Jazz and Ralph Dumain

3/3/2019 Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": "The Jazz Avant-Garde, Mysticism & Society: Meaning, Method &
Method & the Young Hegelians"
The Jazz Avant-Garde, Mysticism, and Society:

Meaning, Method, and the Young Hegelians
by Ralph Dumain
Abstract
3 February 2004
Herein you will find my working methodology for analyzing the meaning of popular and subcultural cultural
and ideological forms. My approach is novel and opposes everything else everyone is doing. You will see how I
oppose mysticism, cultural studies, and postmodernism, while conserving in a demystified form the quest for
transcendence endemic to the 1960s-1970s but since obliterated with the total incorporation of contemporary
subjectivity into the commodity fetishism of media culture.
I also broach the question of the historical amnesia of the baby boomers, who have failed to reexamine critically
their youthful experience and transmit what they should have learned from it to the clueless younger generation.
I contend that subcultures have outlived their historical mission and have nothing new to say, but that neither the
boomers nor others understand why this is so, having failed to transcend the obsolete dialectic between
mainstream and subculture, thus remaining ideologically imprisoned within a social location that mistakes itself
for, or denies, the social totality. The denizens of the managerial-professional class, whatever their political or
cultural pretensions, are bankrupt, but can't see past the ends of their noses to see why.
The most radical feature of my methodology is to reappropriate the dialectic of concept (begriff) and
representation (vorstellung), which equivocally mediates the relationship between philosophy and religion (as
well as philosophy and art) in Hegel's philosophy, but which breaks out into open warfare between philosophy
and religion with the Young Hegelians. I believe this move is unprecedented with respect to the analysis of
contemporary cultural forms. I could only have done this outside of academia and the contemporary literary
market, which relentlessly reinforce the prevailing ideological brainwashing and reward those who play along.
Wed, 20 Nov 2002 14:49:52 -0500

Avant-garde rebirths & culs de sac
"Secrecy and Publicity: Reactivating the Avant-Garde" by Sven Lutticken

New Left Review (new series #17, Sept.-Oct. 2002)
Beyond the interest of this subject matter for small coteries, the basic issues of cultural production in the current
social climate (at least in advanced capitalist societies) are anatomized in a revealing way. Various permutations
of the strategies for using art to change life, confront the culture industry (or succumb to it), and create counter-
publics are outlined, with respect to such figures and movements as Bataille (sacred sociology and secret
societies), Dada, Surrealism, Situationism, Conceptual Art, performance art, Warhol, and various current trends.
The focus is on the visual arts, though literary magazines and movements are also cited as examples. The visual
art world, though, is structured in such a way that it has the most difficult situation when it comes to reaching
beyond specialized audiences. Comparison to independent film would be in order, perhaps even to theater. But
there are no comparative studies here. Especially lacking is comparison to the one art form that has flourished
more than any other in the past century: music. I'll explain in short order why I bring this up.
I've never encountered the concept of "counter-public" before. I suppose it is the artistic correlate to the notion
of counterculture. If the goal is to influence society by means of art, then the creation of counter-publics and
countercultures would be parallel or mutually interpenetrating enterprises, if not identical. The author shows
how the social ambitions of older avant-gardes have failed, while illustrating the attempts of contemporary
avant-gardes to accomplish comparable goals. Again, only the visual arts are counted here, and so a larger
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/jazzmystic1.html 1/31
3/3/2019 Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": "The Jazz Avant-Garde, Mysticism & Society: Meaning, Method & the Young Hegelians"
explanation of how other arts (music especially) and broader countercultures have fared is not forthcoming.
Noteworthy among the experiments of the contemporary avant-gardes are the increasing abstract and self-
referential nature of their efforts, which does not oppose but rather coheres with their political goals. While the
author cites Benjamin, Adorno, Habermas, Burger, and Jameson, he doesn't say a word about Hegel. But here, I
would think, Hegel's end-of-art thesis is most apropos. The viability of art lies in the ability to express the truth
of its time in sensuous form; when art strains against this necessary embodiment (the stage of Romantic art), it
reaches a crucial moment. If art cannot sensuously grab people, but must rely upon the acceptance of the abstract
idea of what it's trying to do, how can it succeed in its goals?
Now I turn to music. Last night I attended a book talk with Ashley Kahn, author of "A Love Supreme: The Story
of John Coltrane's Signature Album", just out. His previous book documented the making of the most popular
jazz album of all time, Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. There's something righteous about having this album
commemorated in book form at last. When I saw Coltrane on a U.S. postage stamp a few years ago, I cried like a
baby. It's been a long struggle to get such great artists the recognition they deserve, not to mention the heroic
energy it took for them and the people they came from to accomplish what they did, against all odds. The pace
of cultural change in the USA following World War II has been so rapid, who was exposed to what depends not
just on 20-year generational periods (and other demographic and geographical differences within the populace),
but on age differences of just a few years. Jazz was not all that popular in the 1960s among the youngsters
brought up on Motown, the Beatles, rock 'n roll, r&b, or the folk revival. There were a few jazz musicians who
gained wider audiences because their energy coincided with the mood of the '60s. Actually, the whole jazz
avant-garde movement coincided with that spirit, but not everyone knew it, as their ethos and audience emerged
from the 1950s, and just a few years age difference determined what people would be exposed to and often what
they could relate to. Coltrane was one of the very few who gained a wider audience and had an influence on
other genres of popular music, esp. on rock musicians. If no young folks listened to no other jazz musician, they
listened to Coltrane. If they heard none of Coltrane's other stunning work of the early 1960s, they heard his 1964
album A Love Supreme. (My first exposure to Coltrane was his 1961 Africa/Brass album, discovered under a
thick pile of dust in my uncle's closet. Also, a teenage musician friend played for me Ascension [1965], which
was too outré for many, but was OK by me. And I'm sure I must have heard A Love Supreme around the same
time.) This album coincided with the end of Coltrane's early-'60s period. From 1965 to his death in 1967 his
music became too far-out for much of his previous audience. But A Love Supreme indeed became Coltrane's
signature album, and among the other aspects of its unique position, outstanding is the fact that this was his
spiritual testament. Coltrane was an eclectic religious mystic, not limited by the AME Zion church in which he
grew up in the deep South. The impact his music made, though, had little relation to the belief systems of those
moved by it. Kahn, the author of this book, identified himself as a rationalist Jew while answering questions
about Coltrane's spirituality. While the jazz audience was variegated, I suspect that strict church-going black
Christians did not constitute the overwhelming majority of jazz aficionados. This is just an unsupported guess,
though. The point is that in a larger secular, not to mention consumerist, culture, the most influential jazz album
of the time was religiously inspired. Within two years the youth counterculture (the Caucasian component of
which would be the most widely advertised) would explode, and its high energy would be manifested in both
musical and mystical forms, as well as in other forms of variously motivated self-expression. This curious
dynamic of popular and sacred status accorded to A Love Supreme has continued to this day. While this
composition has been sampled and performed by others on various occasions, it alone among the jazz repertoire
intimidates all who would dare lay their hands on it. This is not because of its technical difficulty or unique
virtuoso accomplishment, but because of the sacred aura that surrounds it. There is not another composition in
the entire jazz repertoire—not any of Duke Ellington's sacred music, just to stay on point—that partakes of such
a status. Think about the implications of this!
Every musician who thinks of touching A Love Supreme is aware of the danger of defiling or trivializing it and
of the reaction of any audience that would perceive such. The issue is, I repeat, not one of technical competence;
it is about the extremely personal and serious engagement of Coltrane with his higher power. Some serious
musicians have performed this piece, both Wynton and Branford Marsalis, for example. Wynton stated he had no
intention of trying to duplicate Coltrane's style. He also expressed the desire for this piece along with Coltrane's
other work to become part of the standard jazz repertoire. This is a multiply interesting statement, given that
Wynton has done his best to bury the rest of the '60s avant-garde. But Coltrane he can't live without.
On the popular culture side, the most egregious example is the misuse of this music in Spike Lee's film Mo'
Better Blues, a vile piece of shit that induced me to boycott this opportunist huckster forever more. John's
widow, Alice, is guarded about Coltrane's legacy, but is especially militant about this piece. She rejected Spike's
film when she saw what he was up to, and son Ravi Coltrane has also spoken up that the film diverged from the
family's beliefs. Coltrane was vitally interested, all the more intensely in his final years, in the impact of music
on human consciousness. He thought that music could have a subliminal impact on "changing the thought
patterns of the people." Working within one small corner of the commercial music industry, Coltrane addressed
himself to creating a counter-public in one specific way. Like many other musicians, he was dissatisfied by
having to work in bars, and he sought to establish alternative spaces such as cultural centers. His last major
public performance was at Olatunji's cultural center in New York, just a few months before he died. Otherwise,
he made no other social claims for himself, unlike those who directly sought to politicize the music, such as
fellow saxophonist Archie Shepp, or Trotskyist music critic and jazz and Malcolm X groupie Frank Kofsky.
Coltrane in his interviews with Kofksy acknowledged an indirect connection between music and the
sociopolitical sphere, but was circumspect in his claims. Coltrane relied on the power of the aesthetic experience
itself. Drummer Elvin Jones, a member of the legendary quartet, stated, in one video documentary, that he felt
while playing with Coltrane as if Coltrane's music were coming from some other world and manifesting itself in
this one.
Audience members last night raised a variety of questions, two of which are pertinent here: what would Coltrane
be playing if he were alive today, and if you were not part of the time period in which "A Love Supreme" was
created, is there something you would be missing in listening to it? Such questions cannot be processed in the
terms in which they are posed. Kahn said something about the supertemporal or timeless quality of the music,
that it rises above its specific time, instrumentation, etc., that it can be heard outside of a timebound frame of
reference. No one could offer any more, and I also don't think anyone has developed the frame of reference in
which such questions could be substantively addressed.
I want to add a few words about the music. The music itself is a highly sensual as well as emotional experience,
very earthy in its dynamics and intensity, as black music tends to be; but this music was simultaneously intended
to be spiritual, and it has "abstract" qualities embedded in its highly sophisticated structure. To understand this is
to understand why on the one hand a '60s rock group could refer to this piece in the simple-minded self-
indulgent youth culture manner as "Coltrane's acid trip" and on the other a cult could actually found a John
Coltrane church with Coltrane as patron saint. Both responses encode the cultural complexes and contradictions
of modern life. One could also extrapolate on the relationship between "sacred" music (but in a secular context
and outside of all recognized, organized, and named religious social formations!) and the culture industry. What
would it be like today to feel as if something magical emerged from some hidden dimension breaking into and
tearing the veil off this mundane plane of existence? If you weren't there, you might not know what I'm talking
about, because it is just this question that has been mercilessly suppressed by the culture industry, having
successfully produced a generation that can neither conceive of nor comprehend nor acknowledge such a
question. These young folks today wouldn't understand the question if it came up and bit them on the ass, though
as culture consumers they are the beneficiaries in other respects of the rebellion of an earlier era against a
mechanized existence.
Put all this information together in your mental computer and then follow the logic through to unknown
conclusions.
____________________________________
"There are no foxes in atheistholes."

