Amy Kiste Nyberg—Seal of Approval

Amy Kiste Nyberg
Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code
(1998)

---

[38] The legal case of most concern to those drafting state and federal legislation against comic books was a case that dealt, not with a comic book, but an adult crime magazine, Headquarters Detective, True Cases from the Police Blotter. Two thousand copies of the magazine were seized in New York under a section of the New York Penal Code that made it illegal to publish, distribute, or sell any book, pamphlet, magazine, or newspaper made up primarily of criminal news, police reports, or accounts of criminal deeds, or pictures, or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust, or crime. The

[39]

book dealer was convicted, but after more than seven years of litigation, lower court decisions were reversed by the United States Supreme Court on March 29, I948, on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional. Similar statutes in eighteen states were overturned by the decision in Winters v. New York.

The Supreme Court found the laws prohibiting depiction of crime and violence in the media unconstitutional as written, since they violated both the First and Fourteenth amendments. Although obscenity and pornography were not protected under the First Amendment, the Court ruled that crime magazines, while containing little of value to society, were as much entitled to free speech protection as the best of literature. The Court also noted that while words such as obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, or disgusting were "well understood through long use in criminal law," the provisions against crime and bloodshed were unconstitutionally vague because the clause had no "technical or common law meaning." Without a precise definition, it was impossible for an individual to know when he or she was in violation of the law. Therefore, the New York law was also in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing due process.

...

The Supreme Court's decision in 1948 set guidelines for media content that are still at issue today. Laws regulating obscenity and pornography are on the books in almost every city and state, but the regulation of violent content in the media, while it spurs periodic public outcry and legislative investigation, ultimately remains the responsibility of the media industries and their self-regulatory bodies.

Sniderman and Tetlock—Symbolic Racism: Problems of Motive Attribution in Political Analysis

Sniderman and Tetlock
"Symbolic Racism: Problems of Motive Attribution in Political Analysis"
(1986)

[144] Only a minority of Americans favor strict racial segregation, but they exaggerate how many other Americans favor it, often by a factor of two or more. ...

The point is not merely that many white Americans misperceive the racial attitudes of their fellow whites. It is rather that their misperceptions are asymmetrical, in two respects. First, they overestimate the number who are racially intolerant while underestimating the number who are racially tolerant... Second, the kind of mistake people make—whether they over- or underestimate how many people agree with them—hinges on their own racial attitudes. Thus, the racially intolerant overestimate—while the racially tolerant underestimate—how many people agree with them.

The asymmetry in preference estimation—pluralistic ignorance, as it is commonly called—suggests how the American dilemma is enduring. Not only does racial intolerance resist change, but even when it does diminish, the change often goes unnoticed, especially by the racially intolerant, with the result that they continue to believe they are in the majority while the tolerant continue to labor under the belief that they are in the minority.

Research on pluralistic ignorance undercuts the presupposition of symbolic racism researchers that social pressure against overt expression of anti-black affect is now widely effective in American society. Many bigots are not ashamed of their bigotry. It is not, from their point of view, bigotry at all; it merely a [sic] factual description of the world, and of certain kinds of people as they really are—indeed, as any open-minded person would acknowledge they are. Of course, some will feel inhibited from open expression of racial hostility. But many will not. If racists were as quick to dive for cover as symbolic racism theory suggests, racism would be a less serious problem than it is in fact.

Symbolic racism researchers also may have been too optimistic in their analysis of values. Race is the American dilemma, as it seems to us, in part because resistance to assuring equality for blacks (in addition to being rooted in racism) may still more fundamentally be grounded in the American ethos itself.

Symbolic racism researchers have pointed to the importance of such traditional values as self-reliance and the work ethic. But these values come into importance, on a symbolic racism analysis, only insofar as they are allied or conjoined with racial prejudice. But there is another, more sobering possibility: values such as individualism may undercut support for efforts to achieve racial equality, even when these values have nothing whatever to do with racism. For
[145]
example, suppose a woman opposes government assistance for blacks. Then she confronts a request for assistance for women similar to that requested for blacks. If she opposes assistance for women, just as she opposes it for blacks, should she be described as a racist?

There are many Americans like the hypothetical woman. They oppose government assistance for blacks, not out of aversion to blacks, but rather out of a set of normative beliefs defining the propriety both of asking for, and providing, public assistance. And these normative beliefs, a growing body of research suggests, tap values central in the American ethos, especially individualism.

Just how does this analysis suggest that a symbolic racism analysis may be overoptimistic? Quite simply, even supposing prejudice were to disappear completely, there would in all probability remain substantial popular opposition to government efforts to achieve racial equality. From this perspective, the American dilemma may involve a deep paradox: resistance to efforts to achieve racial equality may be rooted precisely in a commitment to a distinctively American conception of equality.

[emailed to self, 26 April 2021]

Wendy Brown—Wounded Attachments

Wendy Brown
"Wounded Attachments"
(1993)

The point is not that these privations [profiling, etc.] are trivial but that without recourse to a white masculine middle class ideal, politicized identities would forfeit a good deal of their claims to injury and exclusion, their claims to the political significance of their difference.

