our virgin daughters to the wild wind, like cold Agamemnon, or live in ignorance and superstition, projecting anthropomorphic personas upon every force of nature we should meet; nay, indeed, ne’er again should we bow to a monarch of dubious divinity who suffered us to beg silver Drachmas with his uncaring face minted upon their surface!

            Or? Had we not, perhaps, given up the riches of Crete, the nobility of the Minoan civilization, mistakenly referred to as Atlantis when in fact, it had never sunk beneath the ocean, but only beneath the horizon of our consciousness as we became more and more caught up in a military-industrial complex, possibly the only way a popular democracy tends to lead, when it is inherently based on redistribution of wealth (but certainly not equality of wealth) and must necessarily demolish all those noble paragons of culture and civilization which get in the way of its own rampant ambition and base impulsivity.

            Well then! So much for our prejudiced and liberal esteem of democracy-in-itself! (I suppress a chuckle.) Back to New Orleans, on the other side of Atlantis and beyond Columbus’s West Indies, where the descendants of slaves from Africa, Frenchmen from Canada, Caribbean immigrants and the indigenous peoples of America were all mixing together in the same pot, and whatever it was they were cookin’, it sure smelled spicy! Despite the just-acknowledged racial and cultural cross-pollination which gave N’Orleans its distinctive character, we shall not waist any time disputing the primarily Black origins of jazz music. To some extent the forms were adapted out of European marching-band (and, slightly later, classical) music; but to assume that lends any amount of credit to European music for the development of jazz, would be more ludicrous than labeling Dvořák’s ‘Slavonic Dances’ as folksongs, merely because he used his native Bohemian rhythms as a springboard for fashioning contemporary European art-music in the tradition of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. It was in fact Dvořák, living for a while in America, who tellingly predicted that, for a truly American music to develop, it would have to incorporate the spiritual music of the African members of our nation, as well as to some extent Native American musical tradition, the latter being more difficult to trace perhaps, but far from absent in American music, particularly so the farther South one goes. Well then! Dvořák would have been proud to hear the full development of jazz music, what the writer Amiri Baraka accurately referred to as ‘American Classical Music.’

            What it is, jazz music was the most honest and thorough expression of Democracy in America, that Logos for which our forefathers fought the British Crown, giving countless sons to Hades for the sake of preserving the liberty and right to justice of the first truly Free State in two thousand years. It was democratic in form and structure: as the style developed, it became characteristic for each instrumentalist to take a consecutive solo (rather than having a certain ‘elite’ of soloists amid a servile orchestra, all strumming to the master’s notation) and cooperatively to weave the whole fabric of the piece together extemporaneously. Although geniuses such as Duke Ellington (who still gets the shaft in American music history behind George Gerhswin) often held a monopoly (also highly characteristic of democracy) in the output of popular compositions, there was nonetheless a great deal of cooperative songwriting that occurred, often one individual composing the music (which, again, was never completely set in stone, but open to improvisatory arrangement-in-the-moment) and another the lyrics. Jazz hits consisted of songs as well as instrumental pieces, and rapidly began to sweep the nation in a great furor. Every dance hall in America now wanted to get their hands on this wild, pulsive enchantment from the rich culture of the Negro South. 

            And they did! These nightclubs that hosted the musicians, as well as the recording studios that would record them, made a killing overnight. The white men who controlled these institutions, having the means of production at their disposal, were able to manipulate the balance of supply and demand, exploiting the (often unspoken) system of racism that still gripped much of our country at the time, to turn outrageous profits out of musical prodigies who were, for the most part, compensated little better than the sharecroppers we mentioned earlier.

            It didn’t stop there. One of America’s earliest contributions to world culture, as it were, sadly and to our shame, moral and esthetic, were the blackface minstrel shows in which white performers would imitate an exaggerated (and politically motivated) stereotype of black musicians, often wearing dark make-up to ‘dress the part.’ This trend continued, in a more sublimated fashion, when white musicians began to perform jazz music themselves at many of the white-owned clubs that were drawing so much attention and cash. Probably most of the white artists who began to perform jazz had an honest appreciation of this black musical form, and many of them virtually worshipped the great black masters as they studied their licks on stage. Shrewd businessmen and insular-minded bigots, however, saw in this a way to appropriate this incredible artistic phenomenon to their own ‘race’, and thereby fend off the threatening insecurity that perhaps the greatest thing to come out of America was actually a black thing.