— Ralph Dumain, 1971
Tue, 26 Nov 2002 01:12:24 -0500

It's the '70s, stupid!
“Before that [19th century American slaves and Pentecostalists], in Europe, if you were in church
and started shaking your butt to Wagner, they would kick your ass.” — Anthony Braxton
American culture—past, present, future!
Sorry I can't devote my attention to what I'm 'posed to do, but in the past week I've been totally obsessed with
music. First I was listening to music, then I was thinking about music, now I'm reading several books at once
about music and musicians. Not only have I discovered the beginnings of a basis for a different pproach to the
social understanding of what's out there, but I've found that if one gets deeply enough into the history of popular
music since the 1970s, one can pretty much figure out how everything else evolved as well. And the framework
for analyzing social and cultural contradictions might prove to be surprisingly similar.
One of my big themes before this current obsession took over me was the 1970s, not as a cliche, but as a roughly
definable period of American history (perhaps further subdividable in half) having just preceded what we are in
now but yet strangely muted in memory. Of course we have media images and stereotypes of the 1970s just as
we have of every other decade of the 20th century, but the realities and social changes beneath have somehow
been occluded. I ask myself frequently: how is such social amnesia possible? The baby boomers who were
young or at least pre-middle-aged during this time period are after all not dead, not senile, not even retired. They
probably average out to people in their 50s. How is it then possible for history to be erased so quickly, leaving
only tacky imagery and sampling, as if somehow the whole society since the election of Reagan popped out of
nowhere? It's a puzzle wrapped inside a riddle wrapped inside an enigma.
I've only hinted at my views of the '70s before, mentioning in passing the conspiracy to destroy liberalism which
when it succeeded surprised a whole lot of people in the traditionally liberal urban sectors. However, on every
level, contradictions were a-brewing and trends emerging whose full fruition might have been suspected though
not foreseen. Of course by the late '70s there were already plenty of people focusing only on partying till
doomsday. (That I believe we all remember if we still possess the relevant brain cells.) They fought for and won
their right to party, and meanwhile the rug was being pulled out from under them.
Hold that thought. Now back to music.
First, something unusual for me has been happening the past month and a half. It began when I visited my
favorite avant-garde music shoppe in the East Village. Of course I bought discs of some of the old jazz staples:
Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra . . . . I didn't listen to these for long, for I unexpectedly
became addicted to . . . . Funkadelic. Back in the day, you couldn't pay me to listen to this stuff. Also, back in the
day I never said "back in the day." OK, I was intrigued by the album cover of Parliament's "The Clones of Dr.
Funkenstein", but that's as far as I got. Avant-garde jazz and African music yes, and fusion in the early '70s till I
could stand it no more, and there were various ethnomusicological adventures, but a funkateer I was not.
Listening to Sun Ra's "News From Neptune" (Have you heard the latest news from Neptune, Neptune,
Neptune?), why should I care? And besides James Brown, I don't think I could take too much of the other stuff
then popular. But by the middle of last month I became totally addicted to Funkadelic's "One Nation Under a
Groove", which I had to play several dozen times in succession on a daily basis. And I still do, though I slack off
occasionally. A few more pieces caught my fancy, my second favorite being "Uncle Jam", which is the most
hilarious performance I've ever heard. So when people found out what I was doing, they were convinced I lost
my mind, this not being in accord with my image, apparently. But I swear, I can be dead tired, sleep deprived, a
total zombie, and if I play "One Nation Under a Groove" I jump up in a minute.
This stuff of course was popular (this particular jam was a megahit) when I wasn't paying attention to it, and so
I'm dealing with it out of context, which improves the experience for me and give me something to think about.
The big catalyst came last week when I attended that book talk on John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. (This is
something quite different from dance music.) While the secularization of the sacred is not a new theme for me,
though much more attention needs to be paid to this topic, the specific interaction between freelance sacred
music (defined as so by its author, outside of any institutional framework) and a secular segment of the music
business captured my imagination. Now whatever one thinks of the "sacred", or the "aesthetic" for that matter,
we are in the realm of categories which are not necessarily describable in sociological terms though they are the
products and expressions of social conditions. But as objective forces, explainable as least partially in terms of
their own intrinsic properties, they bring to mind that which is not totally manipulable by a commodity society,
and which may even be expression of attempts to outmaneuver same. This is one way of thinking about what
outsider culture can produce depending on its characteristics and relationship to the total cultural system. There's
a lot that passes for outsider culture these days, and perhaps there are still forms of dress or appearance that are
outside the pale—though I can't image what they would be any more short of violation of the anti-nudity laws.
(Apparently the thong still has to cover your genitals.) But something in the cultural system has shifted,
(including the total media environment) and when you come down to it, nobody under the age of 40 has ever
been on the outside of anything.
The goal here is to identify what has changed from the older forms of bohemianism, but specifically, what does
it mean for people's relationship to music and perception of its functions? And focusing on this one peculiar
incarnation of a special relationship between an individualistic conception of the sacred, and secular culture,
gave me a handle on how to formulate the historic cultural shift between what it was once like to be a conscious
person and the clueless total absorption into the childish commodity values that rule now, an outside of which
cannot be imagined.
So . . . in the past week I've been reading or skimming various books on odd whims. I've been going through
books on Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, Shostakovitch, Theremin, and I stayed up all last night reading up on the history
of funk. Well, the Europeans mentioned don't really fit into the theme here, but as I say, I'm obsessed with
musicians. Well, in reading about the history of jazz, funk, and whatever Zappa is, I've been finding myself
learning a lot but also extremely skeptical of the perspectives being put forth, not so much for what they say as
for what they don't say. Something is missing, something that might help to understand (1) the historical shift,
(2) the silences and inadequacies of the cultural philosophies embedded in these forms all along, which only
come to the fore with epochal shifts which destroy what once was, and enable and necessitate the Owl of
Minerva to take flight, now that something has come to an end.
___________________
"If you find earth

boring
Just the same old
same thing
Come on and sign up
for Outer Spaceways
Incorporated."
— Sun Ra
Wed, 27 Nov 2002 01:46:33 -0500

Music musings: part 3
"Music that makes us cry

Love that money can't buy
Let's all search for the reason why."
— Rahsaan Roland Kirk
I've been informed that my treatments of the relationship between music and society in the USA aren't going to
be effective without going into some detail about the actual music. While I was hoping to not have to get into too
much detail when I should be doing other things, I guess I will have to explain myself and not just tease my
audience about the things that are occupying my thoughts. But in the process I'll upgrade my teasing: I'm the
escort service of the intellect.
Without knowing how far I'll go, in my spirit of doing things, which means, as a composer friend of mine once
told me as a teenager, that one day I'll write a 20-volume preface to an introduction, let me begin by giving an
outline of what needs to be said.
First, I'll give some bibliographic sources. The books I've been looking through recently (of direct relevance,
thus excluding my readings about European innovators) are:
Kahn, Ashley. A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album. New York: Viking,
2002.
Szwed, John F. Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. New York: Da Capo Press,
1998.
Vincent, Rickey. Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One; foreword by George
Clinton. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1996.
Watson, Ben. Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. New York: St. Martin's Griffin,
1996.
And then there is the book of probable greatest relevance to my interests, that I have not yet begun:
Lock, Graham. Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra,
Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
My Anthony Braxton bibliography is also relevant (and it contains a link to Mike Heffley's important Third
Millennium interview with Braxton).
One can learn an awful lot from these books, and in some cases, also discern what might be missing from the
author's perspective. (There is much to be learned even from Watson's preposterous enterprise.) I'll get back to
this later, as the issue is the nature of subcultures, which has a theoretical dimension not extraneous to the
subject matter of this list.
Here is an initial list of subtopics on my agenda:
(1) Traditional cultures vs. the nature of entertainment and popular music in consumer societies:
from the gamut of life experiences to party/dance/fuck music.
(2) Why I never could stand "entertainment". Why I preferred spirit music to dick-and-pussy music.
Why dick-and-pussy music never interested me for dick-and-pussy purposes. Sex and the sacred.
(3) What jazz and its avant-garde had to offer. Why Sun Ra? Why then?
(4) Funk and soul: how did the funk become a concept? (And why The Whispers were so damned
good.)
(5) Funk: positives and negatives.
(6) What went wrong with fusion?
(7) What happened to the avant-garde?
(8) Why did black popular music degenerate in the late 1970s and turn to shit in the '80s?
(9) Going upscale: why did Wynton Marsalis suppress the avant-garde and "the funk"?
(10) Why did Sun Ra disapprove of funk?

(11) Musical analysis of two funk masterpieces: "One Nation Under a Groove" and "Uncle Jam".
(12) Bernie Worrell: classically trained funkmaster and technological innovator. Analysis of "Funk
of Ages": from the pedestrian to the sweet and beautiful.
(13) The diversity of creators vs. the narrowness of consumers.
(14) Why I turned against the countercultures. Why bohemianism went bankrupt. The death of a
cultural strategy. The 1980s: the creation of a fascist culture. Commodifying your dissent. Living
out of joint with the times, then and now.
(15) The missing ingredient in cultural analysis: the non-identity of subcultures. If something was so
perfect, why couldn't it last?
(16) Why the Owl of Minerva grooves no more.
27 November 2002
music musings: 3b
I read Graham's Forces in Motion and Radano's books a decade ago and more. I think Radano's assumptions
were all wrong, but that's another story. His article in Jazz Among the Discourses or its companion volume—
both deeply misguided efforts—was much worse.
A couple of comments viz. social history. The handle of the sacred within secular culture is one way of
describing how to think of music and society beyond mere sociology, which goes: this music represents x social
forces, the state of a culture or individual at one time, etc., as if its social function defined its value. I'm trying to
deal with, for a lack of the better term, with the objectivity of music, that is what is in it that shows what the
people who make and use it have made of themselves. This is more profound than simply ascribing political and
social content.
Just to give one example of what I oppose: I remember in the early '90s when Angela Davis got to appear on
Arsenio Hall's talk show for 10 minutes. She told Arsenio and us that she thinks rap is valuable because it
addresses social issues. This is the Stalinist approach to art par excellence, and of course all the postmodernists
and Cultural Studies people think the same way, though they represent a different era and project than this,
which is one reason I find the Braxton interview so useful. It also shows a different generational experience and
outsider perspective. The question is, why have so many intellectual baby boomers just slid effortlessly into the
childishness of '80s-'90s consumer culture and effectively silenced certain vital properties of the period coming
to fruition in the 1970s?
Now Braxton, though I can't share his ultimate framework, has a far more sophisticated perspective, reflective of
a generational experience and not absorbed within the Borg-like perspective of mere sociologism.
Giving a scrute to my file of extracts from Heffley's Braxton interview, I note how many of Braxton's
pronouncements ring true, though I frame my analysis of them differently. For example, the pejorative comment
that jazz belongs to the Democratic Party—an odd remark, but one that encodes the structure of social forces
governing American culture. Or the position of Wynton Marsalis and why "jazz" is artificially abstracted as a
self-contained entity, and why the avant-garde was silenced. Why the AACM and other individuals were so
important. The notion of "composite reality", which is animated by a framework different from postmodernism's
"hybridity". The uniqueness of America.
I'm still wondering how to place Braxton's own project in the scheme of things. The mathematical structure he
has evolved to organize his music projects is certainly unique and worth thinking about, though I'm not sure how
I would relate it to everything else, and as I've only heard a small quantity of the music, I can't say what I think
of the results. While I saw Braxton on a few occasions in the 1970s and listened to a few of his records, I've had
no exposure since, except for seeing him at the Library of Congress a few years ago. My memory is not strong
enough to evaluate what I heard then. I have my doubts I could survive on a diet of this sort of thing for long.
I'm still not certain from the interview how Braxton relates his own project—which obviously has him
completely absorbed—to everything else.
I'm extremely out of the loop, though lately I have gotten a few samples of what I've been missing out on while
hiding in the '60s. However, I attended the opening night of the Visions Festival in New York in May, and except
for one piece (and only one) by Jarman, the stuff I heard was such unbearably tedious noodling shit I had to get
out of there.
Thu, 28 Nov 2002 18:15:46 -0500

