Three Letters

How many metas? Dear friend read a review of a book. The book's argument inspired him to write a rant to me and to a mutual friend who plays and loves the Blues. The gravamen:

White attitudes dominate and mold even the most exclusively black genres. It is easy to say this is due to market forces, but in general I have found that dignity is chosen over money, life or happiness – at least when there is an option. This implies to me that, in this minor context, a lot of the real blues has been lost. From the larger point of view, it is obvious that a lot of other things of value have likely been smothered in the same fashion.

My first response follows.

Well! The French would be in no doubt about this one. What Gaul! But I'm a WASP, like it or not. What, I ask the Little Man Within, are your thoughts on the matter?

Silence. The Little Man knows not from Blues or Jazz.Je dois combler cette lacune de ma seule pensée.

It's a medical metaphor, almost. Nothing is clean. Our minds are a medley. Every flavor's floating around swapping juices with every other. It's silly to say Jazz or the Blues were ever pure. The songs aren't sung in African languages; the instruments aren't finger pianos or nose flutes; the religious sentiments aren't animist. Even the old Jubilees were slave songs.

Furthermore. Like it or not, any human performance is a collaboration with the audience, though that audience may be only a vague hope, as in the case of my photography. Consider (most of) the photographs of the very great Henri Cartier-Bresson. If HCB had not made a few dozen ultra-famous, iconic, universally recognizable photographs, the rest of his production would have fallen out of sight, dismissed as snapshots, synonymous with banality. But we (the audience) know the ne plus ultra photos, so we suspect there's something in the rest so subtle we missed it first time around. Presumably Henri has a gift for seeing things that the rest of us lack. We may have to work a bit to see what he saw. See?

Context. Fish don't know they're wet. When we're at the beach and somebody shouts "Shark!" we get out of the water. When the shark sees a net or a harpoon coming, he can't get out of the water. It's much easier for people to fish than for fish to people. And in the context of the Blues, it was much easier for WASPs to trap and consume Black Folks' Music than for the Black Folks to absorb and savor, say, Stravinsky.

Advantage. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Paul Simon went to Africa and made a record promoting African musicians and showcasing African influences on his music. He was widely congratulated on bringing Africa into the mainstream of World Music, right? Wrong – he was widely accused of "stealing" African ideas and culture for his own enrichment. This was easy to prove: The record he made used motifs and performers he admitted were African; and it made money which went into his bank account. If that's not theft, what is?

So the Africans were tricked again. When will they learn to keep their culture pure, to eat it in secret? Yet if they do, are they somehow finer than before? Is all enjoyment condescending? Does a man give a woman pleasure or does the woman give it to the man? Why should a man care if a woman feels anything or not? And if he does care, can that be anything more than condescension? Because he finds it titillating? Because it makes his old lady more willing to do it? Those intellectual mothballs have been ventilated in who knows how many feminist books over the last forty or fifty years.

In the final analysis, is intention so important? New York and most other self-respecting polities now punish criminals for "hate crimes" – if you shoot a man because you want his money, or because he stole your girl, that's one thing; but it's worse to shoot him because you're prejudiced against his race, religion or sexual orientation. Intention counts as much as the action itself. Should that be the rule? Should we punish folks who (pace Mr Eliot) do the right thing for the wrong reason? If it's the rule in matters of criminal justice, should that rule extend to art appreciation?

I don't know. As I said, I'm only a WASP, and a male of the species to boot. I'm beyond insult – there's no bad word for what I am. Therefore almost anything I do or say can be called patronizing, condescending, paternalistic, insincere, sentimental and self-indulgent. I plead guilty, knowing any other plea will be thrown out of court. Silence in Court! Soon we'll all be dead. Our Blues-loving friend answered, reasonably: "I don't follow Les' train of thought at all this time." So I tried again.