...

politicized identities generated out of liberal, disciplinary societies, insofar as they are premised on exclusion from a universal ideal, require that ideal, as well as their exclusion from it, for their own perpetuity as identities.

[emailed to self, 18 March 2021]

Lasch—Educating the Whole Child

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[128] The decline of intellectual competence cannot be accounted for, as some observers would have it, on the reactionary assumption that more students from minority- and low-income groups are taking tests, going to college, and thus dragging down the scores. The proportion of these students has remained unchanged over the last ten years; meanwhile the decline of academic achievement has extended to elite schools.

...

Two Thoughts on Woke Casting

(1) A special complication arises from the conceit to establishing vocational role models by showing the target audience actors who "look like them" in those roles: flooding film and TV with Black actors also reinforces the message that entertainment careers are more open to Black people than are other kinds of careers, which is one of the oldest and most pernicious "messages" American culture has been sending to Black people this whole time.

(2) Casting is and was always inherently unfair. Woke casting is not more or less fair than casting ever was. What's different about woke casting is not its fairness or unfairness but the fact that it is talked about openly and virtuously, even in the eye of the hurricane. For those thus located, this makes it divisive on a day-to-day, person-to-person level. (I am relating past and ongoing experience here, not conjecture.) So, whatever new society we're birthing this way, it seems the talent won't be sharing in it. Seemingly arbitrary acceptance or rejection is, as it turns out, a far stronger basis for esprit de corps. Arbitrariness is a kind of rugged equality, hardly the ideal kind, but closer to it than what is unfolding right now.

Bodies and Artifacts (iv-b)—Jean and LeRoi together again

(previously)

Whereas Jean makes much of

the elements of craft, technique, proven methods which make the artist a worker in a working world,
(p. 406)

LeRoi bends over backward to downplay this part.

as I have said before, Negro music is the result of certain more or less specific ways of thinking about the world. Given this consideration, all talk of technical application is certainly after the fact.
(p. 211)

And earlier,

The trumpets, trombones, and tubas of the brass bands were played with a varying amount of skill, though when a man has learned enough about an instrument to play the music he wants to play, "skill" becomes an arbitrary consideration.
(p. 75)

This last statement especially lays bare the disjuncture, since for Jean skill cannot be arbitrary, and the reason it cannot be arbitrary is because it forms a/the basis upon which a newly-minted work of art, no matter how stylistically esoteric, is never quite as unfamiliar as the plebes' visceral indigestion tells them that it is. Jean's theory is every bit as sociological as LeRoi's, but the two writers appeal to this sociological angle with entirely different agendas in mind.

Gray Areas

It was not just that Italians did not look white to certain social arbiters, but that they did not act white. In New Orleans Italian immigrants were stigmatized in the post-Civil War period because they accepted economic niches (farm labor and small tenancy, for instance) marked as "black" by local custom, and because they lived and worked comfortably among blacks. ... From being "like negroes" to being "as bad as negroes" was but a trifling step in dominant Southern thinking; and hence in states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia, Italians were known to have been lynched for alleged crimes, or even for violating local racial codes by "fraternizing with blacks." (57)

Matthew Frye Jacobson
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)

Were there any jazz musicians among these New Orleans Italians' children and grandchildren?

[from a notebook, 2017]

A Further Appeal To Time-Honored Literary Devices (i.e. MAD LIBS!!!)

[ Why bother? ]

• • • • •


An Open Letter To My Dissenters On Why Classical Isn’t Cool Anymore

Stefan Andrew Lord Kac, with apologies to Nicholas "The Cherub" Payton

(and previously, if briefly, Professor Gann)




Let me make one thing clear. I am not dissing an art form. I am dissing the name, Classical. Just like being called Cracker affected how White people felt about themselves at one time, I believe the term "CLASSICAL" affects the style of playing. I am not a Cracker and I am not a Classical musician.
What do Claude Debussy, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, Kyle Gann (LOL!!!) and myself share in common? A disdain for Classical. I am reintroducing a talk to the table of a conversation that my ancestors wanted to have a long time ago. It is on their shoulders that I stand.
"Classical" is an oppressive colonialist slave-owner term and I want no parts of it. If Classical wasn’t a slave, why did Cage try to free it? Classical is not music, it is an idea that hasn’t served any of us well. It saddens me most that some of my friends can’t see that. Some of y’all who know me and I’ve even employed, stood on the bandstand with, know how important tradition is to me. My work speaks to that.

This Is Most Decidedly Not Any Kind of Rant

For all those who say I’m on a crazed, cranky, angry, dark rant. There is nothing crazed, cranky, angry or dark about what I write, but a lot of this hate energy I’ve received online truly is. Someone has even gone as far as to deem me the Nicholas Payton of Classical?

You know what the most offensive part of that statement is to me?