Music musings 4
Adorno After Sun Ra

Part 1
In re: Gourgouris, Stathis. "Adorno After Sun Ra", Strategies [UCLA], No. 6, 1991, 198-216.
It took me a few years to get hold of this article. The last article I found with a comparably intriguing title was
one on Adorno and The Cadillacs. But I was especially eager to find this one, as Sun Ra presents a special case,
with potentials to move beyond the usual critique of Adorno on jazz. To be sure, in this article there are
similarities with a good deal of this literature: Adorno only knew about swing music, as filtered through Europe;
he might have changed his mind had he known bebop or the jazz avant-garde; etc. The author does indeed
provide an original approach, but one which I ultimately find unsatisfying.
After explaining his title, Gourgouris makes the outrageous "hypothesis that if Adorno had 'a jazz mind,' he
would have 'been' Sun Ra." After glossing this statement, the author begins with a characterization of Sun Ra's
theatrical performance—the African/Egyptian/space age regalia, the dancers, the noise. Is it ancient ritual, circus
performance, serious, or kitsch? The author calls the musical performance a theater of sound. He further claims
that the logic of the commodity is nowhere present, and agrees with Chris Cutler's assertion that Sun Ra's work
helps "to alienate our alienation."
The link to Adorno surprisingly comes not through the music itself but through music's relation to theater and
film, Adorno's relation to Brecht and Eisler. Sun Ra turns music into dramatic gesture, which the author claims
is not just a modernization of ancient ritual, but consists in a purposely unresolved contradictory combination of
avant-garde and kitsch.
Gourgouris then pursues two topics: Sun Ra's exclusion from jazz history, and jazz as folk culture. Though Sun
Ra undoubtedly belongs to jazz tradition—occupying a key place in it—and though his influence not only
extends to other jazz musicians (such as Coltrane) but also to rock and funk, he has inexplicably been written out
of jazz history. While other avant-gardists have also been marginalized, at least they are detectable on the radar
screen, even if only to be chastised. But Sun Ra occupies special status as non-person, though he likely has had a
larger following and greater influence than many others. Sun Ra is not the only one to be excised from Ken
Burns' monstrous falsification of the last 40 years of jazz history, but he is one of the most important missing
figures. Gourgouris accounts for this unique exclusion on the basis of Sun Ra's imputed relationship to the music
(this quote may come directly from Sun Ra): "Jazz is not what it 'is'; rather, it is what it's used for."
Without completing this argument, the author then cites Chris Cutler's characterization of black musical culture
as folk culture, the product of American slave culture, and entity distinct from African tribal culture and other
cultures. There is something about the social imaginary and different organizations of sound. According to
Cutler according to Gourgouris, "American slave culture is an example of how a genuine collective culture in
the modern world can develop only by means of its enforced exclusion from it." This exclusion feeds the
mutability of collective forms of expression and keeps the culture alien at its core. Another quote, possibly from
Sun Ra: "Music represents the potential future; it's about the future that's not supposed to be but that is better
than is supposed to be."
All this is supposed to be somehow Adornian, but in any event the author goes on to review Adorno's notorious
views on jazz. I won't review the entire argument, but as we know the author thinks that the jazz avant-garde
would have, at least for a while, successfully addressed Adorno's concerns.
Gourgouris argues that Sun Ra's mode of musical production exhibits a disregard for commodification and its
mystique. The fact that Sun Ra erased the distinction between composition and improvisation, and rehearsal and
performance, and just documented what the Arkestra produced rather than handling its output as finished
product (and for that matter discounting the romanticized uniqueness of the recorded live club date), supposedly
proves the thesis. There is also an aesthetics of noise in the struggle of collective improvisation with sound.
Sun Ra's outer space shtik as well as his music arouses consternation. He is considered to be eccentric, mad, or a
fake. Gourgouris attributes these reactions to the conventional ground from which these criticisms come. Sun Ra
demands that we be more aware of the play of culture and the conventional boundaries he violates and
reshuffles: "Sun Ra demands of us that we suspend our inculcated desire for a taxonomic conception of the
world which ultimately provides us with a reliable understanding of boundaries—the boundaries of form, of
myth, of society, of the psyche."
With this conclusion Gourgouris shows his true colors: a postmodernist, Cultural Studies interpretation of Sun
Ra. What a pile of horseshit this is I will analyze in my next post. I daresay Gourgouris also violates the spirit of
Adorno, which after all has something to do with truth content and redemption, not just the self-referentiality of
genre.
—END OF PART 1—
Fri, 29 Nov 2002 11:46:40 -0500

Music musings 4: Adorno After Sun Ra — part 1
I'm amazed that Gourgouris, who also saw Sun Ra in concert, could be so naive about both Sun Ra and Adorno.
I wonder what country he lives in and what his exposure to other relevant phenomena consists of. I too
encountered Sun Ra a number of times, in the '70s and '80s and not long before his demise. In part 2 of my
critique I'll focus on why Gourgouris has Sun Ra all wrong. There is not much to say about Adorno at this point
except that he's not much of a fun guy. Did he ever have fun? Smile? Cut up? He was half-Jewish, after all, so at
least he should have a sense of the ridiculous. But he grew up and lived his life in a no-funkativity zone, so he
was unprepared for this subject matter.
Sat, 30 Nov 2002 16:14:42 -0500

Re: Music musings 4: Adorno After Sun Ra — part 1
Much of the past looks pretty insufferable to those who didn't have to grow up under its restrictions. A week or
two ago I was skimming a book about Scrutiny and I had to go out and buy a bottle of prune juice afterward. In
my experiences in dealing with young people—even teaching a few of them recently—I see the inability to
imagine what it might have been like living in a different mental universe, in a society where people were not
exposed to what we've been exposed to of late, and how thinking through that mental universe requires much
more imagination than engaging in ex post facto politically correct judgments, which after all takes no effort and
costs nobody anything now in advanced industrial societies.
In the case of Adorno, surely a big problem is trying to imagine what Europe and its culture was like 100-50
years ago. We've got a lot more to go on now, after all, and we've learned more—I hope—about the conditions
under which creativity functions. From our standpoint, we've undergone a couple of historical shifts ourselves,
which I am trying to get at in other stuff I've been writing on music. It may be now that Adorno is relevant to us
(or not) in very different ways than before.
Does anybody else think that Adorno is being misused by the Cultural Studies people? In other respects Adorno,
Althusser, etc., have been colonized by postmodernism, so it wouldn't surprise me.
30 Nov 2002 23:06:32 -0500

