Shades of White

            White Supremacy is a very real force, historically and Today. With the still-stinking carcass of the legacy of slavery and legal segregation festering in our minds, and housing and employment discrimination, along with a host of pressing social tensions not yet resolved, many are tempted to see America as the hub of racism. But culturally and historically, much of Europe and the English colonies that lacked a Revolution such as ours’ are unconsciously ensnared by subliminal Eurocentric values and judgments of which many younger Americans today are blissfully ignorant.

            The first myth we must tackle is that these prejudices are commonly held to uplift and promote all peoples with lower melanin levels whose ancestors came from the Continent. As has been demonstrated by Friedrich Nietzsche in his ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, with his clever, all-too-clever philological insight, the Aryan cult of nobility first imposed itself in Persia, India and south-eastern Europe. Many of the people living and leading in these areas had been of various African, Semitic and Mediterranean origin; their skin, whether black, brown, yellow, red or olive, along with their oily, kinky, curly, or bushy hair, were taken by the new militaristic elite as an identifying marker of their otherness, which, to coarse minds, translated as inferiority.

            There were certainly many cultural and social innovations that these invaders brought with them, some of which the world is a better place for, today. It would be wrong to turn a mirror to intolerance and say that the Indo-Europeans are inherently bad or that all white people are racist, especially since the majority were soldiers and laborers following orders, that they may survive and sustain their families, and they did not all luck out and become aristocrats.

            But plenty did, and they guarded the land and their cultural prerogative jealously against perceived threats both real and imagined. Over millennia this has fostered a resentment towards those seeking to better themselves, especially those whose “otherness” seemed easy to pinpoint: Jews since a couple centuries BC, Africans particularly during the rise of Empire in Western Europe and after, Native Americans and Pacific peoples in the age of exploration, and, in some societies more so than others, women, from whom all tribes, races and nations are born.

            To say that I am somehow privileged for being ‘white’ is not entirely groundless. But I can tell that when my face starts getting red and my hair is not neat and combed, when I walk with a stocky trudge rather than slender ‘grace’, not everyone approves of me as being truly ‘white’, either.

Prejudices of Rock Critics

            Why write about music anyhow? Trained, critical analysis may help the student to identify major harmonic and rhythmic functions: this is common enough in historical and academic writing on classical music and, perhaps to a lesser extent, on jazz. Towards the opposite pole, journalism being contiguous with advertising, marketing and PR, there is no surprise when a review of contemporary popular music merely regurgitates views articulated by the educated cronies of corporate executives, helping to advance their economic objective.

            But why would a fan of rock and roll strive to distract himself from the Dionysian ecstasy of the backbeat in order to scribble ineloquently about aesthetic and sociological prejudices so far removed from the essence and origins of the music itself?

            In short, why is virtually all writing on rock music so bad?

            It would be all too easy to throw up our hands, shrug our shoulders and say, “Who knows? And who cares?” as if the topic at hand were merely some vapid form of entertainment, when in fact, we know better: Rock is not just Art, but, for us, the epitome of philosophy, the highest and the lowest, first and last, most modern yet ancient, archaic, primal, Alpha and Omega.

            It is also religion, and unfortunately, whenever religious truths are forced by a scribal elite upon the ignorant mass, the result is invariably dogma and superstition. That is the fate of the wisdom of all great men, Darwin and Einstein no less than Moses or Heraclitus. What, then, is the Covenant of these circumcised rock and rollers; where lies the Ark?

            Legend has it, the Apostles John, Paul, George and Ringo received from on (very) high, the most sacred relic of the Philistine rock critic: Sergeant Pepper.

            It is fascinating how the fabulous foursome’s single weakest record became venerated by the adolescent music press that had been coming up in New York and London at this time. I suppose too much Sunshine can be blinding as well as enlightening. One would derive more profit from listening to Magical Mystery Tour (although I concede as an American I am used to listening to a version featuring several songs that were initially put out as singles, and may not have been on the original British release.) Better yet, skip the needle to the last track on The Rolling Stones’ Between the Buttons.

            So much for drugs and rock n’ roll. The modern critic’s true Achilles’ heel, however, is sex. This obsession proceeds naturally from the fact that he wants desperately to convince the world, and not least of all himself, that he actually possesses a libido. It is visually obvious from the covers of publications such as Rolling Stone. It is doubly heinous that this whole pseudo-culture exploits images of women while simultaneously pretending to champion liberal values of respect and equality. Actually reading their propaganda is far more revolting. Simply holding a pen in hand may not make one a writer, but it is a far better qualification than holding your own small, flaccid member.

            How could anyone with such a base and vulgar understanding of human sensuality fully appreciate, much less pontificate on, the sophisticated and vulgar double-entendres of Chuck Berry, aped but never equaled by Sir Mick Jagger, and second perhaps only to the immortal Cole Porter?

            Rock is dead. In two decades Hip-Hop will be supplanted by some new form. Then none will be left to dig rock but archaeologists, sure to replace the grease and filth of the printing-press with the dry desert dust of academia.

Cambridge, Nov 2018