Is music up to the task of creating social critiques?

[koganbot]

To continue my X-post extravaganza, I put this on both the BLEUGH thread and the Adjunct thread. Mark had brought up Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and I'd said — based on my unreliable memory — that, to Jones, "Black American culture contains — among other things — a critique of America, and he doesn’t want to see that critique blunted" (e.g., Black American musical practice contains a critique of America):

(1) Any opinion on Sidney Finkelstein? I read Jazz: A People's Music but can't recall specifically what I took from it; and I once owned but out of a combination of busyness and fear never read How Music Expresses Ideas (the fear because, when I opened it at random, I read something along the lines of "While the Soviet criticism of Shostakovich may have been heavy-handed, there was a fundamental truth...,"* and decided I just wasn't up for it emotionally; I'm sometimes very weak). Do remember considering the jazz book interesting and smart; also that Jones/Baraka cited him favorably — notice that for the title of my John Wójtowicz–Leroi Jones chapter I paraphrase the title "How Music..."

(2) A question we should go into — that we're implicitly raising — is whether Jones (as I've perceived or misperceived him) is right, that music (in comparison to, say, books and essays) is up to the task of creating a cultural critique, at least creating a critique that's more than merely incipient.

(3) Actually it's Otis Ferguson and Manny Farber and Andrew Sarris and ilk who really propelled me to the question. The way I thought of it in college was that the two great proto-auteurists, Ferguson and André Bazin, both treated filmmakers' aesthetic decisions (not just dialogue, but what to show, how to show it, whether to cut or pan, what angle to use) as ways of thinking. To put it crudely, Bazin reads movies for, among other things, the filmmakers' attitudes towards the world, whereas Ferguson reads movies for, among other things, what filmmakers are doing in the world. But obv. it's not either/or for those two critics or in general. Anyway, extend to anyone's behavior, e.g., musician choosing to play this note rather than that, singer phrasing this way or that, fan deciding to dance and deciding which dance, person wearing or not wearing band T-shirt, and on and on and on. Question is, does this hairstyle and acting out really take us far in the way of usable and repeatable critique, of effective understanding, rather than just placing us in Spot A or Spot B etc. in various social situations? (Ludwig Wittgenstein belongs here: we can include in our idea of language that it's more than just the utterances/words, it's also the social practices in which they're embedded, including events, actions.) Btw, what I drew from auteurism wasn't "the director is the author of the film" but rather that filmmaking is a series of choices, and these choices, no matter how original or how rote, constitute thought, no matter whom or what you assign the thought to — the actor, the screenwriter, the director, the studio, social habits, the social structure, the zeitgeist — and no matter how good or bad the thought is. Question is, how far does such thought go? E.g., how a cashier goes about scanning bar codes represents thought, but that doesn't necessarily mean one's scanning of bar codes is a form of social commentary, or can be extrapolated into social commentary.

*Can't locate the exact quote through Google books, which doesn't show any general excerpts and is sparing as to what from my searches of this book it's willing to show. The phrase "heavy-handed" gets me no hits. I did find this noxious sentence: "In the Soviet Union, criticism is a sign of the high regard the people have for music and its creators."

Comments

[joshlanghoff.livejournal.com]

But yeah, in all four of my examples there are at least three (?) distinct steps to the critique:

1. Artist creates music, i.e., makes choices about how to set a particular text, or whether to swing this bit about Fannie Lou Hamer (BOTH Wadada and Matana address her), or how many and which instruments should be playing here, or how long to repeat this "free" section;

2. Someone -- artist, concert programmer, record label -- places that music into a particular social context -- concert in the park, radio.

3. Audience receives music and uses it: as a big "fuck you" to government censorship, as an excuse to walk out in a huff, as a private source of awe and wonder, as a lesson in what you can get away with (those two are where I usually land), as a barely heard soundtrack to play frisbee, etc.

Step 2 is the crucial link. If 1 happens and either nobody hears the music, or nobody hears it except for people already sympathetic (lefty critics getting music from publicists, people who purchase minimal corrido albums), the critique won't go very far. It might not even constitute a critique, whether or not the artist intended it as one. (I guess those sympathetic people could clamor for the music to appear in a more public setting, which may be what happened with Camacho's "El Karma," I'm not sure.) And if, during step 2, you throw the music into a setting that proves irrelevant, like a daycare or a noisy everybody-sharing-everything space like Tumblr, the critique still falls flat. But if you can program your critique to speak to people's expectations, then the critique has a shot. If you can upend those expectations, even better, which may explain why my examples seem to first critique their own audience.

Steps 1 and 2 aren't necessarily independent of one another. Wadada and Matana may have composed their music with the idea of challenging people at festivals. But actually getting that music onto a festival stage is as important as the choices made during composition, at least if we're judging whether music gets to constitute a social critique.