Music musings 4b
Adorno After Sun Ra

Part 2
"What do you do when you know that you know

that you know that you're wrong?
You've gotta face the music,
Gotta listen to the gospel song."
— Sun Ra, "Face the Music"
Unfortunately, this article is similar to the worst criticism practiced of late: half-baked arguments that don't
cohere, individual ideas that peter out (insufficiently argued and not logically tied to other strains of argument
similarly malconstructed), artificial superimpositions of analytical conceits combined with textual obtuseness to
the objects under investigation. But as bad as the sloppiness of form is the tawdriness of content, narcissistically
self-referential: cultural expression is about nothing other than the social status of cultural products themselves;
the creative process is only about subverting, affirming, combining, undermining, or parodying high and low
culture, but, while subverting cultural categories, is inconceivable as involving anything beyond them. This sort
of criticism has been in vogue for a quarter-century, and was criticized even in the late '70s. However, as the
project of intellectual colonialism moves outward from literary studies, the theoretical falsification of cultural
history accelerates. Now, as a more sophisticated approach to the social analysis of music is necessary, to
supplant the naïve notions that prevailed in the 1960s, postmodernism is brought in to falsify history: jazz is
treated as discourse (see Jazz Among the Discourses and its companion volume), artificial periodizations
unrecognizable to anyone who participated or lived through certain stretches of time appear (one book's title
dubs jazz from the '60s on "postmodern"), and the obsession with status becomes the overriding concern (e.g.
Ronald Radano's ridiculous analysis of Anthony Braxton as subverting high-low distinctions, but also Ken
Burns' pack of lies inspired by Wynton Marsalis, silencing the jazz of the '60s and '70s paradoxically because it
didn’t make money and wasn't part of Marsalis' contrived adversity-and-success story).
Gourgouris could have at least pursued his original idea of linking Sun Ra to Brecht and Eisler, though that was
unlikely to get him very far either. Or, he could have pursued the quote, probably from Sun Ra himself, that jazz
is not what it is but what it's used for, except that he would have gotten that wrong also. Gourgouris, puzzled by
the combination of seriousness and kitsch, takes the Cultural Studies way out by insisting that the status of
cultural objects is all that Sun Ra means by this paradoxical juxtaposition. This all adds up to the pseudo-
sophisticated yet persistently one-dimensional and gullible type of criticism that the academy has been churning
out for too long: the mechanical production and reproduction of cultural criticism.
My argument against Gourgouris' position will include the following points:
(1) African-American signifying practices and Sun Ra's seriousness and kitschiness misunderstood,
(2) Reasons for Sun Ra's outsider status even within jazz,
(3) Sun Ra's modernism and archaism: not at all an expression of folk culture,
(4) Sun Ra's negation of earthly existence and his paradoxical relation to the black "community",
(5) Sun Ra's esoteric philosophy not reducible to a subversion of the cultural industry,
(6) Sun Ra's audience and the variety of responses to both the music and the ideology.
I'm not going to have much to say about Adorno himself. If Adorno had a 'jazz mind', there's no telling what he
would think, but the linkage proposed here is just unsupportable. Perhaps had Adorno applied what he knew
about Heinrich Heine to African-American cultural expressions, he might have understood better what he was
dealing with. Had Gourgouris followed suit, he might have understood Sun Ra's signifying better as well.
Gourgouris is apparently mystified how someone could be serious yet clowning around and pulling your leg at
the same time. However, the holy fool as a cross-cultural phenomenon over thousands of years is not exactly a
freshly minted social type. There's a whole lot of signifying in Sun Ra, in which the comical aspects need to be
sorted out from the core beliefs he probably held, or if not disassociated from them, then at least distinguished as
elements within an amalgam. Sun Ra's performance consisted of some very outside music and esoteric beliefs
combined with some garish and highly amusing entertainment/presentation. This is a rather interesting form of
presentation for an outsider, as he was obviously not interested in boring his audiences to death, and apparently
was willing to appeal to his audience on any of a number of levels simultaneously.
Sun Ra also had his musical origins in the big band era, and was only too willing to school his audience—on
great but underrecognized innovators such as Fletcher Henderson—and dip back into that era in his
performances. As a person who understood the position of the entertainer in the old days, he must have drawn on
old traditions of 'signifying' as well. For example, in one concert in which his band played such intense music
they put me into a trance for two days (without my ingesting any intoxicants of any kind), they also did a
number which must have come from sometime in the 1920s-1940s, singing "Let's Go Slumming." Slumming
goes back to the days of the Harlem Renaissance when rich whites would venture uptown to Harlem to get down
with black cultural forms that they dug, patronized, and ultimately financially controlled. This was not the
situation at the Kilimanjaro in DC at the end of the 1980s, but for some reason the band resurrected some hoary
old song gathering dust, and they sang it as they paraded through the crowded club (an African-oriented
establishment with a mixed audience). It was a bit of fun to be sure, but the irony was not lost on me and
hopefully not on others. Just imagine what it must have meant in an earlier era, to have a black band singing this
to a white audience and the latter, joining in the fun, would be completely unaware of the meaning implied about
the social relations underlying this sort of entertainment. My point is, that Sun Ra must have been aware of the
paradoxes of the entertainment industry and had precedents to draw upon prior to the development of his Afro-
mystical outer space shtik.
I don't recall exactly when Sonny Blount, originally of Birmingham, Alabama, became Sun Ra from the planet
Saturn, but he was emerging as this character by the late 1950s. Some of his compositions from this time are
recognizably of big band orchestration, yet with exotic, mystical overtones, such as "Ancient Ethiopia." That this
form of music would emerge in the late 1950s is not completely mysterious, as other oppositional culture of the
same general thrust was developing then as well. Jazz musicians, for example, were aware of the decolonization
struggles in Africa, and some put that into their music. (This also coincided with the birth of the modern civil
rights movement). Their awareness was more political than anything. However, esoteric elements could also be
found in the subcultures and artistic endeavors of the time—both white and black (and intermixed). Sun Ra was
an early experimentalist, but the 1960s would explode with such persons and movements, such as the Chicago-
based AACM. Again, my chronology is completely hazy, but Sun Ra got into electronic instruments and avant-
garde dissonance and noise and was producing "outside" albums by the mid-60s such as The Heliocentric
Worlds of Sun Ra, which is one of the first I got my hands on, though a few years later.
It is a curious amalgamation, whose relation to the culture industry could be analyzed along several dimensions.
First of all, Sun Ra had his own big band in an era of small groups. The big band had ceased to be financially
viable for some time. Secondly, he kept a discrete grouping that was at least partially isolated from the rest of the
jazz world. Rather than migrating in and out of other groups, certain loyal musicians would remain part of Sun
Ra's group for decades, devoting themselves specifically to this music. Others would come to Sun Ra to learn,
and would come away influenced in one way or another, yet Sun Ra's organization would remain distinct from
all others. Coltrane for example was influenced by Ra, and his saxophone playing specifically influenced by
John Gilmore. Who has heard of Gilmore, though? He did appear independently, dressed in a conservative suit,
on Ralph J. Gleason's jazz TV show in the early '60s, but how many albums can you think of where he had his
own group, or was known to play with other famous musicians?
Another isolating factor, perhaps more so than the "outside" music being played, was Sun Ra's presentation.
Coltrane was into mysticism and drank carrot juice, and ultimately played too long to fit comfortably into a
nightclub format. Sonny Rollins sported a Mohawk haircut at a time when such things were unheard of and was
into zen. Yet these folks succeeded in the standard jazz nightclub and concert circuits. I don't know how Cecil
Taylor fared. He was a product of the conservatory and the European avant-garde, wore dark glasses and
behaved like an alienated artiste (mocked by host Ralph Ellison in a television documentary of contemporary
jazz musicians), yet even the performance of a piece like "Octagonal Skirt and Fancy Pants", however outré
musically, was nothing like Sun Ra's outer space presentation. Many jazz musicians—probably most—but many
of the prominent ones, were unhappy with the nightclub format, but some somehow managed to survive in it. I
don't know how Sun Ra fared, but I am willing to venture a guess about the nature of his marginalization, which
I think has a lot to do with how the 1960s differed from the 1950s across the board.
Generational sensibilities—the products of differing social circumstances—in addition to market forces, govern
the reception of music. For music is not just its formal properties but embodies sensibilities that govern
reception. Additionally, musical styles may evoke broader cultural memories or associations that affect
sensibility as well, so that one not only reacts to the style but to the mentality rightly or wrongly associated with
it. It is curious that Ken Burns' documentary, while so invested in social contextualization (Jim Crow, racial
discrimination, civil rights, social unrest, riots, black power, etc.) is completely obtuse to the historical,
generational formation of sensibility. Ultimately, in the typical American fashion it really is all about fame and
celebrity and fashion and popularity and the cash register, so the closer we get to the present, what matters most
is broad-based (un)popularity: though these folks are supposed to be interested in the art form and its evolution:
they really only want to keep track of the score and not bother watching the game. Hence the official story—
inspired by the self-serving Wynton Marsalis and others—is that jazz was not popular in the '60s and '70s hence
we are entitled to stifle the same music now. So history is not history but a success story with much travail but a
happy ending: Alex Haley in Roots and Wynton Marsalis in jazz. The only thing to be said about fusion is that it
made money, and the only thing to be said about the avant-garde is that it didn't. Or to smirk: for example the
African tribal persona of the Art Ensemble of Chicago was a failure because the audience consisted of white
college students and not the black masses, and that's all there is to say about it. In other words, just keep score,
but don't bother to watch the game.
And yet much that did happen was very much in the spirit of the 1960s, and some of the jazz being produced
then achieved an audience—forget about the size—outside of the ordinary jazz constituency precisely because it
appealed to a different sensibility—the expansive, explosive high energy of the time, very different from the
repressed, muted mode of the '50s. This has a lot to do with the nightclub sensibility of the 1950s. Indeed,
serious art was miraculously made in those nightclubs, though the social purpose of those clubs was to entertain
the men while they freely spent their cash, got drunk, got their dates and girlfriends drunk so that the fellas could
more easily worm their fingers into their dates' vaginas under the table while listening to some really cool jazz.
The type of old standards played and sung under such circumstances did not fit the sensibility of a younger
audience brought up on rock-and-roll or R&B and finding other venues for organizing sexual intercourse. But
people who went to outdoor rock concerts might listen to the explosive music of Coltrane or Sun Ra, or Pharoah
Sanders, or Rahsaan Roland Kirk for that matter. (Ken Burns included Coltrane—who could not, after all?—but
he omitted so many other key players. It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham.)
Sun Ra anticipated both the New Age and Afrocentric sensibilities that mushroomed in the 1960s. Not only the
organization of his band but the whole form and mythos of his presentation was framed inescapably in a
different context from that of jazz as mere music, either as art or entertainment. To encounter Sun Ra was to
encounter a phenomenon—however entertaining—demonstrably alien to the prevailing mores of the organized
jazz establishment.
To be sure, there was a mixture of the mystical and the absurd. It is essential to note, however, that the playful,
humorous, and parodical elements of both the lyrics and costumes of the performers do not negate what should
be obvious to anyone who has been exposed to Sun Ra: that he meant much of what he said. Some of the
costuming was outrageous show biz, but some of the mystical aspects of the Afro-Egyptian dress were
undoubtedly seriously construed. Sometimes the lyrics are a scream; the outer space ethos is a lot of outlandish
fun; however, the intended contrast with the ways of earth was surely undergirded by serious intent. "Face the
Music", for example, is a pun (American slang meaning, roughly, reap what you sow): the delivery is buoyant, it
swings, it's funny, and of course ironic in that the karmic consequence of wrongdoing is literally that you have to
listen to music. It's a joke, but Sun Ra really wanted his audience to listen to the gospel song.
Part 3 will pick up with point 3 (above).
—END OF PART 2—
2 December 2002
Music musings 4b
As I am writing very hurriedly from memory, my little essays on music are likely to be chock-full of errors,
including the two you pointed out. When I heard "Face the Music" in concert, I could swear the words were
"gospel song", not "cosmos song".
After I finished the third installment of my Sun Ra piece, I picked up my still unread copy of Blutopia off the
shelf, skimmed parts of the introduction, and gave the rest of the book a scrute. I got a feel for what Lock is
trying to do and the battle being waged, and I noted how similar some of his remarks are to mine. There are
misunderstandings of both collectives and individuals at stake; in the case of collectives, mistaken notions of
black people; in the case of individuals, mischaracterizations (Braxton, Ellington), and easy dismissals of alleged
charlatanism (Sun Ra). I understand quite well why Lock fights these battles. I myself am trying to move on to
another stage of criticism, which will become evident in due course. Part of my project is to rescue individuality
from the anonymity of ethnicity; another is a more critical look at collectivities themselves and the failures and
obsolescence of certain cultural strategies. But I noticed that Lock admitted that he might interpret things
differently than they but had no intention of being judgmental in this book about the ideas of the musicians
concerned. He also evinced skepticism about the postmodernist interpretation of jazz, and about the critical
practice of explaining everything as 'signifying', à la Skip Gates. (I'm glad someone else sees through Gates.)
And he says something about freelance mysticism and the reaction against organized Christianity, and
importantly, about the reconfiguration of sacred music for secular contexts. Very perceptive observations.
I have a lot more to say in part 4, including the question of Sun Ra's sincerity, on the various reactions of his
audience to his music and philosophy, based on personal memoirs of same, also my own personal history and
reactions to Sun Ra's performances, and my changing attitudes to things following the watershed year 1980.
Do you know this character Ben Watson, who wrote a huge bizarro book on Frank Zappa? I've read 300 pages of
it. I got a lot of useful information out of it, and there is some astute thinking in it, but my sense is that, in the
final analysis, Watson is a childish, self-indulgent jackass.
Mon, 02 Dec 2002 02:06:51 -0500

Music musings 4c
Adorno After Sun Ra

Part 3
"Have you heard the news from Neptune, Neptune, Neptune?"