The “CLASSICAL” part.
I’m trying to save this music and folks are straight lambasting me. The saving grace is, for the most part, the response has been overwhelmingly favorable and it’s here where I choose to focus my gaze. I’m sacrificing myself for the greater good of post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music and some of you are calling me names, and I’m the angry one?
Most of these folks don’t even know me, but yet they have a strong dislike for Stefan Andrew Lord Kac. I am a human being, not some internet bot. When you hold an intense dislike for someone you don’t know, it means that somewhere down deep inside, you have an intense dislike for yourself.
Please take at look at yourselves. What are you doing to save this music? Are you out there earning meaningless masters degrees from fancy-pants art schools and enjoying the California sunshine in December honing your skills for the next trumpet player to take you for a fool on the basketball court, or are you just functioning under the guise of what you have been fed for many years and are told is the way things have to be?

You can dislike me or what I say all you want, but it doesn’t stop what I said from being true. It only disturbs you this deeply because it dismantles everything you’ve built your life upon. As I've stated on my blog, “CLASSICAL” is resistant to change. It wants to hold on to the old way of doing things, even if they’ve proven to not work.
What are you so afraid of? That you actually might have to think for yourself? That you will be responsible for the information that has been passed down from generation to generation though the lineage? That you have to live up to the great legacy this music demands?
I challenge my dissenters to really be an individual and stand alone in the face of everyone telling you that you’re wrong, crazy and can’t do it. That’s what Schoenberg did. That’s what Cage did. Are you willing? Are you able? Are you ready? Only a few can really do it and my blog makes that clear. It ain’t for everybody. So, go on, continue to box yourself in a label that was designed to marginalize White musicians and cut them off from their brilliance.

pBAAJMM!

When post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music became “CLASSICAL”, it separated itself from the European folk music idiom. I’m just trying to take it back to its roots. European folk music has been separated from its root (what you call Classical) and, as a result, all of the branches of the tree are dying. White music is dying and I’m trying to help save it. Turn on the radio, if you don’t believe me. How many Classical records that have come out in the last 5 years that you’ve really loved?
I do as much to support this music as most of you. I don’t just come online and bitch about the state about this music. I spew real and actual vitriol at the art and its artists and here I have to see some of you tear me down and say I’m killing the blogosphere? When it is some of you who want to hold on to an oppressive idea that doesn’t serve post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music who are the true murderers.
The music was just fine before it was called Classical and will be just fine without the name.

There is nothing to be afraid of except yourselves.

I am Stefan Andrew Lord Kac and I play post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music.

Nicholas Payton plays more horn than I do, but mine is BIGGER!

pBAAJMM!


(the giant on whose shoulders I stand)

Occupation of the Mind, Part 2

[ Why bother? ]

• • • • •


NP continues:

The 99% is simply about a class of Whites aligning themselves with the impoverished they didn’t give a shit about until they, too, were broke. Am I supposed to care now that you’ve had a “come to Jesus” moment and want to say it’s all about us? Us didn’t become “us” until a faction of people felt the burn who never felt it. They didn’t give a shit when it was “just us”, so now I don’t give a shit. Justice. How does that song go, “Cry Me A River”?

At the heart of this statement lies what white culture might call an "old world" view of ancestry and cultural inheritance. In other words, you are a living representative of your entire lineage whether you like it or not, and their deeds and misdeeds alike are yours as well. I'm not oblivious to the backstory here, and yet I also have trouble seeing this worldview resulting in anything less than a permanent impasse in the getting along department. Because I'll never meet a German who helped exterminate the Jewish side of my family, I can't see any reason to put all of that on any given German indiscriminately until one who had nothing to do with it can be cowed into a contrite gesture of my choosing. From my middle-class white American vantage point, there's no rational justification for this, nor can I anticipate anything constructive coming of it. And to meet a random, unexpected contrite gesture with "so now I don't give a shit" would simply be to throw salt in the wounds.

So yes, Mr. Payton, we presently feel the burn, and only more acutely with your comments. In jazz as in life, the options are few for us modern-day pale folk who aspire to be part of the solution: apathy is complicity, activism is sour grapes; we are thieves if we imitate black music too closely, or ingrates if we do not imitate it closely enough; and the happy medium in both cases is a pinball of a moving target. It is a worldview by which culpability and victimry alike become genetic traits, and where each generation takes with them to the grave their children's hope for reconciliation along with their own. I think we can do better without forgetting our history, and I'm ready when you are.

Occupation of the Mind, Part 1

[ Why bother? ]

• • • • •


Here's NP waxing resentful on the Occupy movement.

The "Carpetbagger" item is intriguing. I think might know some, actually. Unfortunately, they do not just make pilgrimages to New Orleans, but indeed bring their "discoveries" home with them and try to claim some sort of direct line. The music is often embarrassing and the gesture borders on the offensive. So I'm with you there, NP. Some soul-searching and ton more time in the woodshed would do these busybodies good.

Now...

"Why are people occupying the streets when the only person capable of keeping you from your dreams is you? The Occupy movement is a distraction and will not yield anything but more confusion. There is no “machine” to fight against. We are in the dark because people are asleep to their own light. Cure the internal war within and the war without instantly vanishes.

