The "Segregated Musical"

By 1940, both America and the rest of the world recognized swing music as America’s “most distinctive contribution” to world musical culture (David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America 142). After Pearl Harbor, or around the beginning of 1942, perhaps not surprisingly, Stowe observes, “swing found itself transformed into a galvanizing symbol of national purpose” (142). In the years preceding the war, beginning around 1935, swing had accrued a distinctive and highly functional ideology, representing the values of “American exceptionalism . . . ethnic pluralism and democratic equality,” and therefore was seen as an ideal weapon with which to fight fascism (Swing Changes 143). Hence, like jazz, swing functioned as an agent of ideology. “It repeated,” as Michael Jarrett has observed, “on an aesthetic level, myths of identity-through-integration. It naturalized and helped shape a social regime, state apparatus, or, more kindly, values we hold dear.” (Drifting on a Read: Jazz As a Model For Writing 31). In short, swing embodied the utopian impulses of pluralism, ethnic inclusiveness, and racial tolerance.

Strange, then, that a wartime film such as Cabin in the Sky (completed late October 1942, released April 1943), would be, as Thomas Cripps observes in Slow Fade to Black, a “segregated musical.” It is true, as Krin Gabbard observes, that as part of the war effort “Hollywood was trying to pay more attention to African Americans, largely because they were fighting and dying in World War II” (Jammin’ at the Margins 178), but as an “all-black film,” despite its rather obvious purpose—to call attention to the lives of African Americans and to fight long-established attitudes toward the participation of blacks in the work force—it nonetheless was evidence of the state apparatus supporting segregation, as was, at the time, the Jim Crow military. Therefore, the fact that the musical was made, but made with an all-black cast, reveals one of the ideological stresses of the war, the great divide between the symbolic content of swing and the actual social realities of the time: it was made, but rather than having been made with an integrated cast, it was made with an all-black cast—Cripps’ “segregated musical.” Hence Cabin in the Sky duplicated, but within the culture industry and therefore on an aesthetic level, the ideology that supported a segregated military. For instance: Kenneth Spencer, who plays the Reverend Greene character in Cabin in the Sky, also plays in the film the role of the heavenly emissary addressed as “The General.” He would also play the role of the token black soldier in Bataan, also released in 1943, appearing just a couple of months after Cabin in the Sky. While Krin Gabbard argues that the sequence in Cabin in the Sky featuring Duke Ellington and His Orchestra performing “Goin’ Up” serves “to gently sabotage the film industry’s racial stereotyping” (184)—hence revealing the existence of an ideological crack or fissure—the film nevertheless suggests the way that war, and wartime behavior, serves to naturalize other cultural behaviors and practices.

Hard Bop

An oft-repeated tale in the annals of modern jazz has it that bebop was born at Minton’s Playhouse in New York City in 1940, where the house band included pianist Thelonius Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, trumpeter Joe Guy, and bassist Nick Fenton. (See, among other sources, David H. Rosenthal’s fine book, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965, Oxford UP 1992.) Rosenthal quotes at length a passage about bebop from Ross Russell’s novel The Sound (1961), in which Russell writes, “It [bebop] seemed to reflect the turmoil and insecurity of the war years. At the same time it implied a profound contempt for those who had been foolish enough to become involved with the war” (13). If bebop was connected to the wartime mood of the 1940s, and (following Amiri Baraka) with frustrated black hopes in a desegregated America which adhered to the principle of “freedom for all” as well, the post-bebop form of jazz referred to as “hard bop,” emerging in the early years of the Cold War, was influenced by the post-war rise of R&B. Incorporating blues and gospel elements, hard bop, according to jazz expert Michael Jarrett, “combines the melodicism and crisp rhythm attack of r&b with harmonies and minor modes associated with bebop” (Sound Tracks: A Musical ABC, Volumes 1-3, 239). Largely associated with jazz musicians such as Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, and with labels such as Blue Note and Prestige, hard bop “provided bohemians with a soundtrack for living” (239). The first important hard bop recordings roughly coincided with the popularization of rock ‘n’ roll, and 50s hipsters found in hard bop records an alternative soundtrack to the music of pop-oriented Top 40 radio. For those such as myself born in the 50s, hard bop (and cool jazz) formed the soundtrack to many of the television shows that form my earliest memories. For hard bop signified, in the words of Michael Jarrett, “fast cars, loose women, hard drugs, shady deals, and weak or addled minds” (239).

