Frank Kogan

Yeah, I think what you're getting at is right, and my question is plenty sloppy.

It may take me a lot of work to even figure out how to pose the question so that it's at all usable. My underlying concern is that people in my rockwrite/musicwrite(wrong) world — and this goes back to the beginning, e.g., Paul Nelson and Irwin Silber and crew, and Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger and crew — were never and are never very good at following through on their incipient critiques. And my world isn't doing a good job of creating good critiques, and is creating a lot of stuff that sounds or feels like critique but isn't. And how's the weather?

So obviously the shortcomings are not confined to just "musical" activity. And my reason for just now putting scare quotes around "musical" is that "music" doesn't exist in isolation. So to ask, "In isolation, is music up to the task of creating a critique?" isn't helpful, given that "music" isn't an isolated activity (and isn't the same activity in every instance people use the word "music").

In early WMS I was moving towards the idea that anything, including naptime and lunch, that leads to a good idea can be considered a part of thought. A critique happens as a part of a stream — a critique is a stream, let's say, in that a brilliant essay that has no past or future is like the tree that falls in the forest. It's not a critique if it leads nowhere. (And I blame the forest.)

But remember the two passages from Blues People that I quoted back in WMS #4, and the first paragraph of my own commentary that followed. I find what Jones wrote and what I wrote very problematic, even if I feel that what both of us wrote — still, somehow, even if I've lost a lot of my optimism — leads in the right direction. The first of the Jones quotes was in the chapter on bop, the second was in regard to Bix Beiderbecke:

Heroin is the most popular addictive drug used by Negroes because, it seems to me, the drug itself transforms the Negro's normal separation from the mainstream of society into an advantage (which, I have been saying, I think it is anyway). It is one-upmanship of the highest order.... The terms of value change radically, and no one can tell the "nodding junkie" that employment or success are of any value at all.

Music, as paradoxical as it might seem, is the result of thought. It is the result of thought perfected at its most empirical, i.e., as attitude, or stance.
--LeRoi Jones, Blues People (1963)

The second quote is more than a bit puzzling — what is "thought perfected at its most empirical"? — the words "attitude" and "stance" are too passive, and the word "thought" implies something too private. Nonetheless, Jones's idea leads in the right direction. E.g. you [John Wójtowicz] have described the jazz musician’s relation to rhythm-form-tradition, but you've left out his equally important relationship to other human beings. On the bandstand or in rehearsal (or jam session), the musician literally interacts with other people every time he plays a note (or doesn't play a note — see Jimmy Garrison). His music contains "thought" (in Jones's sense) because it contains his answer to the question, "How do I relate to these guys?" "These guys" refers to the other musicians, the audience, and, in a vaguer way, the world.
--Frank Kogan, Why Music Sucks #4, 1988.

Continuing the theme "You can walk and chew gum at the same time," I'll emphasize that this sort of thinking — answering the question "How do I relate to these guys?" — is not the only way that a musician's activities can be considered thought.