Editor's Idea: June 1995
- Issue #136 (Jun 95) | Published 27/03/08
- By: Tony Herrington
ISSUE 136, June 1995
Editor: Tony Herrington
"In its quest for a wider (whiter?) audience, Jungle has become refined," writes Wire reader Jonathan Proctor on this month's Letters page. "Urgency has been replaced by serenity... Recent releases by LTJ Bukem and DJ Krust lack what the early drum 'n' bass outings embodied - blackness, alienation, humour."
Jonathan's letter is a response to comments made by Simon Reynolds in The Wire 134. In that issue Simon wrote, "All my anxieties about Jungle's upwardly mobile drift towards dubious concepts like 'musicality' and 'maturity' seem to be on the verge of horrendous reality." This is a subject that Simon pursues in more detail on page 32 of this issue, taking to task those Junglists whose music appears to be moving away from its roots in black (read: African/American) street culture (even though many of the musicians under discussion are in fact white).
The subtext of the argument is an old one: by attempting to expand their music's matrix to accommodate external, ie non-black, influences, and therefore making it more 'palatable' to a crossover audience, black musicians are 'betraying' their music's most powerful characteristics, which are perceived as being tribal, African-derived, non-Western. This is dangerous and ambiguous territory for critics to step into, especially white critics, but it is a debate that has been running in black culture, on and off, for most of the post-war period at least.
Elsewhere in this issue, Mark Sinker reviews a reprint of Blues People, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's alternative history' of black music first published in 1963. In the 50s and 60s, Jones, a Marxist and regular collaborator with the more militant black free jazz musicians of the time, was a passionate and eloquent critic of jazz musicians like John Lewis, whose group, The Modern Jazz Quartet, became an exemplar of Third Stream music, a kind of chamber jazz which 'cooled' the black fire of bebop by fusing it with elements from the European classical tradition. Lewis's music was to Jones what the contemporary recordings of LTJ Bukem and DJ Krust are to Jungle's current detractors: dilution of some ancient, binding notion of blackness; pale grey hybrids which diminish the alien heat of black music by imbuing it with qualities associated with 'cool', European musics: sophistication, maturity, finesse, etc.
The difference between LeRoi Jones and contemporary critics of Jungle is that Jones approached jazz from the inside; Jungles critics are almost always outsiders, whose objections to certain recent developments in the music are partly aesthetic (it doesn't sound so good any more), and partly predicated on sensibilities that still regard black music as exotic, dark, mysterious, pulsing with a febrile sense of otherness.
In part, the basis for such judgements are historical: the search for the exotic has been one of the defining aspects of 20th century Western culture. The dark side of this impulse arises when 'cultural tourists' start applying their ideas of how the 'visited' culture should behave. The kind of arguments now being levelled against Jungle effectively deny black musicians the option of producing music that is anything other than a reflector for some externally projected fantasy of black culture. Of course, such imperatives are never applied to white musicians. What's more, they sideline considerations of the complex choices that are available to the contemporary musician (black and white), and ignore the fact that, today, definitions of what constitutes black culture are far from absolute: is Dillinja any blacker than Anthony Braxton, for instance, or Quincy Jones?
When European critics and consumers approach black music they do so because it offers them something that their own culture cannot - so in this instance, Jungle's new 'upward mobility', its 'serenity' and 'lack' of blackness and alienation, becomes not a betrayal of black culture so much as a betrayal of the expectations those white critics and consumers have of black culture, a dilution of the qualities that drew them to it in the first place.
One question immediately suggests itself: can only black critics address black musicians? The initial answer to that should be self-evident, the debate that should then follow is far more complex and fraught.
Editor: Tony Herrington
"In its quest for a wider (whiter?) audience, Jungle has become refined," writes Wire reader Jonathan Proctor on this month's Letters page. "Urgency has been replaced by serenity... Recent releases by LTJ Bukem and DJ Krust lack what the early drum 'n' bass outings embodied - blackness, alienation, humour."
Jonathan's letter is a response to comments made by Simon Reynolds in The Wire 134. In that issue Simon wrote, "All my anxieties about Jungle's upwardly mobile drift towards dubious concepts like 'musicality' and 'maturity' seem to be on the verge of horrendous reality." This is a subject that Simon pursues in more detail on page 32 of this issue, taking to task those Junglists whose music appears to be moving away from its roots in black (read: African/American) street culture (even though many of the musicians under discussion are in fact white).
The subtext of the argument is an old one: by attempting to expand their music's matrix to accommodate external, ie non-black, influences, and therefore making it more 'palatable' to a crossover audience, black musicians are 'betraying' their music's most powerful characteristics, which are perceived as being tribal, African-derived, non-Western. This is dangerous and ambiguous territory for critics to step into, especially white critics, but it is a debate that has been running in black culture, on and off, for most of the post-war period at least.
Elsewhere in this issue, Mark Sinker reviews a reprint of Blues People, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's alternative history' of black music first published in 1963. In the 50s and 60s, Jones, a Marxist and regular collaborator with the more militant black free jazz musicians of the time, was a passionate and eloquent critic of jazz musicians like John Lewis, whose group, The Modern Jazz Quartet, became an exemplar of Third Stream music, a kind of chamber jazz which 'cooled' the black fire of bebop by fusing it with elements from the European classical tradition. Lewis's music was to Jones what the contemporary recordings of LTJ Bukem and DJ Krust are to Jungle's current detractors: dilution of some ancient, binding notion of blackness; pale grey hybrids which diminish the alien heat of black music by imbuing it with qualities associated with 'cool', European musics: sophistication, maturity, finesse, etc.
The difference between LeRoi Jones and contemporary critics of Jungle is that Jones approached jazz from the inside; Jungles critics are almost always outsiders, whose objections to certain recent developments in the music are partly aesthetic (it doesn't sound so good any more), and partly predicated on sensibilities that still regard black music as exotic, dark, mysterious, pulsing with a febrile sense of otherness.
In part, the basis for such judgements are historical: the search for the exotic has been one of the defining aspects of 20th century Western culture. The dark side of this impulse arises when 'cultural tourists' start applying their ideas of how the 'visited' culture should behave. The kind of arguments now being levelled against Jungle effectively deny black musicians the option of producing music that is anything other than a reflector for some externally projected fantasy of black culture. Of course, such imperatives are never applied to white musicians. What's more, they sideline considerations of the complex choices that are available to the contemporary musician (black and white), and ignore the fact that, today, definitions of what constitutes black culture are far from absolute: is Dillinja any blacker than Anthony Braxton, for instance, or Quincy Jones?
When European critics and consumers approach black music they do so because it offers them something that their own culture cannot - so in this instance, Jungle's new 'upward mobility', its 'serenity' and 'lack' of blackness and alienation, becomes not a betrayal of black culture so much as a betrayal of the expectations those white critics and consumers have of black culture, a dilution of the qualities that drew them to it in the first place.
One question immediately suggests itself: can only black critics address black musicians? The initial answer to that should be self-evident, the debate that should then follow is far more complex and fraught.