Common Cause

In my last entry I wrote about Casablanca (1942) as an example of wartime propaganda, about how the film enacted the ideological need to value (public) duty over (individual) desire, which corresponded to the wartime need for sexual abstinence and fidelity. I don’t claim any originality in this insight, as I think the film’s ideological purpose, given the virtue of “20/20” hindsight, is rather “obvious” in this regard, as many critics have observed. However, it occurred to me that it is probably worth mentioning that the film, seen also with the clarity of hindsight, also enacts America’s wartime sense of ideological purposelessness. Historian Paul Fussell, in Wartime, argues that the reason why Americans fought the Germans was even less clear than why they were fighting the Japanese (the reason for fighting the latter was revenge against the attack on Pearl Harbor). Although Victor Laszlo refers to Nazi concentration camps when addressing the Nazi military commander, Major Strasser, the death camps were not widely known about in the late summer of 1942 when the film was made, as the U. S. government had downplayed the brutality of Nazi anti-Semitism before the war. Hence there’s no clear sense of the nature or extent of Nazi criminality in Casablanca—they are, simply, the villains. Major Strasser seems confident that the victory of the Third Reich is inevitable. He and his fellow officers sing one (traditional) German folk song in the film, and his villainy is defined by whatever sort of (undefined) act of brutality he perpetrates on his captive, Ugarte (Peter Lorre). Victor Laszlo is wanted by the Nazis because he is a resistance leader fighting Nazi tyranny, and hence is a figurehead (but not a Jewish one). He has been tortured (as indicated by his reference to the “more persuasive methods” used when he was a prisoner in a concentration camp), but the word “torture” is never used. (The question of whether Ugarte is tortured is unclear, but his death is highly suspicious. He was murdered, but was he tortured? We're never explicitly told.) When Rick has finally made his decision to help Laszlo (and Ilsa) escape from Casablanca by giving them the "Letters of Transit" to board the plane to Lisbon, Laszlo praises Rick’s return “to the fight”—they are now fighting on the same side, for the same cause. In his chapter in Wartime entitled “The Ideological Vacuum,” Fussell argues that since Americans didn’t have a positive reason for fighting the war, they fell back on sheer pragmatism—the belief that “common cause would somehow substitute for formulation of purpose or meaning” (139). Hence Rick is told by Laszlo, “this time I know our side will win,” meaning they are now fighting together for a common cause. They are now on the same “side,” but there still remains, to use Fussell's phraseology, an “ideological vacuum.” Outside of common cause, there remains no clear purpose or meaning in fighting the war.

Hill of Beans

In my blog entry yesterday, I wrote about the effect of World War II on jazz music, and how it rendered the modernist values jazz had come to represent in the 1920s and 30s—“individualism”—unfashionable. As a consequence of the need for personal sacrifice during the war (personal sacrifice was required to win the war), individualism was no longer as highly valued as group cohesion and communal harmony. I referred to Paul Fussell’s observation, in his book Wartime, that the most popular songs during the war were about sexual depravation or pleas for fidelity—think of the Glenn Miller Band's “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me).” Fussell also noted that if the songs were not about sexual abstinence and the virtues of self-denial, they were about nothing at all (“Little Brown Jug”).

The opposed values of individual expression and group cohesion were often enacted, dramatically, as duty vs. desire. A classic wartime film in which the tension between duty and desire is dramatically enacted is, of course, Casablanca (1942). In the film’s climactic scene, Rick is faced with a choice that also happened to correspond to the need to resolve an ideological contradiction: should he allow Ilsa to go with her legal husband, Victor Laszlo, or keep her with him in Casablanca? The film demands the audience choose between love and romance (desire) or duty to a higher cause (getting Laszlo to Lisbon).

RICK: Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
ILSA: But what about us?
RICK: We’ll always have Paris. We didn't have. We lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
ILSA: When I said I would never leave you—
RICK: And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do, too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.

It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world—in other words, the woman must be sent away. Rick’s “hill of beans” line is a virtual restatement of the quotation by Eileen M. Sullivan that Fussell cites in Wartime: “There was no room in this war-culture for individual opinions or personalities, no freedom of dissent or approval . . . .” (195). Interestingly enough, the ideological need to value social duty over individual desire corresponds to the wartime need for sexual abstinence and deprivation, yet another form of personal sacrifice that was needed to win the war.

The Sing-Along

The effect of World War II on jazz music was to render the modernist values jazz had come to represent in the 1920s and 30s—individualism and spontaneity, represented by the improvised solo—unfashionable. The individualism represented by popular personalities such as Louis Armstrong, for instance, was devalued, while the virtue of “tightness,” represented by Glenn Miller’s big band, was highly prized because it represented group cohesion and communal harmony. His Army Air Force Band cemented the relationship between self-effacement and subservience to the group, or unit. In Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford UP, 1989), his revisionary history of World War II, Paul Fussell discusses the popular music that was played in Allied factories, “instrumental music only,” suggesting that instrumentals were associated with the wartime values of conformity and mindless labor, the values of the machine and assembly line. Fussell notes that the most popular songs during the war were about sexual depravation or pleas for fidelity, for instance, the Glenn Miller Band's “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me)” (recorded by other bands at the time, of course):