—Sun Ra, "News from Neptune"
Grigouris tipped his hand towards the end of his article, in statements such as: "Sun Ra demands of us that we
suspend our inculcated desire for a taxonomic conception of the world which ultimately provides us with a
reliable understanding of boundaries—the boundaries of form, of myth, of society, of the psyche." As I've
argued, this is a pure Cultural Studies fabrication that reduces cultural content and purpose to social status and
the play of genre. There is no evidence whatever that this is so; furthermore, Grigouris negates any possible
transcendental claims that Sun Ra obviously had in mind, his signifying behavior notwithstanding. Any holy
fool has to find some way however unorthodox in relating to his audience, even in a small village. In a media
society there are additional considerations of the market and the means of establishing and attracting an
audience. This may also entail violating conventions of cultural status (high and low) and genre. But under what
circumstances should we conclude that commenting on the social status of one's art is a central concern of the art
itself? In what situations and in what ways, if not all, do prior considerations of status decisively determine the
creative process?
In Sun Ra's case, a comparison with contemporaries might be in order. Frank Zappa throughout his whole career
was up to his neck in struggle with the culture industry and with his audience. Inspired by black R&B and
European modernism (esp. Varese), and as an outsider coming out of the regimentation and hypocrisy of 1950s
America, Zappa was at constant war with everything that was going on, more on the basis of the overall cultural-
political-existential situation from his location as an individual entrepreneur with an outsiderish perspective
rather than on any evolved political position of his own. That meant that Zappa was obsessed with the zeitgeist
and with the dedritus of everything within the culture. His performance, visual presentation, lyrics, song titles,
and the organization of the music was deeply affected by his efforts at detournement of popular culture,
including the countercultures in their various mutations. (He never believed in drugs, the hippies or the Beatles.)
One could say that the results of his work that circulated within popular culture (Zappa also doubled as an avant-
garde composer) are documents of their time, which creates complications for those reviewing them or being
exposed to them for the first time after the passage of decades. It is likely that one will react very differently to
the music and to the lyrics. In the multitude of cases where the music can stand alone as pure music, regardless
of the context, title, or lyrics attached to it, one is likely to perceive the music as really good music still very
much listenable, and just as likely to ignore the lyrics and everything else as a juvenile product of times gone by.
To some extent, the structure of the music reflects its time not only as all music must reflect its historical
evolution, but the state of the culture industry as well, and yet there is a substantial portion of it that shows what
Zappa wanted to do as a real composer and musician if he could do so without feeling the need to psych out the
suits and the audience. It is certainly the case that Zappa consciously conflates the high/low distinction and
engages in guerilla warfare with the culture industry—but there remains music to be analyzed in musical terms.
George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic is a directly relevant case, as P-Funk was directly influenced by Sun Ra.
Clinton copied the home-made mythologizing, the outer space theme, the Afrocentric spin, the idea of
outlandish visual presentation and performance. The stage presentation was over the top, eventually including
the descent of a constructed Mothership. A funk cosmology was constructed to accompany the whole show. In
Clinton's funketelechy, the original forces of funkativity triumph over negative opposing forces. I forget all the
characters involved in the drama except for Dr. Funkenstein, obviously the hero. While I imagine that Clinton
had one or two serious ideas underneath all his "metafoolishness" (he did preach: "Think! It ain't illegal yet" and
he did believe in the social importance of the funk); it was fun cosmology in the pursuit of dance and party-time.
Parallel developments at various times would include Elijah Mohammed's Nation of Islam cosmology, Ishmael
Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo (1970s), and of later vintage, the myth of sun people vs. ice people circulated by
Afrocentric crackpots in the 1980s. Clinton's version, however, was playful entertainment, and thus rather
harmless in comparison to the more serious and hence malignant versions of Afrocentric mythology. The major
problem here would be the existential, ethical, political and aesthetic limitations of the party ethic and the self-
indulgent excess of the time. But whatever it was, it became popular culture as the '70s wore on. There seems to
be no ironic relationship per se to the culture industry as there is with Zappa, though plenty plenty of signifying.
As Clinton had a much longer history that went back as far as doo-wop, I believe, the society had to change and
to reach a certain point where Clinton could actualize his most outrageous ideas. Clinton had kept an eye on all
sorts of things, including Jimi Hendrix's accomplishments in rock. Funkadelic began as outrageous and outré,
but with time and with some tailoring, it was possible to combine all of Clinton's musical interests in one
outrageous package for popular consumption. And this happened in the 1970s, when the cultural (and social)
revolutions unleashed in the '60s finally made the decisive impact so that the whole culture would change
fundamentally in the '70s in ways that only an advance guard could agitate for in the '60s. And the full
unleashing of funk in the 1970s—as an abstract concept as well as a form—also reflected the newly solidified
self-assertion of the black working class filling up the ghettos, effected as a result of the upheavals of the '60s.
American society bogged down politically and economically in the '70s, but the masses fought for and won their
right to party. There were of course obstacles for P-Funk, such as being banned from radio and TV, but Clinton
nonetheless established his own mismanaged little empire which gained a huge following. In addition to
Clinton's shady business practices, ultimately it was the triumph of a watered-down and mechanized form of
black music controlled by millions and millions of dollars of white money—disco—that took down funk and
destroyed the lion's share of halfway decent music in America. (While funk has its limitations, some of it is quite
outstanding musically and complex in construction, though engineered for getting down rather than cerebral
contemplation.) In the 1980s new monstrosities would appear.
A comparison with Sun Ra would be instructive. While Sun Ra was a pioneer of outlandish, mythology-tinged
performance, at no time did he ever pursue a party ethic or attract a party audience. Though he used dancers, his
was not dance music. (Not that you couldn't if you wanted to.) Though purveying humor himself, Sun Ra was
not about to promote the rock star mentality. Clinton put out myriad songs with themes as raunchy as "No Head,
No Backstage Pass", but Sun Ra wouldn't be caught dead doing any such thing. Sun Ra is reported to have
disdained funk as being of the body alone. Far from embracing popular culture, Sun Ra consistently displayed an
otherworldly perspective. He wasn't into freedom, but "discipline and precision". To Sun Ra "earth is a planet of
death" and "space is the place". While the latter assertion has a humorous tinge, the former is no joke. Sun Ra
hearkened back to African rhythms and Egyptian mythology, combining them with futuristic elements including
electronic instruments and space travel themes. Though his presentation was carnivalesque, Sun Ra had no part
of any party mentality.
Other considerations that will solidify this perspective on Sun Ra include: (1) his relationship to folk culture, (2)
his relationship to his audiences and to black people at large, (3) his conservative world view.
First, in response to Gourgouris' assertion (citing Chris Cutler) that black musical culture is folk culture: what
"folk culture" means in a complex urban setting in a technological, commercial, and mediated society is itself an
object subject to close scrutiny, but even to let this notion pass does not address the status of individual artists
with respect to it. Even an individual doing traditional folk material as a professional cannot be assumed to be
part of collective folk expression. But for an avant-garde artist leading a marginal existence even with respect to
his own "community", it is simply preposterous to make such an assumption, even if that person's art embodies
some formal characteristics of folk expression. The notion of Sun Ra as folk artist is hilarious: would such a
notion even be entertained if Sun Ra were not black and thus assumed to be representative of all black people as
whites suppose? This sort of gullibility has not changed a great deal over the decades, and it applies to jazz
musicians as it does to others. For example, the 1960s was an explosive time with demonstrable cultural as well
as political dimensions, for jazz musicians as well as the rest of black America. And of course musicians with a
given musical and social background would channel the current mood of the society into their art. Yet the
assumption of being part of an unmediated collectivity is a naive one, albeit easily perpetuated in a segregated
society. So, for example, Frank Kofsky, a Trotskyist historian and music critic, who claimed to have written in
Malcolm X and John Coltrane as his votes in the 1964 presidential election, could innocently perpetuate
romantic illusions. Other jazz musicians and other black artists and intellectuals will tell a different story, about
how little support there is for their work in the black community, and how limited the interest in the cultural past
as well.
Sun Ra shares certain characteristics with other avant-garde artists of the 20th century in all cultures. There has
always been a connection between modernism and the resurrection of the archaic and the primitive: both are
constituent elements of new visionary art forms and the escape from the limitations and the alienation of the
present. In the case of the black American musical avant-garde, older forms of folk expression, African-
American and/or African, were incorporated along with challenging innovations not always likely to be
immediately popular or easily digestible. In Sun Ra's case, that meant the use of African drums and rhythms
mixed with big band orchestration and styles mixed with electronic instruments, screaming saxophones, and
stretches of what most people would consider pure cacophony. Now some of this music is very catchy and
listenable, much more accessible than other avant-gardists (Cecil Taylor is much harder take, for instance), and
the more cacophonous moments are less tolerable except for those of us who love that stuff. The black avant-
garde who followed the route of combining the archaic with modernism constructed a very clever amalgam: one
could claim a continuity from the archaic to the futuristic, from the ethnic to the cosmic.
This cultural strategy was a great source of strength, but was also the source of an ideological illusion. While
New World cultures because of the way they came into being and had to survive are indeed flexible and mutable,
there are limits. Folk musics and the folks themselves can be brilliant at what they do, but they tend to be
conservative and intolerant of anything radically different. The propensity for constant innovation and stylistic
revolution is an exclusively urban phenomenon, first of all. And while numerous innovators have come from
small towns and rural areas (e.g. Coltrane from Hamlet, NC; Dizzy Gillespie from Cheraw, SC) they all
developed their artistic innovations in big cities. It could not have been otherwise. Now, reaching back into the
archaic allowed certain people to claim that their most avant-garde experiments were "in the tradition" (the title
of an Anthony Braxton album), but no traditional society would have ever tolerated them. Somebody like
Anthony Braxton would have been put to death.
All the more reason to dispense with naive ideas of folk culture. In Sun Ra's case, his relation to the black
community is even more problematic. Sun Ra's entire persona and mythology were tied up in a negation of
earthly existence. Can you imagine what it must have been like for a visionary to have been born and grown up
in Birmingham, Alabama in the days of Jim Crow? I don't think you can, and neither can I, but chances are you
heard of Birmingham the same way I did: from the infamous bombing of a black church and resultant murder of
four little girls in 1964 in the heat of the civil rights movement. And that was only the most conspicuous
example of what Birmingham was capable of. Sun Ra concluded long ago that life on earth was primitive and
barbaric, its seeming complexities simple and childish from the standpoint of a higher perspective, a creative
perspective. This meant also that the social and cultural adaptations of people to their environment incorporated
the very same barbarism; hence Sun Ra distanced himself from the people as well. The vantage point of outer
space made earthlings, their ways and preoccupations look small. The ability of music to paint pictures of
exquisite beauty ("pictures of infinity") is the direct negation of the ugliness and pettiness and cruelty and
ignorance of daily life and the souls it creates.
There is a paradox in Sun Ra's Afrocentric cosmology and his relation to actual and potential audiences. Sun Ra
noticed that the young white kids who were coming to see him were of a different breed than what he
experienced in places like Birmingham, and was cognizant, as many were, of the importance of the emergence
of conscious whites in the society. At the same time, Sun Ra had no truck with the ways of the ghetto, and had a
rather harsh view of black people and their cultural interests. He stated his hostility to the black audience most
bluntly: "They hate me because I play beauty and they're ugly."
It's not a nice thing to say, but it states the problem in the starkest terms, which incidentally, has nothing
whatever to do with the maintenance or subversion of the distinction between high and low culture or any of the
other trivial pursuits of the postmodernists and Cultural Studies mavens, who after all are more plugged into the
culture industry than anyone else on the planet. These people will do their best to suppress the issue that Sun Ra
raised, because they are ugly, ugly people who worship ugliness—ugly films, ugly popular music, ugly ideas.
They have to suppress the individual's consciousness of himself as an individual and the need for transcendence,
all the better to conceal their own capitulation to barbarism.
Sun Ra's problem, on the other hand, is that he never developed a more sophisticated concept of social evolution.
There is no Afrocentric mythology that is not ultimately fascist, and his is no exception. This might not be
immediately evident, for considerable exposure to Sun Ra's ramblings are needed for his more reactionary views
to emerge. There is the suggestion, for example, that black people are paying off some sort of karmic debt, that
they deserve what they have gotten, as an educational process by which they will have to learn to do better.
There is Sun Ra's leader complex. I shall have more to say about all this later. However, all of this requires
deeper analysis, not to be found among fandom or cultural critics and especially well-meaning whites, who are
all gullible to the bitter end.
Sun Ra's personal cosmology was directed as a radical negation of an inhuman environment, a visionary attempt
to overcome backwardness using the tools at hand, which also reflect the very situation one needs to transcend.
Both the heroism and the failures of this strategy should be justly noted. Can we afford any less?
Part 4 to come: Sun Ra and his audience, personal memoirs, and the end of an era.
—END OF PART 3—
Mon, 02 Dec 2002 12:28:14 -0500

Music musings 4d
Adorno After Sun Ra

Part 4
SUN RA AND HIS AUDIENCE, A PERSONAL MEMOIR
Consideration of the varied relationships of Sun Ra to his audiences begin with allegations of Sun Ra's
charlatanism. While there is room for ambiguity, I need to state at the outset that there are some things that Sun
Ra says that can only be expressions of deep conviction. There is the paradoxical situation of the dissident
mystic, who, whatever other nonsense he spouts, may also hit on some profound truths in the struggle against
repression and convention. Sun Ra once spoke of his view of creation. To paraphrase: What can I do for the
Creator? I can't sacrifice anything of mine. I can't sacrifice an animal as an offering. All these things are already
His. The only thing I can do for Him is to create something of my own.
Now a person who would say this is not just a New Age con man. While conventional religious belief just
perpetuates the cruelties of nature and the natural man, and garden variety occultism follows suit, these words of
Sun Ra represent the highest standards of civilization, the moral superiority of human aspiration to mindless
nature and savage custom. "Earth is a planet of death." This is not frivolity, showmanship, or random spew.
People who say things like this know what they are saying and why. To get so hung up on the bizarre and
implausible aspects of a person's behavior and belief system so as to overlook the rationally understandable truth
content within their work is obtuse. An analogy with William Blake might be in order. Was he mad,
hallucinating, psychotic because he claimed to see angels in a tree as a child? Should we fixate on this one
thing? Should we really give a shit whether he did or didn't? Does this mean nothing he ever wrote made rational
sense or that he never knew what he was saying? Does your suspicion of the paranormal mean this person was
never rational and should be passively embraced as esoteric or safely ignored as a crank?
There is another factor: an artist is an artisan, someone who exerts physical energy and skilled labor to produce
something. The proof of what he does is in the doing, no matter what he spouts, uplifting or offputting. Art is
praxis. Any upper middle class professional with half a brain can stand up and talk New Age shit on PBS (such
as Wayne Dyer's shnorring I accidentally tuned in to last night). Any flatline dweeb can voice uplifting
sentiments. Anyone remember the "Up with People" roadshow of the '70s that wowed middle-aged Caucasian
suburbanites? Doesn't such feelgood pabalum differ from John Coltrane?
This having been said, there is a sliding scale of how much we can take seriously. When it comes to playacting,
we tend to assume a division between what a person thinks himself and his performance for us. But acting a part
is also an act of will, and the first person one wants to convince is oneself. Hence there is plenty of room for
ambiguity as to how much of Sun Ra's "mythocracy" is a put-on and how much meant literally.
Now how have audiences reacted to Sun Ra? Here I can only draw on my personal experiences of the past three
decades. First, there is a division to be made between his music and his ideology. Hence, disallowing
complexities of judgment, there are four combinatorial possibilities, two of which can be dispatched quickly. I've
never known anyone who took Sun Ra's philosophy seriously who wasn't interested in his music, though I
suppose this is possible. I know people who think Sun Ra is a charlatan musically as well as philosophically.
There's not much to be said about these two positions, except that it is inexcusable for critics to write Sun Ra out
of history because they are put off by his shtik. More interesting are the other two possibilities. There are many
who dismiss Sun Ra philosophically as a charlatan, but take him very seriously as a musician. And there are
those who swallow the philosophy as well as the music, hook, line and sinker. Beyond these four cut-and-dried
combinations, there are also nuanced reactions that can be very revealing.
As with Woodstock, if you remember the '70s, you weren't there. I'll do the best I can, though. One example will
reveal the complexities of the situation: a Sun Ra concert I attended, in Buffalo, circa 1978. This was part of a
larger festival of some sort, which included talks by the musicians in addition to concert performance. Anthony
Braxton was part of this event as well. First of all, there is quite a diversity, philosophically as well as ethnically,
in Sun Ra's audience. While the jazz audience in the '60s and '70s is known to be limited, the precise contours
are not easily definable. The avant-garde also had an audience, but its boundaries were evanescent as well (from
the standpoint of the usual characterization of such phenomena, based on the European experience). However
Sun Ra was both more and less popular than other jazz musicians, and his audience similarly overlapped the
constituency of avant-garde jazz. Sun Ra also had a cult following that bulged the demographic curve. For
example, while audience members in general are known to carry on, the way that certain black men would yell
out "Sun Ra!" at inspired moments revealed the cultic dimension of the experience.
So I attended the aforementioned concert. Several other people I knew did also. Though I remember talking with
them about it afterwards, I don't remember actually being there with anybody. I also can't remember the
particulars of the music, except that I can still visualize someone beating on a very tall African drum with a
stick. I'm sure I enjoyed the music. I'll have more to say about the talk afterward.
Later on, possibly on another day, I had a chance to discuss this concert with a woman I knew, an extremely
introverted, withdrawn, esoterically inclined white woman who was nonetheless prone as an actress (inspired by
the ancient Greeks), to go into deep trances that blew everyone away including adepts of Afro-Caribbean
religious cults. She said she liked Anthony Braxton better, because she often found the demeanor of Sun Ra's
Arkestra (in performance) closed and dogmatic, but she also enjoyed moments that seemed brighter and more
open. Very interesting.
Now the talk afterward was a curious experience. This was the first time I got to see Sun Ra talk with people, in
a more intimate setting, though still in a large room stuffed with people. The black men with the skullcaps—
Muslims (orthodox Muslims, not members of Elijah Muhammed's separatist gutter religion)—hung on every
word. This was the real deal for them; they asked esoteric question after question and soaked up each response
with complete earnestness.
My own reaction? Well, Sun Ra's personal magnetism on this occasion was incredible. The sound of his voice
literally had a hypnotic effect on the audience, on me, anyway. I could feel waves of energy radiating out from
his head and filling up the room, casting a hypnotic spell of calm over the audience. It was remarkable. But
apparently not remarkable enough. While some of his statements were OK with me, and even his talk of higher
beings did not particularly bother me, eventually so much gibberish came out of his mouth it exceeded my level
of tolerance. I proved unable to stay through the whole thing, which, as I heard from others later on (probably
not the same day), went on and on much longer.
So some time later I had this confab with a group of black women I knew (that I had met while taking a class in
African drumming). They were not Muslims, no, and they liked me because I was so sweet and lovable back in
those days (Washington cured me of that in a hurry) and not an embittered, macho ghetto male like our drum
teacher. A couple of them were many years older than I, and thus their engagement with bohemian and artistic
circles was not a product of '70s culture, but of earlier derivation. (Can you dig it?) So the ladies repeated to me
some of the Sun Ra palaver that I had missed, with a straight face, with not an atom of critical thinking a-
stirring, and I couldn't believe that anyone would have the nerve to talk so much bullshit and that anyone could
swallow so much of it. I mean it was such patent drivel it was shocking.
I hope this account gives you a flavor of the complexity of what was involved. I was able to tolerate a lot in the
'70s, partly because, given where I was at in 1978, anyone from outer space was a friend of mine. However, for a
variety of reasons, I underwent a sharp reevaluation of all the countercultures and subcultures I endured in the
1970s. When the watershed year of 1980 rolled around, I had to reassess their ideas with great severity.
Stayed tuned for part 5: the end of an era.
—END OF PART FOUR—