We’ve worked from the outside in for centuries and still have not completely resolved the bigger issues. Grand gestures make great headlines, but the real healing takes place on an individual level.

"The internal war," huh? Sounds about right. We all have one, and we should absolutely fight it in the way that you describe. Is that it, though? Collective action is dead? Really? Since the 1960's? I'd like to believe you. I'm an introvert. I'm good at fighting internal battles and virtually incapable of being part of a collective anything. But comfort be damned, I can't agree with you on this, and I would, with all due respect, raise the question of Abolitionism first and foremost. How would that have gone without a little bit of collective action, public debate and well-timed violence thrown in? Not a direct analogy? I'm not so sure. The Pro-Slavery side certainly took great pains to specifically inhibit the formation of collective consciousness and action alike among their slaves. They feared it, and they were right to. They were cowards and they were outnumbered. Even failing any more specific similarities, I think the same can absolutely be said about modern-day Wall Street. Tell me why I'm wrong.

Poonpuff FAQ for the e-Nihilists in the room (as well as any and all past/present/future MFEDI readers whose e-worldview necessitates such overt clarifications of purpose and method be made again and again regarding this and the few other constructive, well-written weblogs about music and musicians)


WHEEEEW, okay...


ahem...



Dear Angry Reader With Better Things To Do Than Sit Around Reading Some Young White Asshole's Weblog,

Before attacking my motives for joining the Post-Nicholas Payton Foofaraw (PNPF or "Poonpuff"), for making any particular argument therein, and/or for having this blog in the first place, I would humbly ask you to consider the following clarifications of purpose and method, issued at the outset of my joining the PNPF and applicable to all subsequent statements made on this topic.


(1) You're not qualified to disagree with someone who "plays more horn" than you do. Who do you think you are, anyway?

While NP indeed plays more horn than I do, mine is bigger.

In all seriousness, I graciously defer to NP and similarly accomplished individuals (if any others exist) on matters which are directly informed by one's degree of musical skill and/or career success, such as issues of instrumental technique, music criticism, marketing/career advice, practice habits, etc. However, any generalizations (music-related or otherwise) about a group of which I am a member (e.g. "white people" or "all these kids with music degrees") are fair game for rebuttal because they require no further qualifications than (a) that I be a member of the group(s) in question, and (b) that I tell the truth about myself. Under those circumstances, no musical skill whatsoever is required to be qualified to make such a rebuttal, even to a highly skilled musician such as NP. Were I to make a blanket generalization about "black people" or "New Orleans cats," don't you think NP and all other members of those respective groups would be qualified to rebut my statement?



(2) But...you're...white. WTF is up with that shit?

Guilty. Can't change it, and unlike many white classmates growing up, I never tried. If it's relevant (and I'm not saying it is; only you can decide), I did go to an elementary school from 1st through 5th grade where blacks outnumbered whites by more than 2-to-1; I have spent hundreds of hours of my life on the basketball court (one of NP's hallowed proving grounds, which is the only reason I bring it up) outnumbered by a similar margin; I did continue to volunteer (albeit in fits and starts) on the Northside of Minneapolis long after I finished high school there; believe it or not, a good high school friend of mine declared another friend and I "blacker than some [black people]" even though we didn't talk, act or dress like him; and of course, it goes without saying that a good number of my strongest musical influences are African-Americans. These are mere facts about my life experience. They do not grant me any kind of authority to speak about racial issues that I would not otherwise be thought to have. By relating them here, I simply hope to convince anyone who is not otherwise inclined to believe so that I care and that black people are real and human to me. You don't have to believe me, but that is the truth. That's all I've got for you on that front.

Hence, if you see fit to comment on something I wrote (which I welcome), I would appreciate the common intellectual courtesy of having this articulated in terms of the content of the argument in question, not in terms of my supposed qualifications (or lack thereof) to make it based on overbroad generalizations about groups of which I am a member (e.g. "young white assholes" or "academically trained white musicians from the Upper Midwest who, surprisingly, can also hold their own on the basketball court") when these generalizations may or may not actually be reflected in my specific case, and indeed, when you clearly have no possible way of knowing if they are reflected in my case or not based solely on an argument I have put forward about music and the world immediately surrounding it. There certainly are "qualifications" I do not and cannot possess, and I promise never to speak as if I possess them; I am, however, eminently qualified to evaluate overbroad generalizations about groups of which I am a member, no matter who made them or what they are. At that point, any further psychoanalysis of my identity, while perhaps relevant to other, broader discussions, is moot to the particular argument I've made about music and the world immediately surrounding it. And that's why we're all here. Just the facts, ma'am.



(3) Gee, that's a mouthful, Socrates. If you're a musician, why don't you go practice/study/listen/compose instead of writing a pointless blog about your white angst?