Don’t go walkin’ down Lover’s Lane with anyone else but me

Anyone else but me, anyone else but me, no, no, no

Don’t go walkin’ down Lover’s Lane with anyone else but me

Til I come marchin’ home

I just got word from a guy who heard from the guy next door to me

The girl he met just loves to pet and it fits you to a T

So, don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me

Til I come marchin’ home

Fussell also notes that if they were not about sexual abstinence and self-denial (individual desires, as were personal opinions, counter-productive), they were about nothing at all, e.g., “The Beer Barrel Polka,” AKA “Roll Out the Barrel.” Most of the hit songs containing vocals were communal or intended as sing-alongs, such as “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” To make his point clear about the function of music during the war, Fussell cites Eileen M. Sullivan: “There was no room in this war-culture for individual opinions or personalities, no freedom of dissent or approval; the culture was homogeneous, shallow, and boring” (195).

Stuck In The Muck-O

The late Robin Wood’s Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia UP, 1986) contains what I believe to be an extremely valuable discussion of the “ideological shift” that characterizes the American cinema of the 1960s. In Chapter Two, “The Chase: Flashback, 1965,” Wood argues for the significance of Arthur Penn’s The Chase (filmed 1965, released 17 February 1966) as “one of the most complete, all-encompassing statements of the breakdown of ideological confidence that characterizes American culture through the Vietnam period and becomes a defining factor of Hollywood cinema in the 60s and 70s” (23). The Chase was one of those big, epic-length Sam Spiegel productions featuring a “major Hollywood cast”: Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Angie Dickinson, E. G. Marshall, James Fox, Robert Duvall, Miriam Hopkins, and other well-known figures. Wood admits The Chase is rather “crude and obvious” in its socio-political commentary (its critique of racism, bourgeois hypocrisy, conflicted attitudes toward the law, etc.), but nonetheless finds its special strength in being “the first film in which the disintegration of American society and the ideology that supports it (represented in microcosm by the town) is presented as total and final, beyond hope of reconstruction” (23). While I agree with him in his view of the film’s historic importance, and think the film extremely worthy of critical scrutiny, I think his claim that The Chase is “the first film” to represent the American ideological disintegration characteristic of the Sixties is debatable. I’d make a case for George Axelrod’s Lord Love a Duck as the first such film, but since it and The Chase were released virtually on the same day in February 1966, I’m unable to do so. The two films share few features in terms of story elements or characters, but like The Chase, Lord Love a Duck is also a representation of American ideological disintegration, and equally as compelling as The Chase, but is more contemporary in style. (Penn didn’t adopt a contemporary style until 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde). Interestingly, both Penn and Axelrod were born the same year, 1922, and were virtually the same age, Axelrod being the older by slightly over three months.

Axelrod, who died in 2003 (biographical details here), came to prominence as a consequence of writing two Broadway hits of the mid-50s, The Seven Year Itch and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?; both were later made into successful Hollywood films. He wrote the screenplays for, among other films, Bus Stop (1956), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and, perhaps most famously, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He was therefore not primarily known as a director, directing only two films during his career, both in the late Sixties: Lord Love a Duck (1966) and The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968), the latter sharing a family resemblance to Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967), in which a housewife (Anne Jackson, who played the child psychiatrist in Kubrick’s The Shining), in order to prove to her husband that she’s still sexually desirable to other men, begins an affair with a famous movie star. Neither one was critically nor commercially successful, and sadly, their failure brought an end to Axelrod’s motion picture directorial career. Too bad, because I think Lord Love a Duck to be one of the very best films of the 1960s; in fact, I would place it near the very top of my “best of” list of the decade.

According to the IMDB, The Chase was released theatrically on 17 February 1966, although it also indicates a different date for its New York premier, which occurred on 19 February. Serendipitously, Lord Love a Duck was released, this again according to the IMDB, on 21 February 1966—four days after The Chase, and while this may lend credence to Wood’s claim that The Chase has pride of place as the “first film” to represent a disturbance in American ideological confidence, the matter of a mere four days is irrelevant. While I haven’t done an extensive analysis, I suspect both films were being shot simultaneously, during the summer of 1965. I do know that The Chase wrapped by mid-August 1965, because I recall reading, in one of the many biographies written about the Fondas, that soon after the film's official wrap, Jane Fonda married Roger Vadim, the wedding occurring on 14 August 1965. I have no definitive filming dates for Lord Love a Duck, but it had to have been filming roughly at the same time as The Chase. The crucial point is, however, that there doesn’t seem to be any possible influence, of the artistic sort, of one film on the other; it’s therefore a matter of thematic convergence rather than direct influence, and that is what is important. I must also mention that both films were based on previously written material, The Chase on an unsuccessful 1952 Broadway play by Horton Foote, while Lord Love a Duck was based on a novel by Al Hine published in 1961.