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 01:03:22 -0500

Adorno's cultural critique and music
Without specifics I don't know how the alleged romantic anti-capitalism dovetails with the study of Adorno.
Your examples, interestingly, are all visual: actors in films and a singer's visage rather than his music. I wonder
though how these students analyze music, if they do. And I wonder if they realize or you teach the differences
between then and now. The nature of conformity now is better disguised (so much so that it's not named as an
issue anymore), because its form is basically a sublation of all the protests against it of the '50s and '60s. It may
be that in an altered form Adorno is more relevant than ever, but that means we have to think through our history
as Adorno thought through his rather than ape him. And all grad students learn these days, from what I have
seen, is how to ape thought, not how to think.
Tue, 03 Dec 2002 12:39:36 -0500

I have no problem with the notion of a true self. The only problem—which I guess is the Rousseauan version—
is that it is something outside of history and concrete determination.
The regression to primitivism, also a prominent feature of the '60s, was nonetheless an attempt to escape from
alienated existence, as was Rousseau's. People are never dialectical thinkers; they progress from one naive
position to another, because they can only go on what they know, even when they protest against it. Now the
postmodernists think they are sophisticated because they can criticize this naiveté as "essentialism", but it takes
neither insight nor dedication to do that, it's just another ready-made intellectual justification for neo-
consumerism (postcolonialism with credit cards).
The consumerism of the '80s, retooled for the baby-boomer yuppies, is precisely a sublation of the cultural
revolution of the '60s-'70s, which was a rebellion against as well as a natural evolution beyond the gray,
mechanistic regimentation of the '50s. Consumerism is more diversified, it's much sexier, it incorporates
frustration, cynicism, and dissent, and it is far more skillful at engineering the illusion of self-expression, at a
historical moment when people have less of a self than ever. Postmodernism and Cultural Studies are brought in
as consultancies to justify this state of affairs.
Speaking of abuses of Adorno, wait till I review this gem:
Watson, Ben. Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1996.
3 December 2002
Music musings 4b: Adorno After Sun Ra — part 2
Yesterday I was sitting at a table by the post office preparing a package to mail, singing the lyrics to "Outer
Spaceways Incorporated" (see Bernie Worrell's Funk of Ages, track 10), when an old man walked by and
remarked to me: "You're happy, aren't you?". Caught off guard, I responded: "Well, yes I am, for the moment."
I took Blutopia with me on a shopping trip, in the freezing cold, on the subway, to look up the references to John
Corbett. I've also been skimming through the book at random, gleaning very useful pieces of information every
time. I am quite pleased. I'd like to drop everything I'm doing and read the whole book. But I'm supposed to be
packing up for New York where I'm supposed to be thinking about Herman Melville for the next month. Well,
perhaps at least I'll be able to look up Corbett's book in a library while I'm there. I've never heard of Lee Perry.
Reading Sun Ra's political opinions in the book, e.g. his remarks on Martin Luther King, only intensified my
political view of Ra as an objectionable reactionary, a mentality only too consistent with that of other black
people from the deep South. The South breeds fascism like garbage in the alley breeds rats and lice.
It's just this sort of thinking that made me part way with the various subcultures I lived with in the '70s. I
contend that such cultural strategies are at the end of their rope, and hence my approach is different than that in
the book. However, there is the issue of preserving historical memory, and the younger generation has no
conception of why people thought and acted as they did in a more restricted society.
I've also been thinking up what I'm going to say on Watson's book on Zappa.
Wed, 04 Dec 2002 01:47:44 -0500

In my estimation the Cultural Studies people greatly exaggerate the consumer's autonomy. On the other hand, I
think Adorno's specific judgments on American popular music are useless. I suggest that his applicability to our
conditions is on a more abstract level, and needs to be thought through in light of the much richer cultural
experience we have behind us, especially in the last half century. Adorno reacted to the cultural exhaustion of
Europe in the face of barbarism, and of course saw analogous phenomena here, exaggerated by the typical
European horror at American crudity and gigantism. I claim we have much richer cultural experience to draw
upon, but also that now we are facing our own exhaustion, hence the power of capital pulsates not only through
what we produce but who we are, not that it didn't before, but that now is the historical moment where publicly
recognized forms are all contaminated to the point where no fresh message can get through.
I believe we have a much richer experience than Adorno of the intermixture of commercial and ideological
restraint on the one hand, and the ability to inject fresh creativity into the culture industry on the other and even
to hold one's own at times. This is especially evident in the history of our popular and fringe music, a far more
interesting phenomenon than a lot of tired old European shit. However, I believe that we too have reached an
impasse, which has its roots in the late '70s and came to fruition in the '80s and solidified with a new generation
raised upon the cultural order we now know, a generation that is now breeding little monsters of its own. The
logic of incorporation is has just about completed its telos.
Now as to TV comedy. I contend that the one vital public art form we have of recent vintage is comedy. I think
The Simpsons is the greatest product of American popular culture in the '90s, and this is no coincidence, since it
is based on a satire of formulaic existence. I think that this show, though it has its built-in flaws, stands out
above all others. However, in addition to inconsistencies, there are limitations that kept it within certain bounds
as well. Furthermore, as the '90s wore on, the all-consuming cynicism of the culture also consumed the critical
edge of comedy, especially on television of course, and that whatever critique was there has been effectively
neutralized. "The Simpsons" was not as corrupted as all the other shows, but due to the macro-condition in
which we live as well as the micro-condition of the show's format and content, the show, and perhaps more
importantly its reception, had to be affected as well. I have a much more in-depth analysis of how and why this
happened, but I'll save it for another time.
I think in fact that we have now reached the limit point that Hegel predicted in its aesthetics: art can no longer
represent the speculative truth of the age, but only philosophy can do this.
Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:16:16 -0500

Religion - the open question [2] / music musings 5
The actual debate over the contemporary value of religion was an engagement with Hegel scholars which bled
into the discussion of Marx's sublation of religion. We have also fragmentarily discussed the sublation of
religion into art, and art into culture more generally.
Perhaps you can now see that my work-in-progress on the development of American music and culture—
especially my series on Sun Ra—is directly related to this theme. It is also intimately related to the problem of
overcoming what you call frozen "metaphysical" positions, which in this case is not "Marxism" but religious,
mystical ideas circulating in contemporary culture and codified by intellectuals. Over the past four decades we
have rich cultural material to work on analyzing. For example, one could analyze the relationships between the
concrete cultural experience of various subcultures and metaphysical congealments such as New Age or
Afrocentric mysticism.
My route is in direct opposition to the metaphysical route taken by liberation theology or the corrupt, regressive
New Age turn taken by Roy Bhaskar.
Implicit in my analyses are two basic propositions:
(1) Oppositional mystical/metaphysical positions are anticipations of developments to come,

formulated at a time and staking out a territory before they can be concretely realized in society and
developed in theoretical form. In Hegelian fashion, that which is needed but cannot become
concrete must live as abstraction.
(2) When the historical moment is due for the sublation of mystical/metaphysical abstractions into
scientific/cultural form, and this fails to happen, then a regression takes place, and the dark side of
mysticism—intimately connected with fascism—comes out into the light, the concealed weaknesses
of a cultural strategy become manifest, and the cultural strategy goes bankrupt.
I don't believe the world of scholarship is addressing my concerns, nor do I think that they are understood. What
is happening in scholarship at its best is to get a whole preliminary scholarly development up to speed as a
prerequisite to moving on to the next stage. In the area I've been discussing, the book to read is:
Lock, Graham. Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra,
Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
This book crystallizes with great clarity the nature of the cultural strategy I'm talking about. Duke Ellington,
interestingly, presents a different case from the others. I've admired Duke that much more when I learned to see
him as an intellectual in the early '90s. In this book Duke's own analytical framework, totally independent of
whatever religious beliefs he held, is so obviously rational and progressive, it's an inspiration. Sun Ra's strategic
relation to his environment is clearly analyzed. However, much more damning political views than even the ones
I knew about are documented, inadvertently showing up the fascistic potential of Sun Ra's world view. I put this
up to his origins in the Deep South: the South breeds fascism like garbage in the alley breeds rats and lice.
Braxton is an intermediate case, and much more interesting than Sun Ra philosophically though not musically. I
attribute the difference to his different origin, both generationally and regionally. Braxton is a product of the
urban North in the postwar era, from Chicago's South Side I think though I don't trust my memory. Braxton
embodies the paradox of ghettoization combined with extremely advanced goals.
This book is the best jumping off point I can think of for further explorations. It represents the need to do justice
to African-American cultural forms which have been badly misrepresented and misunderstood. The process of
setting the record straight analytically as well as historically is not yet finished; it is of too recent vintage. This is
the Owl of Minerva waking up as dusk falls. However, I'm already in the stage of thinking beyond this threshold
even before this task has been completed. Why? Because I see the end of an era, an old world dying without a
new one being born, and a new strategy and a new perspective are needed. It's not a theoretical luxury. Daily life
and the demands of survival under conditions of barbarism mandate an altered perspective.
Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:54:49 -0500

