tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post8434478757679776460..comments2024-03-27T18:45:16.950-07:00Comments on Fickle Ears: McLuhan—The Great WithholdingStefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-1818471428779349702021-10-27T21:57:33.831-07:002021-10-27T21:57:33.831-07:00LeRoi Jones
Blues People (1963)
""Gradu...LeRoi Jones<br /><i>Blues People</i> (1963)<br /><br /><i>"<b>"Gradually, the New York cabarets began to hear more of the real pure jazz and blues by musicians from Florida, South Caroline, Georgia, Louisiana, etc. What they played was more expressive than had been heard in New York to that time.<br /><br />. . . . .<br /><br />You could only hear the blues and real jazz in the gutbucket cabarets where the lower class went. The term 'gutbucket' came from the chitterlings bucket. Chitterlings are the guts of a hog and the practice used to be to take a bucket to the slaughterhouse and get a bucket of guts. Therefore, anything real low down was called gutbucket."</b><br /><br />Again, the marvelous paradox created by ghetto reasoning and the social predicates out of which it issued. The Northern musicians who wouldn't play blues or "jass" were quite happy playing American and European popular music, including light opera—anything within the shadowy world of semiclassical music—but all was played in the raggy style of the day, which, of course, had been the result of white dilutions of Negro ragtime styles. And even though the Negro musicians who imitated "popular" ragtime styles were merely trying to reflect the dominant tastes of the day, they still managed to bring a separate cultural knowledge (maintained by the "blue" tones of the Negro church) to their "syncopated music," as it was called then.<br /><br />"Northern Negro pre-jazz music was almost like the picture within a picture within a picture, and so on, on the cereal package. Ragtime was a Negro music, resulting from the Negro's appropriation of white piano techniques used in show music. Popularized ragtime, which flooded the country with songsheets in the first decade of this century, was a dilution of the Negro style. And finally, the show and "society" music the Negroes in the pre-blues North made was a kind of bouncy, essentially vapid appropriation of the popularized imitations of Negro imitations of white minstrel music, which, as I mentioned earlier, came from white parodies of Negro life and music. And then we can go back even further to the initial "steal" American Negro music is based on, that is, those initial uses Euro-American music was put to by the Afro-American. The hopelessly interwoven fabric of American life where blacks and whites pass so quickly as to become only grays!"</i><br />(pp. 110-111)Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com