In order to demonstrate how The Chase enacts, in dramatic fashion, the collapse of essential American ideological values, Wood, ingeniously, compares features of Penn’s film with those of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), a film made roughly 25 years earlier during the pre-World War II days of Hollywood’s so-called “Classical” era. Following E. H. Gombrich, Wood calls these features “schemata,” and they serve to reveal the changed cultural and historical conditions in which each film was made. I make no claim to have invented these schemata—I take them from Robin Wood’s enlightening discussion of The Chase, borrowing them from him in order to reveal the ideological collapse Lord Love a Duck dramatically enacts in a similar fashion. Relevant pages in Wood’s book are pp. 20-23. Note that these pages refer to the 1986 edition of Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan. The book was later revised, updated, and reissued, but I have not had the opportunity to read the revised edition.

1. “The male authority figure, the symbolic Father, repository and dispenser of the Law, combines myths of individualism and male supremacy that are central to capitalist democracy, enacting the functions of control and containment.” In Young Mr. Lincoln, it is, of course, the figure of Lincoln that embodies these values. In Lord Love a Duck, there are no commanding male authority figures. The authority figures are inept, ineffectual, and seemingly perverse. Barbara Ann Greene’s (Tuesday Weld’s) father, Howard, (Max Showalter), in one of the film’s most perverse moments, is revealed to have incestuous desires for his daughter, shown moaning, growling, and snarling as his buxom daughter models for him various cashmere sweaters. The high school principal, Weldon Emmett (Harvey Korman), is a masochist who can scarcely conceal his sexual interest in Barbara Ann, fetishizing her by means of her cashmere sweater, the color of which she tells him, provocatively, is “Peach Put-Down,” suggesting the masochistic nature of his desire. In Bob Barnard’s (Martin West’s) case, the Father is dead. And Alan “Mollymauk” Musgrave (Roddy McDowall), the film’s anti-hero, has no family, living here and there—“around,“ he says—in various places. “I stay with people.“

2. “In Young Mr. Lincoln Ann Rutledge dies but lives on as the protagonist’s spiritual support (it is “her“ decision—the stick falling toward the grave—that sends him to study law. The myth of woman as man’s supporter/inspiration/redeemer is of course long-standing.” In Lord Love a Duck, Barbara Ann’s parents are divorced. Her mother, Marie (Lola Albright), is vain, alcoholic, and promiscuous, indiscriminately picking up men at her place of work, a bar, where she works as a waitress dressed rather like a “Playboy Bunny.” In the scene in which she’s first introduced in the film, she drunkenly arrives home with a man whose name she can’t remember; the man also evinces an interest in Barbara Ann, hinting at a ménage involving himself, the mother, and the daughter. Barbara Ann later, tearfully, admits the truth to herself that her mother is a “prostitute.” Marie provides Barbara Ann no emotional support of any kind because she is completely absorbed in the drama of her own life. Her narcissism is represented visually through the device of having her constantly studying her own mirror image. Similarly, Bob (“Bobby Bear”) Bernard’s (Martin West’s) mother, Stella (Ruth Gordon), is portrayed as highly critical (“My son is . . . a total idiot. He takes after his late father”) and domineering. The Mother figure does not offer support, inspiration, or redemption, and therefore I suspect it is no coincidence that the hostile psychiatrist administering the Rorschach (“ink blot”) test to Alan, early in the film, is a woman. I should add that the film is pathologically harsh on women, more so, I think, than the male symbols of authority.

3. “In Young Mr. Lincoln the innocence of the young accused is unambiguous: the brothers, representing simple “manly” virtues, are central to Ford’s idealization of the family, the celebration of family life being central to the film.” As I indicated above, in Lord Love a Duck, Barbara Ann’s parents are acrimoniously divorced (he’s behind on his payments, too), and Stella Bernard’s (Ruth Gordon’s) husband is dead (“We . . . don’t divorce our men, we bury ‘em”). Later, in order for Barbara Ann to achieve her secondary goal (the first being a Hollywood actress) of marrying Bob “Bobby Bear” Barnard, the film’s demiurge figure, Alan Musgrave (McDowall), arranges for Barbara Ann’s mother, Marie, to have an “accident,” overdosing on sleeping pills. Alan’s arranging Marie’s death is never overtly stated, but we are strongly encouraged to make the connection, as he himself says to Barbara Ann that her death must seem an “accident” (rather than to be seen as a cleverly orchestrated murder, committed by him). We are therefore led to believe that Barbara Ann will be complicitous in murder if it is a necessary step for her to achieve her primary and secondary goals. Hence the nurturing role and function of the American family, so idealized in films of Ford, is entirely absent.