Like you, I'm darn close to being a Nihilist at this point, but not completely. The ethical issues surrounding music still matter enough to me to devote a small bit of my time to considering them publicly. This is wholly a matter of (a) self-interest (i.e. since I have to live and work in this world just like NP and everyone else who makes music, and therefore would like to see it improved wherever possible), and (b) the sense that such "improvements" are, frequently, so fucking obvious to a majority of us and thus quite easily attainable if only more of us were to give them proper consideration using adequately precise terminology and more than 140 characters where needed. As you no doubt know based on your wording of the above question, most blogs fall short of meeting this need; this is where I come in.

If I had no self-interest in seeing a better musical world, or if I thought it was a wholly untenable proposition, then no, I absolutely would not bother. There are other areas of life that I feel are lost causes in this way (see: Congress, U.S.), but music is not one of them. I believe that music is trivial in comparison to these other areas, and therefore that it is easier to fix. Only a small percentage of these musical issues do I choose to explore publicly. The rest I keep to myself and seldom write down; thus, the content here is already heavily edited and pared down to its essence. You are absolutely entitled to judge it to be a waste of your time, but not a waste of my own; the latter is for myself alone to judge. Know that I spend quite a bit of time reading blogs as well as writing them, and have thus developed a very low tolerance for vacuous garbage masquerading as musicology. My activities here are always directed towards achieving something more vital and useful. Even during my annual "Blog Month" project (which is presently in effect), during which I force myself to blog daily for a month regardless of whether I feel I have something just this important to say, I am after two things I believe to be constructive objectives: one is to throw myself a change-up, knowing that I sometimes become a different writer when forced to work constantly; and the other is to critique the vacuous garbage referred to above through the time-honored literary device of satire.

Sounds like fun, huh? None of this is a burden on my direct music-making endeavors, from which I, like virtually every other musician, need occasional respite anyway. In fact, blogging has frequently allowed me to bring fresh motivation to these endeavors at times when it has been lacking. (Knowing that more people would take your blog seriously if you "played more horn," while not necessarily right, certainly provides some motivation, doesn't it?) It isn't hard to find bloggers and trolls whose musical lives are out of balance in this way, but I do not consider myself to be one of them. If you do consider me to be one, I would like to know on what intimate knowledge of my inner thoughts you base this observation, and also what you are doing wasting your time with my senseless rants? It must be more complicated than misery loving company...

a foofaraw over a kerfuffle about a boondoggle

Longtime MFEDI readers know the drill by this time: I post misinformed rants about pop music while the real issues are discussed elsewhere by more important people on their more important blogs, are then commented on extensively by the people I malign here, and are noted by me, if at all, only weeks, months or years later after I've had a chance to catch up on the gory details, by which time comment threads have been closed, libel suits filed, and any further attempt to get a word in edgewise merely dismissed as self-important "intellectual land prospecting." Ah yes, long live the blogosphere, the first (and I hope last) vehicle of human discourse where it is neither what you said nor how you said it that matter, but rather when!

So it is, again, with the Nic Payton skirmish, and here I am late to the party as usual, still young, white, middle class and accredited, just like I was before, still with a blog and a project of my own invention whereby I intend to post on it daily for a month, and presented with yet another eminent black musician who I have great respect for saying a few things I agree with alongside many more things that make me want to quit playing music altogether and go back to working at the airport. You could argue that the worst thing I could do under these circumstances would be to get involved; indeed, there superficially seems to be nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. By dint of both a deeper interpretation of the possibilities and a spectacular lack of willpower, I hereby declare my intent (to be withdrawn whenever I see fit) to enter the fray. In part by choice but also by necessity on some levels, this will take place here rather than elsewhere until further notice. The next post will explain in more detail why I feel justified in doing this, and will be linked to at the top of each subsequent post on the topic in order to anticipate the usual nihilistic barbs.

(FYI, Payton's blog is here. Further links omitted; you're smart enough to follow the trail.)

Also, closed-circuit to Sean Roderick: where's Sean Roderick when you need him? If you're out there reading, I want your reaction (on or off the record) as this discussion unfolds.

Contradictions To Be Done Away With

(1) Louis Armstrong took his unconventional trumpet and vocal technique and figured out how to make great music with it, but Miles Davis just didn't know how to play the trumpet.

(2) Music that needs to be explained is too intellectual, but musicians that don't talk to their audience are arrogant.

(3) Jazz originated in the West, but it doesn't belong in a book or a course entitled "A History of Western Music."

(4) White jazz musicians who apply classical concepts to their jazz work are dishonoring jazz's African-American origins, but white jazz musicians who overtly imitate seminal African-American artists are just stealing from them for their own material gain, and/or because they have nothing original to say.

(5) No one wants to be labeled "avant-garde" by others (especially in person), but everyone labels themselves "avant-garde" given the chance (especially on their MySpace pages).

Towards "A Full Understanding"

Jazz and race. It's a topic that's been making it's way around the blogosphere lately. By the time I get this post up, the whole thing probably will have passed over. Fine. This isn't something that one just rattles off a casual sketch about. It deserves a well thought-out, carefully worded, conscientious effort even from a blog, the most notoriously casual and unregulated of all media outlets. I'd undoubtedly have less to talk about here (which would be a good thing) if more people had put more thought and more effort into what they've written. Here, then, are my responses to the good, the bad and the ugly of what has been said recently. My sincere thanks and congratulations to anyone who actually reads the whole thing.