            Europe, however, did not fail to see the truth of the matter. The true musical masters (black and, sometimes white) were given the recognition their talents deserved and offered, almost paradoxically, a more democratic welcome in Europe than they enjoyed in their own divided nation. Although this humanity and appreciation must have been as pleasant to the visiting jazz stars as it was well-deserved, I think it is safe to say that by far Europe gained much more from the exchange. This first, truly American music, was more than just a rhythm or a melody…it was a new culture, something the world had not yet experienced, a new strut on the stage by Dionysus, complete with sharp, flashy wardrobe from Apollo, and of course, it literally brought democracy to the world.

            Particularly during the Second World War, when American soldiers were launched by the thousands overseas to protect the ideals of liberty and democracy, American music, American dress, American culture in general were being exported along with the troops; everyone in Western Europe was already dancing to swing by this point, the American movie star had affected the global ideal of nobility and greatness; now the jazz musician ushered in a totally new conception of status: ‘cool.’ Probably the most commercially successful of these jazz musicians, overall, were the famous swing singers, many of whom were white. Frank Sinatra may well have deserved his celebrity; not only was he fantastically talented, his charisma and thorny charm endeared him to the American heart, both black and white, and in fact did much to popularize the jazz idiom to mainstream white America. But we must not ignore certain other socio-political factors that may have contributed to his tremendous popularity and commercial dominance. Sinatra, along with many other entertainers, then and now, had ties to the mob. He was smooth enough that he could mingle with legitimate politicians as well, but at the end of the day the mob code ruled the streets, and there was little that could be done against them. When Sammy Davis, Jr. decided to change his plans and back out of a gig he had arranged with some of The Rat Pack’s mob contacts, those same mobsters who would plot the assassination of JFK informed Mr. Davis, in no uncertain terms, that he would fly down to fulfill his duties to the mob, or his plane would not land at all. Organized crime is a political fact of most modern urbanized states and is difficult, either to define or ignore, but has been entrenched in many regions of Western Civilization at least since the principalities of post-Empire Italy through which Machiavelli lived and wrote.

            (On a side note, to metaphorically assess the preceding nine paragraphs, we should consult Heraclitus, the ‘Godfather’ of Greek philosophy. In a simple aphorism of barbed wisdom, Heraclitus shows utmost contempt toward what has become our own liberal-academic military-industrial regime in the United States:

                                   

If learning were a path of wisdom,

                                    those most learned about myth

                                    would not believe, with Hesiod,

                                    that Pallas in her wisdom gloats

                                    over the noise of battle.  

Pallas is another name for Athena. In any case, the fact is that since World War II we have been engaged in almost ceaseless military intervention and, in some cases, virtual occupation. One thing that always follows our military campaigns is American culture: our fashion, our cigarettes, our movies and of course, our music, which has been spearheading the cultural styles our nation embraces since the jazz age. These styles often begin among a small segment of the black community in America, until they find their way all across the developed world.)

             Never has the Apollonian dream-world been more powerful in our country than during the period immediately following our victory in World War II. Expansionist, almost imperialist abroad, we became incredibly insular at home, locked up behind short white picket fences and forced, post-atomic smiles. Conformity was an unparalleled virtue. Sinatra, Bing Crosby and other, less talented white jazz singers were still very much in vogue. The vocabulary of jazz itself was evolving, as a new breed of musician, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, worked out what would become known as ‘be-bop’ in the clubs around Harlem, particularly Minton’s on W 118^th. Meanwhile, the blues had become electrified, and the clubs and studios in Chicago and other urban centers in the Mid-West and North were producing a much heavier sound, with guitars and vocals heavily amplified and increasingly distorted. Howlin’ Wolf in particular laid the framework for what would ultimately become ‘hard rock’, thanks in large part to the incredible guitarists who worked with him, and to Willie Dixon, the genius who wrote most of Wolf’s hit songs.

            Parallel developments were happening throughout the world of black music: Ray Charles developed ‘soul’; musicians like Jimmy Reed were working out what became known as ‘Rhythm and Blues’. And also, artists like Ike Turner (who played briefly with Howlin’ Wolf,) Chuck Berry and Little Richard created the backbone of rock and roll. The Dionysian rebellion was in full bloom.    