4. “Ford presents the lynch mob as essentially good citizens whose energies . . . get temporarily out of control. They need to be reminded of what is “right”—of a fixed and absolute set of values ratified by biblical text—whereupon their basic soundness is reaffirmed.” Although it is not made entirely clear whether the “student body” of Alan’s new high school—“Consolidated”—is composed of children of the dominant classes, it is strongly implied that they are. They are all white, affluent, cliquish, and have clearly internalized the values of extravagant financial expenditure, as indicated by the girls’ awareness of the invidious distinction bestowed by wearing cashmere sweaters, as opposed to the sweater made of inexpensive “synthetic” fabric that Barbara Ann wears early on. After Alan disrupts the graduation ceremony by destroying the staging platform with the tractor—presumably killing “Bobby Bear” (Barbara Ann's first picture is titled Bikini Widow) as well as the members of the school administration—the students and faculty are transformed into a lynch mob that chases him into the school building. He manages to escape their wrath by locking them out (his many keys again suggesting his status as demiurge), and the police gain admittance only by smashing the glass door, thereby allowing them to unlock it. (The police, as authority figures, are also depicted as inept.) The eruption of mob violence would seem to be a “natural” consequence of Alan’s violent actions—the link between violence and male sexuality is implicitly confirmed—but unlike what is often the case in Ford’s work, which as Wood observes is often preoccupied “with the ways in which ‘excess’ energies can be safely contained,” the energies, some destructive, some sexual, shown unleashed in Lord Love a Duck can only be contained, precariously, by a deep act of sublimation, as when Alan, cornered on the roof of the high school building, surrenders to the police. He first orders the police to “stop,” then adopts a sort of Zen-like pose, extending arms to them in an act of submission. Although time and space do not allow me to fully explore the subject, the necessity to sublimate destructive energies seems to me to be one of the film’s preoccupations. As an example, Stella Barnard’s (Ruth Gordon’s) sudden keen taste for alcohol seems to blunt her highly negative and destructive energies. The female psychiatrist’s aggressive attitude toward Alan is blunted, temporarily at least, when she is smoking; principal Emmett’s energies (sexual and otherwise) are blunted by the pencil he’s always putting in his mouth and holding like a dog holds a bone, and so on.

5. “Ford’s idealization of motherhood is central to Young Mr. Lincoln and to the ideology it embodies. The mother is reverenced as the rock on which the family, hence civilization, is built . . . .” In Lord Love a Duck, as in The Chase, the “collapse of confidence in the figure of the Mother . . . points directly to a collapse of confidence in the family structure and, beyond that, in traditional sexual relationships generally.” This latter insight is true of much of Axelrod’s work in general.

6. “It follows from Ford’s veneration of the mother than nothing in Young Mr. Lincoln questions the rightness and sanctity of marriage.” In contrast, nothing in Lord Love a Duck validates the rightness and sanctity of marriage. It is not clear, moreover, that Barbara Ann’s marriage to “Bobby Bear” is ever consummated, and his behavior is often portrayed as Oedipal toward his mother.

7. “In Young Mr. Lincoln the bible . . . is the ultimate sanction, and Lincoln’s authority is seen as God-given.” As Wood points out, in The Chase religion “is reduced to the helpless, absurd and annoying mumblings of Miss Henderson, who is represented as mad.” In Lord Love a Duck, religious services are held at the “First Drive-In Church of Southern California,” where one can “Worship in the Privacy of Your Own Automobile.” We happen to overhear the sermon on the Book of Leviticus, which the minister tells his parish (all in automobiles, parked as if at a drive-in move theater) is “long, confusing, and even boring.” Conventional religion is so marginalized it has ceased to be culturally relevant.

8. “The link between violence and male sexuality, which is implicit and probably unconscious in Young Mr. Lincoln, is fully explicit in The Chase.” Likewise, too, in Lord Love a Duck, as I pointed out above.

9. “Lincoln’s progress in Ford’s film is stimulated by his learning from the books passed on to him by the Clay family: he is guided toward his destiny as President by Ann Rutledge and Blackstone’s Commentaries, by women and nature, law and learning.” In Lord Love a Duck, the concept of progress through learning is debased by technology and economic necessity, as revealed by the brand new “Consolidated” high school being chic, having the latest technology, such as a PA system throughout the school, and elevators. The new technology is also mocked during a scene in which Barbara Ann provocatively raises the principal’s, Mr. Emmett’s, phallic PA microphone to her mouth and blows (into) it, causing Mr. Emmett’s to giggle and wiggle in his chair like an adolescent school boy. Moreover, the school’s very name, “Consolidated,” suggests that the new school was built out of a need for economic “efficiency” by the fictional school system of the film. The aphorism excerpted from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and quoted (incorrectly) in the opening title sequence (as “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” rather than “A little learning…”) also foregrounds the role of education, but Pope’s famous aphorism is reinterpreted as, “Go To School/Get A Little Knowledge/Live Dangerously.” The meaning of the reinterpretation suggests that true knowledge comes only from experience, as opposed to what is sometimes pejoratively referred to as “book learning.”