This is undoubtedly the touchiest subject to fall within the purview of this blog (sorry guys, B-flat versus C tubas doesn't even register on the scale). With that in mind, let me establish a few things from the outset that the reader may want to keep in mind while evaluating my comments. This is a classic example of a situation where everyone wants to be the victim. Needless to say, African Americans as a group have endured victimization the likes of which few other Americans can relate to directly, both in general, and specifically with regard to the exploitation of certain largely African American musical contributions and innovations. I get that. This particular situation proves that we are all victims of what has been perpetrated, albeit to varying degrees. It is understandable that some amount of the animosity and distrust created by these injustices endures in succeeding generations of musicians who, individually, have not really done anything to each other.

I am white: to say that I too feel victimized is simply for me to be honest, but could also be interpreted as ignorant. Hence, I need the reader to realize that I by no means consider my own victimization to be on par with the ongoing oppression and exploitation of blacks. It is too easy for whites to come across as insensitive on this matter, and also too easy for blacks to take it this way when it may not have been meant as such. Please do not take anything I say here as an indication of a lack of empathy or historical knowledge (there will be more on my background later). I am acutely aware of the existence and the fallacies of the "cult of white victimhood" (Twin Citeans may recognize that phrase; I'm stealing it from this disturbing City Pages article of last year, which has nothing to do with music, but which many readers will find interesting nonetheless). I do not subscribe to this school of thought; it is a propaganda victory of the right wing designed to whip up racial tensions ("divide and conquer"). My victimization pales in comparison to the real issues here, but I am a victim nonetheless and I insist on the right to voice my concerns. I will do so by taking various recent online statements as starting points and working out from there. At the conclusion of each discussion, I will afford each of these people the opportunity to cover their asses by giving an assignment to each of them based on the claims made in their statements. These people (and anyone else) are thusly invited to post their completed assignments as comments to this entry. Without further ado:

EXHIBIT A
excerpt:
White folks know the historical value of jazz as an art form. They will stop at nothing to write themselves a part of it. But their presence means the scarce resources are taken from the black artists who are the true keepers of the legacy. White males will recognize the dead and dying ones, but never anoint the younger turks like James Carter and Christian McBride. Of course , we shouldn't expect them to. They had always looked out first for their own.

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The best thing white musicians can do is get out of the way and let them play. Let them be heard, let them be able to sustain a living and leave a legacy. I am still searching for a true white jazz musician. And I have heard many. I hear intellect, but not "soul" and energy. Maybe one day , I will hear one. In the meantime, I refuse to lower the standards I was taught so that they can pretend they have a right to our legacy. Do you think they would accept a black man playing Irish or Yiddish music?

A gem of ethnomusicological scholarship, if I don't say so myself. I have faith that the black supremacist account of jazz history is espoused by a relatively small number of individuals, so small in fact that I'm not sure I've ever met one of these people in person. If I have, they have all been unusually kind to me. Nonetheless, as this document proves, they are out there somewhere, and even if they only express their "real" views in private, anonymously or through one-way online conduits, those views are communicated often enough that this is by no means a dead issue. As the bumper sticker says, if what I'm about to say makes you feel attacked, it is probably a counter-attack.

Dropping McBride's name the way he does is ridiculous. I don't know anyone I've ever worked with, black or white, who wouldn't give up their first born child for McBride's ability. Carter I'm not so sure about, but I hardly find him to be a good example of a musician who has been systematically denied media attention. More like the other way around.

The intellect/soul dichotomy and its many variants should be familiar to anyone who reads about music regularly. It's a bad enough to dismiss a whole slew of musicians (including at least a few widely acknowledged masters) as worthless based entirely on the color of their skin, but to do so on this hopelessly subjective and cliched basis is laughable. Would I accept a black man playing Irish music? Of course. No less than I would accept a black man playing classical music, which many do quite well. How do you explain that?

Assignment for Greg: write a five paragraph essay on the music of one or more of the following white musicians, explaining in specific and widely accepted/understood musical and sociological terms why those in question are not worthy of being called jazz musicians.
(1) Bill Evans
(2) Dave Holland
(3) Pat Martino

EXHIBIT B
excerpt:
Whether or not there are authentic systems in [Dave] Douglas’s music is not even close to the point. To me, the question is: What is jazz music? What I really don't like is how the avant-garde, which is more like contemporary European music, is treated as the solution to jazz to the exclusion of real jazz. I realized the problem years ago when Roland Kirk complained to Cecil Taylor in Downbeat that Cecil wouldn't let him sit in with his band. Cecil said they had arrangements, and that's why he didn't let Kirk sit it, but that's not a good reason. That's what holds the music back. It is a real problem that there is no agreed-upon place for avant-garde musicians and the musicians who play real jazz to play together. Because if the avant-garde musicians stay away from the jazz musicians, their music gets to the point where it has less and less to do with jazz. I don't like that.
-Stanley Crouch