Authentic isn't always best. No doubt the folk songs of Hungary have their charm, but I prefer the folk-inspired music of Bartok. Probably a Russian village wedding is interesting, once, but not as interesting as Stravinsky's "Les Noces." Raw moonshine from the Carolina highlands might be fun to try, but Heaven Hill it ain't. The 19/20th Century's intellectuals and artists were revolutionary in finding great value where previous Europeans had seen only crude, savage, inept, infantile, primitive attempts to make music or sculpture or poetry. You can see this even in the 18th Century, when Rousseau preached the perfection of the noble savage and Gothic and Irish and Scottish legends (viz. McPherson's "Ossian") became chic.

However. The Euros lumped together things which really were in the usual sense "primitive" (masks from New Guinea, totem poles etc) with things which were as highly developed as their own arts and crafts, but which came from cultures which the British and French patronizingly considered inferior – pre-Columbian art, the music of northern India, even Chinese and Japanese stuff. The 20th Century in particular rebelled against fuddy-duddy "establishment" taste and celebrated children's drawings, subway graffiti, folk songs, hillbilly crafts, Grandma Moses, tattoos, prison art made with chewing-gum wrappers, you name it.

And that was great. It was liberating and refreshing and necessary and important and all good things. However.

There's also been a tendency (and I trace this to Rousseau, the dog) to exalt "naive" art at the expense of more studied work. At first this was (as I said) liberating and refreshing. However. I can't help preferring the work of Klee (let us say) to that of the children who no doubt inspired him. I can't help preferring the work of Picasso to that of the mask-makers who inspired him. I can't help preferring Stravinsky's Russian wedding to a real Russian wedding.

Etc.

So what shall we say of the Blues? Well, the true grit of Leadbelly has a quality and a charm that's inevitably missing in the performances of, I dunno, Janis Joplin, not to mention Gershwin. Certainly it's more authentic, closer to the source – shit, it IS the source. But yet...

Since I don't much care for Gershwin, and consider Janis Joplin sorta lowbrow, maybe the Blues isn't the best vehicle for me to argue this case. But I think you get my point. To give an operational definition, I suspect that if somebody held a gun to his head and gave him a chance to study up on the sources, Stravinsky could have written music indistinguishable from Leadbelly's Blues; but Leadbelly could not have written "Pulcinella." Picasso could have produced African masks that would fool anybody but a museum curator, but the mask-makers could not have produced fake Picassos.

Undsoweiter. And no, I'm not commenting on some supposed racial qualities or limitations. Bartok and Kodaly recorded and cherished the folk songs of their own native country, and were certainly able to write imitations nobody could tell from originals, but the folk singers, however gifted, would likely not have been able to produce operas or sonatas.

Knowledge is a good thing, not (as the Rousseau contingent would have it) a bad one. It isn't the opposite of ignorance; it subsumes ignorance. An educated and intelligent man knows everything his little boy knows and then some. However. It's important to be able to see things from the little boy's point of view. Some grownups can manage this. On the other hand, no little boy can see things from the educated and intelligent point of view. A child lacks data. He's bound to be childish. The educated and intelligent man can be child-like – quite a different thing.

Well, so it goes. I've finished my coffee and my argument, such as it was. You may accuse me of being an elitist, to which I'll answer: Yes. Again, it's only because some elitists hawked the idea of universal equivalence ("leveling," the 17th Century called it) that "elitism" became pejorative.

The friend answered, "Maybe." So to put the matter to rest and shoot myself in the other foot, I wrote this third summa:

The distinction between arts and crafts has always been factitious bordering on fictitious. Fick it. We now salaam to paintings and statues that were made for the same reasons we now make snapshots or buy garden gnomes. Music we think of as the summit of the art was elevator music for the nobility. Again, it was the counter-Enlightenment (what you scholars call the Romantic movement) that invented "Ars Gratia Artis," which by the way is the motto of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. (I wonder how many people know that Rousseau's first publication, "On the Arts and Sciences," argued that the arts and sciences are bad for us.) Whence the millions of paintings, drawings and cartoons of Beethoven as the archetypal demented and tormented genius.

Etc. Of course the fact that many artists really are and were demented and tormented gave breath to that archetype.