10. “Hollywood’s emblems for a lost innocence/happiness suggest a steady descent into disillusionment.” In Young Mr. Lincoln, Wood sees Ann Rutledge, although she is dead, as the “spiritual support” for Lincoln’s career. He also mentions emblems such as Kane’s “Rosebud” and “the river” of Written on the Wind, both emblems representing a lost innocence. There is no comparable image in Lord Love a Duck representing lost innocence, no nostalgic emblem. The only moment remotely suggestive of a kind of childhood innocence is when Alan and Barbara Ann inscribe their names in the wet concrete on the roof of the new “Consolidated” high school. Actually, Alan doesn’t sign his name at all, but rather the name “Mollymauk,” accompanied by the outline of the bird “thought to be extinct, but isn’t.” Indeed, rather than lost innocence, we get the name “Mollymauk,” which uncomfortably rhymes with “muck,” as in the lyrics in Neal Hefti’s title song to the film, with the lines “down on my luck-o/stuck in the muck-o,” referring to “muck and mire,” that is, filth.

Illegal Smile

Last night I watched Ron Mann’s documentary Grass (1999), not so much a social history of marijuana in the United States as an exploration of the government’s attempt, over a roughly 70-year period, to make marijuana possession (and therefore, presumably, its use) a criminal offense of ever-escalating severity. His film is a marvelous compendium of newsreel footage, clips from educational scare films, period music, and feature film excerpts with references to the herb, from the largely unknown (at least to me) High on the Range (1929) to the well-known cautionary tale, Tell Your Children (1936) AKA Reefer Madness. While Mann, to his credit, reveals the extent of the government’s systematic propaganda campaign against marijuana, for which it has, apparently, spent billions upon billions of dollars over the past century or so, the question that remains unexplored in the film is why—why has the U. S. government spent billions and billions of dollars attempting to discredit an rather benign drug, certainly no worse in terms of wasteful cultural expenditure than alcohol?

Perhaps the answer lies in the sort of behavior with which marijuana has been variously associated during the decades explored by the film, for instance, jazz and swing in the 1930s (racial “mixing,” or miscegenation), R&B in the 1950s (juvenile delinquency), psychedelic rock in the 1960s (“free love,” or sexual promiscuity), and the cults of the 1980s (Satanism and goth rock). In other words, the government's campaigns were as much about attacking marijuana as they were attempts to discredit or proscribe certain social behaviors, broadly understood as youthful insolence. As a Victorian—who held the key government position of “drug czar” for over 30 years—Harry J. Anslinger’s campaign against marijuana seems to have been motivated out of a hatred of the anti-Victorian forces and forms of modernism, of which the popular expression in the 1920s and 1930s was jazz and swing, represented by the Afro-American musician. It was therefore motivated out of racism (toward the black jazz artists of the 20s and 30s, but also toward the rock musicians of the 50s and 60s, e.g., Little Richard, Chuck Berry). It would seem that the government’s anti-drug campaign during those decades is roughly analogous to the idea of censorship. While censorship can operate at the level of production (as in the case of “prior restraint,” the prohibition of certain behaviors or practices, for instance), it can also operate before the production stage, meaning it makes certain thoughts literally unthinkable. Racial mixing, or miscegenation, is an example of such a forbidden thought during the swing era. In the rock era, John Prine’s song, “Illegal Smile,” is a wry critique of the sort of censorship that outlaws certain thoughts. Prine has said that the phrase, “illegal smile,” refers not only to the bemused look on a stoned person’s face, but also the “knowing smile” one exchanges with another when each one understands that a joke or reference has violated certain proscribed thoughts—the silent, non-verbal communication, in the form of a smile, that occurs between individuals living under the threat of punitive action. A video of his performance of the song is available here.

13 Sonic Celebrations Of Grass:

Louis Armstrong, Song of the Vipers (1934)
Black Sabbath, Sweet Leaf (1971)
Black Uhuru, Sinsemilla (1980)
Brewer and Shipley, One Toke Over the Line (1970)
Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, Reefer Man (1932)
Bob Dylan, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (1966)
Fraternity of Man, Don’t Bogart Me (1969)
Lil Green, Knockin’ Myself Out (1941)
John Prine, Illegal Smile (1971)
Bessie Smith, Gimme a Reefer (1933)
Steppenwolf, Don't Step on the Grass, Sam (1968)
The Toyes, Smoke Two Joints (1983)
Muddy Waters, Champagne and Reefer (1981)

"The Music of Savages"

