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

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

One question that immediately came up for me is, "is social critique up to the task of creating a social critiques?" I don't know that music is any more or less "inherently" opaque in that regard than actual (written?) critiques, which tend to be refracted through its audiences in varying levels of comprehension and interpretation. My guess is no -- music's meaning can be widely shared even when (1) it's not "on the page" and (2) it seems not to be "about" the critique from outside some community of shared meaning (e.g. the god-awful music of Rodiguez and its apparently unifying place in the anti-apartheid movement, though I don't know if that's an accurate way of putting it).

Do you need to be conscious of creating a social critique to end up with a good one? My gut says no, of course not, a lot of good social critique happens sometimes despite or sideways to whatever the intentions of the critic were. But then my brain says "yeah but you *finding* a critique in something is not the same as the critique being *put* there. Which is to say that the question is where the onus of the work of critiquing lies -- of course Black American culture contains critique. But everything "contains" critique, because a good critique finds its way into everything (how could the critique NOT be in the omissions, distortions, etc. of white American culture?).

But this still ends me thinking that the role of the critique is in the listener more than the sayer, so hmmmm.

[joshlanghoff.livejournal.com]

Jones does seem to value junkiedom as much for its symbolic/shibbolethy possibilities as for the actual effects of the drug -- the "nodding junkie" frees himself from white society's expectations, yes, but he's also "successful" when he "has no trouble procuring his 'shit'" and masters the "addict's jargon" -- and then Jones writes, "The purpose was to isolate even more definitely a cult of protection and rebellion." I also have problems with this, but then I would, not having any desire to belong to the cult. And his idea seems to lead to an authenticity argument: it doesn't matter how well you've mastered the "hip talk" or other heroin signifiers; "Many heroin addicts [leaving himself an escape hatch there] believe that no one can be knowledgeable or "hip" unless he is an addict."

Another example I forgot to mention was "Move That Dope," which I hear and love as reveling in its irresponsibility, a big old "fuck you" to anyone who'd ask rap musicians to be good examples for the community. I'm pretty sure none of those guys actually sell drugs.

I'm still pondering how this works in norteño music, and lack of historical and social immersion is holding me back, but here's my current theory. One of the current and very gradual (like, glacial) lyrical shifts is from narratives of drug production -- narcocorridos about cartel bosses and drug runners -- to narratives of drug consumption -- partying and getting high in the bathroom and whatnot. It SEEMS LIKE most of the consumption narratives are by US bands -- Maura just ran my piece about San Francisco's hyphy norteño movement of last decade -- whereas most of the production narratives are by Mexican bands (although narcocorridista El Komander's lately been singing a lot about getting drunk). If this is the case, for immigrants and their children drug consumption becomes a reverse shibboleth (??), a symbol of belonging to a broader US culture that privileges consumption because it means you have enough money, or you belong enough to know how to procure your shit. This could in turn be a big old "fuck you" from a subaltern culture to a predominant culture who often makes it clear they don't want the subaltern culture here. Possible social critique: we belong because we're buying drugs and not selling them to you?