            ‘Rock n’ Roll’, as it became affectionately known, had an immediate and deeply-resonant impact on the middle-class white youth in our country. This may seem surprising, given such an audience’s superficial disconnect from the cultural origins of the genre, but its reasons are evident and two-fold. First, and most poignantly, the affluence and comfort of the post-war era yet left a gaping void, culturally and spiritually, for the heirs of its supposed progress and prosperity. White men were reaping the benefits of our economic supremacy, making a decent living without the prerequisite of higher education or even necessarily a skilled trade. But their wives were often bored, depressed and shut-off from society (a social phenomenon more reminiscent of Greece in general than the Roman period) and their children, particularly as they reached puberty, felt constricted by the social appendices of protestant morality, whose gnarled roots pervaded the very soil of the American conscience. Which brings us to the second cause of their kindred sympathy for rock and roll music, the appeal of unbridled sexuality as sublimated by the lyric genius of Chuck Berry, precisely distilling the essence of the American Dream (freedom, automobiles, hedonistic enjoyment just short of debauch, kissing a pretty girl at the school dance) and translating that wisdom from an intelligent black man to every youth in America, and later the world.   

            Expectedly, it took little time at all before white people had reinvented rock as their own music, ostensibly marketing it as an urban hillbilly phenomenon. To be fair, there were always white folk and country influences in the earliest rock and roll, which were developed further by artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis. But when Caucasian celebrities such as Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison and, above all, Elvis Presley usurped the throne that had been forged by the great black artists, something was lost, culturally, even as America gained some of the most fantastic music ever recorded.

            Before we proceed with the evolution of rock and roll, let us examine once more the circumstances from which American democracy arose in the first. Our Revolution was fought against the agents of the British Crown, a monarchical power with imperialist tendencies which exacted great tribute from her American colonies. From where I type in the area of Boston, men such as Samuel Adams protested the harsh taxes imposed by the King of England on the colonists. The Stamp Tax effectively shut down the newspaper and legal industries, as every paper, marriage license and legal writ could not be produced without some pence going to the King’s coffers. Likewise the tax on tea, which led to the revolutionary action of the Boston Tea Party, as well as our national preference for coffee which persists to this day, and may well account for our dental superiority.

            Let us compare this to the ‘British Invasion’, when a horde of English bands of young white boys, led by The Beatles, infiltrated the American market with their interpretation of our own black American music. One of the greatest things to come from this movement, aside from the great art of The Beatles themselves, was that white American youth were now exposed to much of the true black American music that started it all (rock and roll, Chicago blues, and of course Mo Town, which I have sadly omitted from this essay, as that would have involved further digression into such matters as Henry Ford and his investments in Germany’s National Socialist Party, and I am already humbled by your patience in indulging me thus far, Dear Reader.) Problem is, every time we buy a record of these English covers of black music, or today, buy the songs off of iTunes, we are in effect paying a tribute to the British Rock Royalty (well, the Beatles’ catalogue is now in the hands of Sony and its shareholders.) The Rolling Stones probably did more than any other act to expose us to the great Chicago bluesmen, like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, whose careers they revitalized even as they built their own upon these men’s hard work, as the European powers had made tremendous profits from the products of American slave labor and the slave trade itself. Although, as the title of their album ‘Sticky Fingers’ makes manifest, the Stones stole their music from America and sold it back to us, there is a Robin Hood twist to this Canterbury Tale, in that they gave back socio-cultural recognition and real economic agency, not only to the artists they ripped off in the first place, but to later black musicians such as Peter Tosh and Living Colour.

            By far the most culpable act in this process of pseudo-Colonial appropriation were the English group Led Zeppelin. Their first album, easily dismissable in regards to its cultural significance, despite the inspirational juxtaposition of folk and rock elements, contains a number of plagiarisms, in this case mostly of earlier white artists. The opening track, ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ is probably the best and most original on the record. Certainly the main riff is an unparalleled achievement in rock and roll. ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ follows which, despite its ceded penmanship at the hands of Anne Bredon, and the insistence on the adherence to Joan Baez’s version (or so-called ‘traditional arrangement’) which is based upon a common flamenco pattern (see "Couldn't Get Much Higher": The Musical Legacy of Robby Krieger ) descending from the minor, the verse is actually based upon a variation of this flamenco progression recorded on a track by Donovan; in the case of A minor, F#dim is sounded before the typical F/E of the sequence, giving it a very sad, jazzy feel which had always impressed me as an example of Zeppelin’s creativity, until I recently heard the Donovan song (not sure of name.) The opening of ‘Dazed and Confused’ incorporates the use of open harmonics heard on Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’, although the rest of the song is quite original and in fact was copied in numerous instances by Black Sabbath. The greatest theft is ‘Black Mountain Side’, a deliberate rip-off of Bert Jansch’s ‘Black Waterside’, only changing half a word in the title, although Page’s arrangement is amazing; Page in fact owes a huge compositional and stylistic debt to Jansch. Then, of course, are the two Willie-Dixon penned blues numbers, ‘You Shook Me’ and ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby.’

