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

Comments

[skyecaptain]

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

[koganbot]

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

[joshlanghoff]

Here's four examples, two live jazz and two radio norteño; the point of all four might just be "context matters," but we'll see:

1. Jazz composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith plays excerpts from his civil rights suite "Ten Freedom Summers" in Chicago's Millennium Park as part of Jazz Fest 2013. (Some context here.) The music is part improv and part composed, for jazz quartet and string ensemble, no vocals at all, and its prevailing mood is serious. On the 4-disc set, Smith gets a lot of social critique mileage out of titles like "Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964." On the other hand, anyone listening to the 4-disc set is the kind of person who listens to 4-disc abstract jazz concept albums about the civil rights movement. In the park is a different story. I've been there for previous years' avant-headliners Ornette and Threadgill, and they were immensely popular, but they grooved and swung and gave the people a good time. Now Smith -- as much modern classical composer as he is jazz artist -- is

[joshlanghoff]

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

[joshlanghoff]

Though of course, that critique falls on very few ears of the "you," but it could mobilize the "we."

[joshlanghoff]

(Anthony just taught me the word "shibboleth" and I've been using it like horse.)