As Ted Gioia observes in The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (1988), in the early years of jazz studies, the first important critics were European, all of whom employed the discourse of “primitivism,” i.e., they were heavily influenced by the writings of Diderot, Rousseau and the idea of the “noble savage.” As he rightly points out, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “primitive” and “exotic” art started attracting the attention of Western artists and became the sources of new ideas and artistic forms; les choses Africaines “began appearing with great frequency in Paris around 1906” (21). “The idealization and theorization of primitivism in French culture was soon followed by an equally enthusiastic . . . reception for another import from foreign soil,” he writes—American jazz, which arrived in Europe toward the end of World War I, in the form of jazz records brought over by American soldiers (21). In other words, primitivism and exoticism became both a fashion as well as a source for “high” art. Gioia provides an illustration in the form of a quotation by the French critic Charles Delaunay, an early pioneer of jazz studies: “In fact, certain masterpieces of Negro sculpture can compete perfectly well with beautiful works of European sculpture of the greatest periods” (27). Or, in the words of Hugues Panassie, the jazz critic known as “the venerable frog”: “In what way would the music of savages be inferior to that of civilized man?” Many scholars have observed, “Jazz, in particular, has provided the raw material for a critique of the attitudes of white musicians, critics, and listeners drawn to black music culture” (see Georgina Born, Western Music and Its Others, 22). She points to an article by Amiri Baraka published in Downbeat in 1963, titled “Jazz and the White Critic,” in which he points out that one of the distortions of jazz resulted from the treatment of jazz as “natural” and “primitive.”

One need look no further than the work of Belgian critic Robert Goffin, who, in his early work Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan (1944), observed about Louis Armstrong, for instance, “[he] is a full-blooded Negro. He brought the directness and spontaneity of his race to jazz music” (167). Gioia argues that it was Goffin who was the first to formulate the stereotype which has lingered with jazz “until the present day,” the stereotype “which views jazz as a music charged with emotion but largely devoid of intellectual content, and which sees the jazz musician as the inarticulate and unsophisticated practitioner of an art which he himself scarcely understands” (30-31). Gioia calls this “the primitivist myth,” a stereotype which rests upon a belief in the primitive’s unreflective and instinctive relationship with his art. But lest one think the primitivist myth is exclusively European, I should point out that the association of jazz and primitivism was uncritically accepted by American jazz critics once the works of the first European critics reached American shores. Few insightful works were written by Americans in the early years of jazz, primarily because it was generally perceived as both passing fad and as the musical form of a decadent race.

Comments Disabled

For some reason, after a couple of years of existence, my blog is now being targeted for random comments from a location (or locations) overseas. This morning, for instance, I had to go through several past entries, a time-consuming process, and remove the comments, which had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the blog entry itself. Therefore, reluctantly, I am, for the time being anyway, changing my settings so as to disable comments by anonymous readers. I'm loathe to do this, as normally I learn something from the comments readers take the time to post. However, those who wish to contact me can do so by clicking on the "Contact Sam" link to the right, as well as through my university email address, also listed on this site. After a month or so I'll change the settings back to allowing anonymous comments, but for the time being I'm deactivating it.

In My Tree

About three weeks ago, I wrote a short blog entry on the famous cynic Diogenes, the great anti-Socratic. Diogenes was greatly admired by Alexander the Great for the freedom exemplified by his way of life. According to legend, the famous conqueror approached the sage on a day when he, Diogenes, was sunning himself. Alexander the Great asked him, Diogenes, if there were anything he could do for him. “Yes,” said Diogenes, “Get out of my light.” It’s said that Diogenes asked to be buried standing on his head, because, so he thought, one day down would be up, and up would be down. In the earlier blog, I claimed that one can hear Diogenesian thought in many pop songs, including Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” when Dylan sings, “You don’t need a weather man/To know which way the wind blows.” One can hear him in the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off Of My Cloud” and in Ian Hunter’s “Standin’ In My Light.” It occurred to me this morning that one may also hear Diogenes in the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” written by John Lennon. I have excerpted a few of the lyrics below:

Living is easy with eyes closed

Misunderstanding all you see

[…]

No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low

That is you can't you know tune in, but it’s all right

That is I think it’s not too bad

[..]

Always know sometimes think it’s me,

But you know I know when it’s a dream

I think a “No” will mean a “Yes” but it’s all wrong,

That is I think I disagree

I was prompted to revisit “Strawberry Fields Forever”—a recording which, in my view, represents one of the Beatles’ finest moments—because according to Dave Haber’s The Internet Beatles Album, it was on this day in 1967 the Beatles shot the night scenes for the “Strawberry Fields Forever” video (available here), in Sevenoaks, Kent. Watching the video this morning, shot over forty years ago, I thought of Jean-Luc Godard’s observation that the cinema also happens to be a documentary record of persons and things at a particular moment in time. Godard said about his film Breathless, for instance, “This film is really a documentary on Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.” Thus the “Strawberry Fields Forever” video is really a documentary recording about how the Beatles looked on 30 January 1967—an example of how photography connects us to what we, even now, still call “the real.”