The first thing jump out at me about Crouch's statement is a perverse concern with defining jazz, a position which the reader must acknowledge in order to evaluate everything he says during the interview. His approach is notable (but not unique) in the way it aspires to neutrality in order to conceal a value judgement (which, make no bones about it, he wants you to share). Douglas is not a bad musician, he's just not playing jazz, or at least not "real jazz." Sounds objective enough, but let's consider the source: coming from someone who takes stylistic labels for granted, perhaps it could be taken as a neutral statement; coming from Stanley Crouch, it is a veiled condemnation. His statement quoted earlier in the article that "Douglas is not a bad musician" now seems suspiciously candy-coated. Of course, he's entitled to his opinion; from reading the whole interview, I would expect that the two of us most likely share many tastes in music. I simply find the elevation of the "what is jazz?" question to be a bit misguided in general, and given what we know about him, I don't think it is one bit unreasonable to wonder if this is really just about music.

Of course, at this point in the interview, he makes it clear enough that he is expressing opinions rather than facts, but these are opinions about sociology, not music. He doesn't like the avant-garde because arrangements make participation in music-making more exclusive? What about the musical results? I don't think it's too extreme to insist that the musical outcome of any given event is far more significant in any evaluation of it's overall success than the logistics of how inclusive the event is, yet Crouch attempts no such evaluation here, not even on a subjective basis. Hence, not only has he elevated the all-trivial question of stylistic definition to the height of concern, but he answers the question not by evaluating musical properties but by wallowing in social concerns.

On top of all of this, it's ludicrous that he assails the avant-garde for being exclusive. As if any old dope could have simply sat in with Charlie Parker! The stories I've heard about people trying didn't have particularly happy endings. A rift between the mainstream and the avant-garde is an inevitable consequence of a virile art form, and in most cases, I'm not sure members of the two groups are terribly disappointed that they cannot play together. Kirk was not exactly a mainstream guy himself after all, and as petty a thing as it is to say, I feel obligated to point out the obvious fact that he was also blind. Could that have had something to do with it? I've sat in with groups playing original material even though that meant I had to read. I'm having someone do the same with one of my groups tonight. The solution is not to do away with arrangements, but to be a competent sight-reader, which most jazz musicians are anyway these days. Of course, the dixieland guys also think that arrangements are wrong-headed, but Crouch's own stated interests would seem to reach far beyond that. Last I checked, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra plays "arrangements." Does that fact by itself "hold the music back?" Wait...don't answer that.

Another grave mistake is to lump the entire avant-garde together. "Free" music most certainly does not use arrangements. It is nothing less than the single most inclusive Western musical form yet devised. Yes, it tolerates charlatans to a greater extent than most musical traditions as a consequence of this openness, but it also enables what are to me some of the most compelling possibilities anywhere in all of art. Any idiot can see that Crouch's ideal of "real jazz" is far more exclusive than this.

Assignment for Stanley:Write a five paragraph essay defining jazz. Use specific and widely accepted/understood musical and sociological terms.

"EXHIBIT C
excerpt:
"Defining 'who can play' is subject to a great deal of cultural bias that breaks down largely along racial lines. Of course, to suggest that the criteria for evaluating the music should emanate from the culture that spawned the music would be interpreted as 'reverse racism."
-Eric Gould

Which culture would that be? Perhaps the culture of New Orleans, which was more thoroughly integrated in the late 1800's than some American cities are today? I think you could argue that race became a larger factor in jazz only after it moved on to places where race was a larger factor in general, but that is a superfluous observation to make here. What Gould is saying implies ownership, and that is more worth examining in depth. Outsiders are being asked to take on a false consciousness and assimilate the value judgments of what is assumed to be a largely foreign culture in exchange for membership in the "jazz" club. Even if you find this reasonable, it certainly isn't very nice. Perhaps the reason you seldom hear such things these days from Europeans talking about their classical tradition is because they have not suffered exploitation like American blacks have. At some point, you'll just have to take my word that I aim to be as sensitive to these issues as any outsider can be without actually having been in the victim's shoes. I still do not think that it helps matters to militantly guard a culture's artistic contributions from all outsiders as if it were a trade secret. It would, in fact, be a tremendous gesture of goodwill and reconciliation to be open to many interpretations of what jazz might mean to people of diverse backgrounds, and in fact, that view is not altogether unusual these days. Some will inevitably reply that the ongoing possibility of exploitation precludes this, a view which I find unduly conservative, but which I suppose I can't disagree with entirely. But just to be clear, if this is indeed the way we're operating these days, I hereby grant permission to all non-whites to play classical music, and to synthesize new musical works from this and other streams of tradition. You can bet your life that I would be labeled a racist if I opined to the contrary.

In any case, here's your assignment, Eric:
Write a five paragraph essay detailing the criteria for evaluation that you think should be used to decide who can play. Use specific and widely accepted/understood musical and sociological terms.