            Their second album, which truly developed their ‘unique’ sound and in effect invented hard rock and heavy metal, was basically a series of one Howlin’ Wolf rip-off after another, in particular their big hit, ‘Whole Lotta Love’. The credit that is given to artists like Link Wray, The Kinks and Led Zeppelin in the development of power chords, the use of whole-tone as harmonic element in progression, and what became hard rock in general should in fact go to Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarists, if not to Robert Johnson and the other acoustic blues masters who were playing power chords decades earlier and exploited the natural distortion of the recording technology of their day.

Throughout the 70’s, British artists such as the Stones, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and King Crimson were selling vast amounts of records to American consumers, stealing this uniquely American art-form and stimulating the British economy, as they continued to profit from the reggae music coming out of former-British-colony Jamaica.  

After that, rock music suffered the necessary fate of perhaps any democracy, fading into self-indulgent mediocrity. Oscar Wilde’s summation of our nation’s history is quite fitting to the legacy of commercial (white) rock music: “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” The petty class-struggle of English punk-rock, and the American pantheon of untrained misfit musicians only inspired the modern ochlocracy of artistic values, relegating musical taste to television and magazines whose primary incentive is to sell an adult ideal of sexuality to children and a youthful ideal of sexuality to adults, sentiments which now pervade all of liberal journalism, cinema, and even the plastic arts, a phenomenon which perhaps can be blamed on those same champions of freedom, democracy, and creativity who took this music to such heights in the 60’s and 70’s, setting us up for “The Day the Music Died” (see Opening the Doors to the New Aesthetic in Music.)

@dGabeEvau

Surviving the Storm in Cambridge

            Wow! What a storm this is turning out to be. One long, continual frozen deluge of distinct, tiny snowflakes amassing themselves like hills and mountains, melting into valleys of slush and coalescing into flat plains of ice. Children all over New England delight in the many days they have gotten to stay home, watching cartoons and drinking hot cocoa, driving their parents mad. Here in Cambridge, MA, we probably have it a bit easier than some of the surrounding cities. We have a great crew of city workers pushing themselves day and night to make the roadways safe for traffic. Of course, it’s never enough, with the snow that just keeps coming and has us all feeling like Sisyphus at this point.

            Thankfully, I don’t have a car. I see people whose vehicles have been buried for weeks. I see motorists stuck in the snow, or with no through way to get where they’re going. I got a ride home last week that probably took longer than it would have had I walked. But being a pedestrian is no easy matter these days, either. Many residents and property owners have been doing a terrific job at clearing the long expanse of the sidewalks, giving a wide enough berth for at least one person to walk by, and in many places even a baby stroller or a grocery shopper clutching two bags in each hand. When the way is not wide enough for two, many good citizens are being kind enough to duck into a front yard, stairway or inlet in the snow in order to let others pass by, especially for women, children, the elderly and persons with disabilities. There are, of course, others who are not so considerate. These conditions always seem to bring out the best, and the worst, in people. But overall it seems the storm is brining us closer together, even as it keeps us apart, by slowing transportation of all means.

            However, although the sidewalk itself may be clear enough for walking, come the crosswalk, you may likely encounter an impenetrable, un-scalable mountain of white powder with a core of rock-hard ice. This is one area the city needs to get moving on, and fast, as property owners do not seem wholly convinced of the necessity (not to mention the possibility) of clearing them out. Undoubtedly, it is a difficult task; the snow ploughs heap slush and snow from the road right where we pedestrians wouldn’t want it. The real problem is, in recent days we have taken to the street to walk, in many places finding it completely unrealistic to use the sidewalks. As I walked through the middle of the road yesterday morning, I considered the very real possibility that a truck or snowplow might run me over.

            Oh well, we must get to work, if we can! Many employers cannot afford to pay their employees to stay home, even if their places of business are shut down for the day. Not everyone in Cambridge is living the bio-tech dream, or making millions in software engineering. People have bills to pay. And people need to eat. The grocery stores, for the most part, have been doing a terrific job in staying open. Places like 7-11 have done even better, keeping their doors open 24/7 through the harshest storm. But the snow is impacting deliveries as well, and many stores are left with empty shelves and desperate customers. I have been thinking of one older woman who I have always seen rolling her wheelchair through the street in Inman Square since I moved here two years ago; in this weather there could have been no way she could have gotten around. I only pray she had enough food, or a friend, neighbor or relative to help her out. These are harsh times, and we are all reminded of our vulnerability as human beings; but some are hit harder than others. As the immortal reggae legend Peter Tosh sang, “Only the poor man feels it.”

            But just remember: only six more weeks ‘til Spring!

                                    ….of course, there will still be snow on the ground in April.