Song Of The Vipers

In Chapter 2 (“The Rise of Individualism and the Jazz Solo”) of James Lincoln Collier’s book, Jazz: The American Theme Song (1993), Collier discusses how the forces of modernism enabled the transformation of jazz bands from ensembles to vehicles for soloists. Modernism privileged the individual, championing the virtues of “individualism.” It valued “freedom of the spirit, the virtues of primitivism, belief in living spontaneously . . . and . . . individual expression” (44). Adherence to these values led some to refuse to read, study, or rehearse music, “for fear that a conscious knowing of what they were doing will inhibit spontaneity and the free flow of feeling” (45). However, if modernism privileged freedom of the spirit, primitivism, and spontaneity (the latter expressed in the form of the improvised jazz solo), modernism also was a consequence of the so-called “machine age,” which valued predictability rather than spontaneity, the planned rather than the improvised, and interchangeability (replaceability) rather than individuality.

It’s possible — to theorize a little — that drug use became a fixture of early jazz (sub)culture as a reaction against modernism, that is, the machine age that was dominated by spirit-crushing, that is, mindless and unfulfilling, labor. I’m aware that what was called Romanticism in the nineteenth century was called “Modernism” in the twentieth; drug addiction (such as Charlie Parker’s), as a form of self-destruction, conforms to the Romantic myth of early death as a sign of heightened sensitivity and consciousness. Yet it is also true that the early “drug subcultures” arose in Paris in the early modernist period, the city to which the mercurial Sidney Bechet was drawn in the early 1920s, to the detriment of his recording career in the United States. Among the first of the Parisian drug subcultures (or at least one of the most famous) was the Club des Haschischins, which flourished in Paris in the 1840s and ‘50s. Its members included Charles Baudelaire, Alexander Dumas, Gerald de Nerval, and Théophile Gautier. In the mid-twentieth century, writers such as William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin revived the myth of the “Hashishin” or “Assassins” — a secret group of drug users at odds with the material culture in which they lived — as a way of conceptualizing the modern “drug subculture” or so-called “drug underground.” The important point is to notice the link between esotericism and the individual’s need for a quasi-religious transcendence that can occur only with the secrecy of ritual. “The structure of modern life tends to eliminate possibilities of radical change,” Luigi Zola astutely notes, which is why secret or esoteric societies hold such imaginative power for individuals in modern desacralized urban society (see Mike Jay, Ed., Artificial Paradises 367). Mike Jay has observed that drug subcultures “share many of the underlying dynamics with initiatory secret societies” (Artificial Paradises 366). Such occult or secret societies are premised on initiation ceremonies  (employing drugs) allowing individuals access to a higher state of being — what is meant by “high” in the first place. The French expression for being high — “il plane” — expresses the meaning of being high as being metaphorically elevated to a different plane, or level of conscious awareness. The urban jazz subculture, in turn, shared many of the features of a secret society (exclusive membership). “Speaking of 1931,” Louis Armstrong wrote in “Tight Like That Gage,” “we did call ourselves Vipers, which could have been anybody from all walks of life that smoked and respected gage. That was our cute little name for marijuana, and it was a misdemeanor in those days.”

Coupled with what Ted Gioia has called “the primitivist myth” (The Imperfect Art, 1988) that has informed much of the early critical writing about jazz, drug use (or perhaps excessive drug use, addiction) became the imprimatur of authenticity—the positive indication of tortured artistic genius.

High Infidelity

Friedrich Kittler (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1999) argues that from around 1880 on, composers of music have been “allied with engineers” (24). After this date, he writes, “The undermining of articulateness becomes the order of the day” (24). As a consequence of sound recording, noise itself became an object of scientific research, and the previous conceptions that governed musical theory became antiquated.

The phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such. Articulateness becomes a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise. (23)

Recording is a form of engineering. Consider the composers who became significant since 1887: Schönberg, for instance, Ives, Varèse (all born in the nineteenth century), John Cage (born 1912), and Stockhausen (born 1928). David Morton (Off the Record) indicates that Arnold Schönberg, along with many other composers, writers, and scholars (think of John Lomax, and later Alan, recording folk music “in the field”) became “avid users of sound recording equipment” such as the portable tape recorder (144). (An implication of this development, of course, is that we live in a world in which we will most likely encounter a reproduction of something rather than ever encountering the thing itself.) For tape recording, says David Morton, “destroyed the already tenuous concept of an “original” performance and made the performance a source of content to be refined rather than something to be preserved” (46). Morton cites Steve Jones, who made the observation, “it has become sound—and not music—that is of prime importance in popular music production and consumption” (qtd. in Off the Record, 46). Recently developed (historically speaking) digital recording technologies only made it “easier than ever,” Morton writes, “to create and manipulate new sounds and have little relevance to the concept of high fidelity” (44). Hence the concept of fidelity (truth, accuracy, realism) is no longer relevant when judging a recording (what Kittler calls an “acoustic event”). It must, more than anything, sound good. By way of analogy to the terminology employed in rhetorical theory, perlocution (the effect on the listener) is privileged over elocutio (“purity,” correctness or faithfulness of utterance).