EXHIBIT D
excerpt:
The reason most of the whites & asians come out and support is because they're still trying to cop what we're doin'...especially the creative music, because they don't have a full understanding which propels them. Blacks in some since have moved on like Miles and on to tha next.
-http://www.myspace.com/coreywilkes

Aargh. This takes the cake. Let's again reason by analogy to European classical music: when was the last time a white classical pianist gave a recital for a predominantly Korean audience and subsequently complained that there were too few white men in the audience and that the only reason it was packed with young Korean women is that they were there to cop his phrasing? I would hope that this a strictly hypothetical situation, and that if it's not, plenty of people would be lining up to speak out against such an attitude. I can only speak for one white person (myself), but that's not why I go the hear live music. I mean, it's just so much easier to cop that shit from records because that way you can hear it more than once (and of course, most of us are pretty slow, so we need to hear things many times before we can remember them).

In all seriousness now, the "full understanding" line is the single most offensive thing I've read in music-related discourse in quite a while. I most certainly do not understand fully why music has such a profound effect on me. I think that if I did, it would lose some of it's attraction. That's not a white or a black sentiment, that's the sentiment of all people who play music for it's own sake rather than to have their ego stroked. If you aren't in it for the music; if you're a Stanley Crouch type who's more concerned with who and how than what; if you believe that people of different races are genetically predisposed to sound a certain way; then you are the one who lacks a "full understanding" and you really need to go hang out at Berkleeuntil you inevitably run into some kid from Uzbekistan who sounds like he grew up in Chicago. How's that for "cultural context"?

Assignment for Corey:at the first set break of your next gig, go up to five unknown white people in the audience and ask them why they came. Report back. (Extra credit: go up to five men and five women and ask them why they came. That question is on a lot of people's minds also, and is no less controversial.)

EXHIBIT E:

Wynton Marsalis recently appeared on The Daily Show, where he described the music of Armstrong, Ellington and Parker as "subversive." His latest release is supposed to carry on that tradition. I don't need to see a genuine copy of Wynton's tax return to get a decent idea of what he makes and how he lives, and I don't find that to be the least bit subversive, the provocative subject matter of his music notwithstanding. Let me tell you why. (note: I am not a blanket Wynton hater. J Mood is one of my favorites of all time; why the hell won't he do that anymore?)

To be an art musician of any kind is still subversive, but not in the way jazz used to be. Jazz musicians of all races live in less-than-affluent circumstances, eschewing "American Dream" bullshit in favor of a hard scrabble life with few lights at the end of the tunnel. Many own instruments that are worth the price of a car. Some of their record collections are worth more than that. In an age when "the best thing for America" is to earn as much money and buy as much plastic shit as humanly possible, they refuse to comply, even though many of them possess exceptional intellects and would have no trouble distinguishing themselves quickly in a more lucrative field. That is pretty damn subversive, but it is only indirectly related to continuing concerns about race. I don't think white people purposely infiltrated the ranks of the working stiff musician in order to hijack the subversive power of the jazz community away from race and towards their own agenda. I think it's merely a symptom of the quality of "real jazz" that it inevitably attracted such arduous followers from all over the place. In any case, subversive people are more dangerous than subversive music. If the current situation somehow represents a failure to fans of subversion, I think they have missed the point.

Conclusion/Full Disclosure/Considering The Source:

I am white and had a comfortable middle class upbringing, but my parents did not shelter me by any stretch of the imagination. I went to inner city public schools for all but 6th through 8th grade, including an elementary school that was at one point 70% black. That doesn't make me an expert on or a member of the culture (although a good high school friend once jokingly elected me and another white friend as official black people), but it does mean that I have more than just a cursory grasp on the past and the present of black history. Maybe it is insensitive to say so, but I do in fact feel downright victimized by much of what I've read over the last several weeks, if not in a rather minor way. It is genuinely disheartening. Why is it even worth complaining about from my end? Take these five exhibits together and you have an impossible situation. Go your own way and you are an ingrate, co-opting the jazz label without any justification. Follow tradition and you are simply stealing from black innovators. It's a catch 22.

Notice that only one of these five people take the position that white people are innately incapable of playing jazz, but that the various others lay out a web of demands which, taken together, cannot possibly be met. Simply by being white and playing most any form of American music, you are prone to run up against one of these objections. That's not the attitude that I see in the people I play with, nor is that an attitude I feel entitled to take towards European music. No, the race issue in jazz is not dead, but resolving it has got to be a two-way street. If there's anything I can do, I will, but I will not stop transcribing black musicians, nor will I stop working in avant-garde or "classical" influenced groups, and when pressed by a well-intentioned (if annoying) inquisitor about what kind of music I play, I will not hesitate to answer "jazz". "Full understanding" sounds more like "hidden agenda" to me. I have no agenda in doing these things other than to relieve the constant urge to make music, and I'd like to think that this attitude transcends all racial and social boundaries. I don't seek to understand my musical inclinations, only to translate them into tangible high-quality musical products (the establishment of that criterion being, of course, highly subjective and mediated only by my own value judgments). I take offense to no one who does the same, and I ask only the same treatment in return.