If you've read any of the critiques of Adorno on jazz, you have the answer. He had nothing of value to say on the
subject, beyond the ideological imagery with which jazz was being presented to Europeans. That is, at best he
could see how jazz was being ideologically framed in its marketing to whites, but he was incapable of dealing
with the form itself, knowing nothing other than that tired European shit. By using Adorno on an abstract level, I
mean rethinking concrete examples from scratch, using whatever in Adorno's methods are usable. In the old
days, the problem was Tin Pan Alley, show tunes, swing music watered down by and for Caucasian
consumption. Today the question of commodity fetishism is much more pervasive of all genres, even with the
relaxing of former taboos.
* * *
Take any blockbuster sci fi or action film, one with advanced special effects or spectacular highly orchestrated
mayhem. The human content of American film has almost completely disappeared, except in some good
comedies. I usually avoid this shit, but I had an incredible experience some years back when I went to see
Batman and Robin on my birthday. What I felt when I saw this was the power of capital: that was the message:
the ability of capital to marshal all these resources to create this so we could worship it. People always gravitate
to power when they haven't discovered themselves. This is what I see happening in film.
As for popular music, I look at it in terms of genres, and also types of songs within genres. The big money-
making genres are the ones most affected by commodity logic: rap, rock, country & western, whatever other shit
is out there I'm trying to avoid. Traditional niche genres can get by doing the same old thing with variations—
blues, for example.
* * *
The mass production of music in the late '70s is documented in:
Vincent, Rickey. Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One; foreword by George
Clinton. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1996.
* * *
The age market for bubblegum Britney stuff means that this is children's music, simple and catchy. It's how a
new generation is socialized, but with the spectacle quotient jacked up.
Rap turns my stomach, however political. Almost as much as black nationalism turns my stomach. Basing a
world view on a ghetto mentality is an ideological dead end.
As much beef as I have with Marsalis' position in the culture industry, I like one thing he said in an interview I
attended in DC in the early '90s. After discussing the cosmopolitanism of Duke Ellington as compared to
European composers, Wynton said: "Who cares about what's happening in the 'hood? How does that relate to the
rest of the world?" Precisely. I've been in many 'hoods and couldn't wait to get out. The 'hood has to be
obliterated root and branch. The racialization of class division breeds provincialism.
* * *
I'm out of the loop as usual, but I've heard some fantastic stuff, which I guess could be classified as "techno".
I've had mixed feelings even about the stuff I like, i.e. a tendency toward monotony, but a good groove is
irresistible. If you must know, though, for the past two months I've been addicted to Funkadelic's "One Nation
Under a Groove", which I think came out in 1978. Adorno's problem is that he was the product of a no-
funkativity zone.
Thu, 05 Dec 2002 03:11:23 -0500

Religion - the open question [2] / music musings 5
"Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps." — William Blake
Now in terms of providing a framework for the analysis of Sun Ra, I actually do not treat him as an undivided
whole, but divide him up, into: (1) the music itself, (2) the ideology, embodied in the mythology, costume, lyrics,
and song titles. The framework I am developing here applies, so far, solely to (2), in that my ideology critique
addresses these aspects and not the music. The critique of actual musical form is much more demanding. It can
be done, but it takes a subtler approach, and I'm not a musicologist.
However, let me say a few words about the music, which I have touched on in only one respect, i.e. that Sun Ra
preaches beauty. Some would consider the cacophonous segments of the music unbeautiful, but I consider them
to be exuberant. I love Ra's music and it has lifted me to sublime heights. At the very concert in which the
Arkestra sang the slumming song (which I am now informed is 'Slumming on Park Avenue', written by Irving
Berlin and recorded by Fletcher Henderson in the late1930s), which was a bit of fun, these folks did a job that
blew me away. Another time I'll tell you the funny story of the conversation I had with saxophonist Pat Patrick
while peeing next to him in the men's room. This concert was so powerful that, though I drank no alcohol and
took no drugs, I went into a trance that lasted two days. I floated out of there higher than a kite, stopped at an
Ethiopian restaurant for a late dinner on the way home, savored the delicious beauty of my waitress (Ethiopian
gals have a physiognomy all their own), and remained floating on air through the following day. I don't know
what the hell I did, but it was Christmas vacation, the fam was away visiting the fam, sparing me the irritation of
Xmas, and I was all by myself for a few days just to contemplate existence. It was fantastic.
Now when it comes to music, beauty is what I believe in, though we all have different standards of what
constitutes it. As Steve Lacy said when I last saw him in town: when you hear music, you experience what
Paradise must be like. Jazz has been saddled with the burden of a lowlife image—because of the social
conditions under which it grew and because so many white people love to wallow in shit themselves—but the
more conscious of the musicians, set their sights higher, such as pioneer composer Mary Lou Williams who was
still alive in the '70s and whom I got to see, she talked about the healing power of music. In spite of the
whorehouses and the drugs and the seedy institutions of nightlife, consciousness plays a big part in the history of
this music. Music plays a role in expanding one's sense of possibility and thus finding one's self-worth and
dignity. Music will keep you alive; music will keep you from slitting your wrists. Music is supreme exaltation, a
manifestation of the unbearable ecstasy of being alive. Hence music should always be motivated by love and
beauty, never by hatred and degradation. Too many musicians gave everything they had, with superhuman
dedication, elevating the standard of civilization, for us to accept anything less. I didn't grow up with dignity, but
once I learned what it was, I decided never to turn back. Just because society is a piece of shit doesn't mean you
have to be one too. Hence, when I was first involuntarily exposed to punk as social decay set in the late '70s, I
reacted violently: I'm not going to lower myself to this dumbass violent artless Caucasian excrement. The
socialists I happened to be there with could not comprehend my attitude, but there's the left for you.
Now moving on to the ideology critique, that's where my framework really kicks in, not that's its in a separate
universe from the music itself, but it's the perspective from which to analyze the social role of musicians and
their notions of their place in the world. There is a big pile of books on this topic. Graham Lock's Blutopia is one
of the more recent and highlights the issues at stake extremely well. Now on the death of a cultural strategy, of
course that involves musical form and its relation to society, and also the ideology of musicians about musical
and extra-musical matters. So far I've concentrated on the latter.
As for the music itself, there are a number of factors that have also created a difficult situation, including the
strains in the class structure that have put black professionals in a different world from the black poor, as one
group advances and the other deteriorates. This, combined with the political economy and outright machinations
of the music industry, has decided effects, for the multibillion-dollar industry is predicated on the manipulation
of genre, maintaining genre boundaries, and the maximization of product in each genre. As a young man
Wynton Marsalis was manipulated into a market niche whose ideology is jazz authenticity. It marks the triumph
of integration for a certain class of people. Do not misunderstand me: I'm not being cynical here. I admire
Marsalis in many respects, as a musical craftsman, a musicologist, an educator, and a person who upholds high
standards of intelligence and dignity all around. However, he has been placed in a position of institutional power
by the controllers of institutions and he has been molded to fit this role. Both his art and his ideology cannot
circumvent the strained class structure and the stagnation and political impasse of American society. Both his
construction of the musical category "jazz" as a metaphysical musical category and the corporate ideology he
explicitly propounds in moralizing and framing the music (jazz as democracy, competition, optimism, etc.)
reflect the dismal state of American society, its class structure and politics.
Now Ken Burns' documentary is also admirable in many respects. Nine of its ten installments are pretty damn
good. There are quibbles, both with its necessary factual historical incompleteness (the whole story can't be told
in ten hours), with its ideological content, including the selection and editing of talking heads. I don't have time
to elaborate now but I plan to write this up eventually. This ambitious series is good as many documentaries are
good, partly because it is mostly about people who are dead. In all American documentaries, the closer you get
to the living present (which means from the 1960s to now), the more trouble you get into. The final episode of
Ken Burns' Jazz falls apart. There is a virtual conspiracy of silence about so many important players, the
commentaries are distorted, and the morality play is nailed down: jazz almost died until Wynton rescued it and
since he's a success, so is jazz. This is Roots all over again.
Now there is one aspect of the rags-to-riches spiel that is heartening. The long struggle for recognition has
finally borne fruit. A few years ago when I saw a slew of jazz musicians on US postage stamps: Mingus,
Coltrane, yadda yadda yadda—esp. Coltrane—I cried. Paradoxically, however, this is like the Owl of Minerva:
this recognition has come about just as the music's historical moment has passed. To dwell with these supreme
achievements is to attach oneself to something that is not of the present. This may be fine for the institutions of
European classical music, but for American music, built on the struggle for democracy and on living reality
rather than a monumental, Platonic order, this is not good.
One of your statements is profound:
To this end I am at war with anything which promotes its own radicalism, frameworks are work-a-
day things not political in any direct sense—what they supply is a means of clearer understanding
and deeper knowledge, not the understanding and knowledge itself which does have direct political
import (ie "truth is revolutionary", etc).
Just so. And I am sick of propaganda. Candor is far more radical. I am not certain though of the meaning of the
sentence that follows:
So what I distill from your postings is an inkling of a new and robust framework, designed to make
sense of the "theoretical" statements made within art (I hope this is not corrupting your intention).
You go on to make another noteworthy statement:
Cultural criticism (here meant in the wide sense also) which begins by dissecting the "message"
from the impact and then trying to judge the impact by the abstracted worthiness of the "message"
does not work—first because whatever the "message" is too easily over-written by external
concerns which themselves never get criticised, second because what is intimately a part of a
cultural experience cannot be artificially extracted.
I think I understand this passage, but I'm not certain of the meaning of the next sentence:
It would seem that assessing the pronounced "message" (that part most articulating the artist's
theoretical understanding) must take place within the impact of the artwork as a whole.
I have to think more about your examples of old movies. I hate old movies as a rule, especially the 1940s
classics with all the larger-than-life actors everyone loves but me. However, that is not important here; the
question is the structural pattern involved. I don't have a problem with tear-jerking per se. Don't tell anyone, but
I once went to a dog movie and went through a box of tissues. But I think maybe there is something irresistible
about a form when one is a spectator. I'll give you a different example. Consider a TV show that is ending and
you tune into the last episode, and the show comes to a conclusion. It could be a drama, a sitcom, or even a
nonfiction show such as a talk show. Endings are always sad. It is easy to be affected by them even if you never
cared much for the show. Just to give one example: Johnny Carson's farewell appearance on "The Tonight
Show". I never could stand Johnny Carson; for decades I couldn't wait to be rid of the possibility of ever having
to look up in his face on TV again. But I watched his last show. It was not hyped or maudlin, no emotional
exploitation, fairly low key until he made his closing statement, saying goodbye to the viewing audience. He
was very professional; he thanked everyone for watching for 30-something years, he was cool and collected, and
did his best not to betray any emotion. He was very classy about it. But there was a look in his eyes he could not
completely suppress. It wasn't overly obvious, but I felt as if he was really trying to control himself just in case
he might start tearing up. I saw it in his eyes, and it moved me. And I don't even like him.
Your tentative conclusions are most interesting:
Could the naked emotions of empathy themselves suffer such an abstract distortion? That is in a
world when feeling and acting on simple human empthy is so restricted and distorted, do
uneblieveable situations and characters provide a means of "theoretical" expression of what cannot
be expressed concretely? After all why should modern kids be reduced to tears (the girls sometimes
openly, the boys more discreetly) at a storyline which is frankly ridiculous ("Random Havest" being
the classic example). Do we live in a culture so bereft of humaness, that not only has the tear-jerker
become practically extinct but we are alienated from the expression of this raw emotion to the
extent that anything touching on it is ridiculed?
I believe there is some power in these negelected areas, that demoralising generations requires
distancing them from raw emotional experience (i mean this in that there is no direct political
purpose, rather that by ensuring a passionless world, one unmoved by anything other than personal
experience, makes amoral behaviour just part of the landscape). In these sentimental and
melodramatic pieces the students always want to interfere in the storyline, always desire the story to
turn out differently to the one portrayed, they want to engage directly in the affairs of others to
"make things better"— the experience while being alienated, distanced from everyday life also
thereby enriches it by some incremental amount.
I think you have something here, but I can't add anything more at the moment.
The rest of your post, on the art itself, on the ideology of the artist, on the need for a new type of cultural critic,
is very important, but I won't quote in full right now; I'll leave the relevant passage at the bottom of this post.
What you say here is significant, but I'm not certain it echoes my argument. That is, we may be pursuing two
slightly different topics rather than discussing the same thing. I don't know. Let me just make an effort to explain
myself.
My guess is that all of Cultural Studies tries to make sense out of apparent absurdities and in the process evokes
sympathy. Actually, all materialist interpretation of cultural, religious, and whatever ideological phenomena I
have forgotten, addresses this point, though perhaps not from an aesthetic standpoint per se. The sublation of
theology by atheism of the Left Hegelians we were discussing is an analogous project. My intent, perhaps
parallel to this development, is that interpretation also involves an ideological shift, so that concept is not merely
a translation of vorstellung, but a transformation of it. (See the Bauer quote on my web site.) However, I am still
treating art in a somewhat fragmented manner, in that I am discussing its truth content and the truth content of
the ideologies expressed in or associated with it rather than the actual aesthetic experience. While individual
taste can't be made a fully objective matter, there is obvious room for analyzing the "truth" of the immediate
aesthetic content and its reception as well. How then would one judge it other than from the standpoint of
political propaganda, i.e. 'this is progressive because it says this'?
Here is how I would approach the question. The judgement of the aesthetic form is predicated on how it actually
functions to express, unleash, and expand human capacities. Like every other sort of technique, the technical
makeup of art shows you what people can do and what they can express. That is as much a message as any overt
political message. Hence my vitriolic hatred of punk, rap, heavy metal, etc. is based upon the "message" I
discern in the form, regardless of what it thinks it's affirming or protesting. So when Angela Davis, a product of
a very different generation, got up on the Arsenio Hall show and said she likes rap because it addresses social
issues: my response was: this is just how a Stalinist thinks. Inversely, proceeding from the covert instead of the
overt, she also thinks apparently that Bessie Smith and Billy Holiday were crypto-feminists. Well, I once
memorized every word these characters ever sang, and if this is feminism, the word has no meaning.
So I am not interested in empathy per se, but I am interesting in analyzing the aesthetic experience, however
"pure" or separable that is or not from other ideological aspects of the work, the ideological content of the work
itself, and the ideology of the meaning and purpose of the work's existence. Demystification may involve not
only decoding something to explain its why and how, but also transformation, in that we may in some cases no
longer be able to accept something as it is, once we have made the analysis and the acceptable allowances.
The new critic needed is one who understands the expression of human powers and capacities in aesthetic form
—this is an objectivity of sorts—and can thus say something "transcendental" in a limited sense, i.e. about a
phenomenon that is not to be judged merely sociologically. The intrinsic content needs to be related in a unity-
in-distinction to the sociological dimension without being reduced to it. This is what cultural criticism now
lacks.
My guess is that what is now needed culturally is a perspective that transcends both the old subcultural
bohemianism and the current postmodern neo-consumerist culture of pseudo-dissent (the body-piercing culture).
I don't want to bring back Allen Ginsberg—we've moved beyond that—but I want to preserve the memory of
something forgotten, for new, dialectical purposes.
I hope you will re-read the preceding two paragraphs very carefully.
My framework is also important regarding the sublation of religion and mysticism. The existence of freelance
self-made mystical systems in the midst of a secular culture is a rich source for analysis. The only such "mystic"
who really matters is William Blake; all the rest are second-rate by comparison. But this is a matter to be
pursued—urgently in the case of African-American cultural history—and it is tied up in cultural form and
strategy rather than metaphysical beliefs considered as independent entities. In this respect my project differs
from the Left Hegelian sublation of religion; perhaps it is a stage beyond; I'm not certain. It also differs from
metaphysical concoctions such as liberation theology, New Age twaddle, etc.
At 11:56 AM 12/05/2002 +0800, Greg Schofield wrote:

I find myself again in agreement, but with a priviso. I care little about the forms that artists (of any
medium) employ, that is we should not impose on them the need to de-mysticize. Let them grow
like weeds and use anything at hand which is useful to create their art (I have found artists the very
worse people to talk about their art, it is rare to find one cabale of clear theoretical expression, rather
they have sunk so far into the means of artistic expression a more distant view is denied them —
sometimes the better the artists the less coherent their understanding of what they are in fact doing).
On the other hand there is a role for a new form of cultural critic and here de-mystifying art
becomes a sacred duty (not the same thing as reducing the art to pat phrases and neat theories). It is
at this point that the "darker-side of mysticism" takes place, where metaphysical concepts are
unleashed against the public in a way guranteed to foster a form of fascism and disconnection
(worming its way between the experience of the artform and conscious appreciation of that
experience). It is not just that the "cultural strategy" (of which I have had a belly-full over the years
and what propelled me to concentrate on the artistic merits of popular art forms) but criticism as a
whole.
The public needs cultural critics (critics in the real sense, critics able to unleash human potential by
addressing its rational aspects) in order to heighten cultural experience and allow us all to expand on
this experience (in a modest way this is what I tried to do in classrooms). Against this form of
criticism (the one that concentrates on the experience in a additive rather than detractive way), is the
much more common form of promoted alientation passed off as cultural criticism, when this is not
totally locked into its own world, addresses the public as censor-general (whether of the left or right
it amounts to the same thing the left just being the more sophisticated version).
Ralph none of this does justice to your tour de force, I am too ignorant of the references to make any
real assement of them in their context, what I do apprieicate is the application of a general
framework, if you like a system for dealing with certain apparent absurdities thrown up by art but
which are not absurd within the experience of it. If I am right in abstracting this out of your postings
it accords with a direction I have myself been exploring. I find it natural that art throws up apparent
absurdities, mystical or otherwise, however this has never seemed to me an appropriate point of
judgement of the artwork (whatever it may be) that art by its nature is non-intellectual and in a sense
is much better off with patent absurdities then forced to follow some predetermined notion of what
is important and not.
However, the intellectual appreciation of art turns this liberalism on its head, hence becoming
focused on the devices of art, misses the point — for the question is not whether one device or
another is legitmate, but how well the devices employed add to the effect — the more effective the
device is, the less it can be separated from the artwork itself. It is the art which needs to be in full
focus for it is on that experience we can then explore intellectually as a basis for invigorating our
minds and our lives. To make the point that art is an act of Praxis seems to me to be a profound one.
Sat, 07 Dec 2002 01:58:16 -0500

Walter Benjamin, surrealism, avant-gardes & society
As coincidence would have it, I was trying to clear a pile of books from my desk yesterday and gave a brief
scrute to Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition by John McCole. I've never had time for Benjamin
and I've found him difficult to understand, but thumbing through the book I found the section on surrealism very
interesting and even possibly germane to my own work. Apparently Benjamin had a critique of surrealism
(which I think he viewed as the final stage of the European art tradition), particularly its political project of
uniting dream and reality, art and life. Following or perhaps outpacing Pierre Naville, Benjamin thought that
surrealism's tactics could only end up in provocative spectacles and publicity stunts, and he had a specific
analysis from an alternative view. Benjamin had his own concept of "profane illumination", which looks
interesting, though I didn't quite grasp it.
What got me to thinking was the abstract nature of the attempt to inject the "marvellous" into daily life, not only
because of the disjunction from the concrete reality such a project aimed to influence, but of the overall
character and particulars contained within the abstract view itself, much like other metaphysical concepts I've
been discussing. The mystification of the metaphysical alternative goes hand in hand with the mystification of
the social reality it is trying to influence. Hence the former is still a utopian anticipation of a possible future
development and cannot possibly effect a direct pragmatic result.
Reading more of Sun Ra's views in Blutopia gave me an even more negative perspective on his world view,
which is even more right-wing than I knew. Ra was very much the mystic (he called himself an angel not a man)
who withdraws from practical life and pooh-poohs all attempts at social reform as they all lack his spiritual
vision hence can't possibly work. It turns out Sun Ra had a lifelong negative view of the civil rights movement.
He didn't think much of Martin Luther King because King never said anything about music. I know this sounds
stupid, and it is, but the idea is that Ra's mythocratic revolution is a revolution based on beauty, hence without
putting art first, one's priorities are askew. You will notice the abstract metaphysical character not only of his
mysticism but of his view of the material social world, as well as the relationship between them. And that is the
character of all people who think like this. When you look at their ideas, in most cases their ideas are incapable
of penetrating concrete, objective reality and so they are doubly mystified. This means also that the content of
the ideologies in question imported from slave and feudal societies of thousands of years past are that much
more amenable to ahistorical retooling so that it looks like wise men always say the same thing irrespective of
time and place while in fact they are always trapped within the historical limitations of the scientific and
technical knowledge, as well as the social organization and the conceptions of social relations built on it, of the
time. And modern mystics who think outside of the notion of historical progress are always caught within the
grip of reactionary positions and they always preempt the development of critical thought. Hence their utopian
anticipations of the future in metaphysical form can go either way. Once they reach a critical point whatever
potential they had turns sour and this becomes an obstacle to further development.
Sun, 08 Dec 2002 19:45:21 -0500

Music Musings & the Young Hegelians: Recap
My exposure to Ernst Bloch in years past was mostly regarding his philosophy, e.g. Wayne Hudson's study. I
have Bloch's book on the utopian function of art. I once bought the trilogy The Principle of Hope on sale, and
then the post office lost two of the three volumes in transit. Curiously, if Tim Brennan can be believed, Bloch's
principle of hope did not encompass the United States. I read that Bloch was working on his magnum opus
sequestered in New York, trying to keep his distance from American culture that he hated, like so many
Europeans. But yes, Bloch's philosophy of not-yet would be most relevant.
Of course liberation theologians would use Bloch; if they can use Marx, why not Bloch, who comes closer to
them anyway? But, unless I've missed something, liberation theology is more of a metaphysical construct than a
form of symbolically coded popular culture, though I suppose the dividing line is not hard and fast in countries
with a Catholic religious hierarchy. I think though that the hierarchical structure of the Church has affected even
its dissidents. How dissident can you really be at the end of the day without abolishing the Catholic Church and
converting Catholicism to Protestantism, which at least would be progress? Methinks a lot of mystification has
to be pumped into liberation theology to make it a viable ideology, and ideology it is, from the descriptions of it
I have read. Its appeal to people outside of Latin America seems to be based mainly on guilt and third world
romanticism.
Sun, 08 Dec 2002 10:12:11 -0500

Mythology, poetry, ideology, music
I was into anthropology in the 1970s, including mythology, but like many other things, this interest fell by the
wayside in the 1980s, when I was no longer able to take anything about people seriously. But seriously, your
characterization of the Australian aborigines makes sense. While I don't have much to say these days about
traditional mythologies, I wonder if a comparative analysis might be interesting, to look for qualitative
differences between the mythologies of pre-literate societies, more evolved civilizations with sacred books, the
role of myth in modern societies, and the creation of individual, homemade systems.
I think the case of Sun Ra is different from the examples of poetic picture thinking you are describing, though of
course this is conjecture. I don't know much about the composition process of music in general, let alone Sun
Ra's. Obviously, if Sun Ra had in mind musical theater from the very beginning, he would have to take into
account the total performance scenario in order to integrate the music with the dancers, etc. Or, if he had some
mystical system of numerological/structural relationships in mind, as Anthony Braxton does in some sense, this
ideological framework would affect composition. But I don't see a tight relationship between the structure of the
music and the specifics of Ra's world view, especially not the components of his world view not found in the
titles and lyrics of his compositions. Interestingly, the lifestyle of Ra's group was in a class by itself. I believe the
group lived in a commune in Philadelphia, which meant that Ra could wake everyone up at 2 am and make them
play for 6 hours, if he was in the mood. Obviously, this process shaped whatever music was being worked on at
this point. I have my doubts whether they would all be compelled to dress up and set up a stage as if they were
performing for the public, so I'm inclined to think that the music was pure music and not programmatic music
per se.
Now the aspect of a spiritual or even otherworldly dimension to music does not make me lose sleep. It is hardly
surprising that one would feel that way. I feel that way myself. I have read about the mystical conceptions of
music held by many people from many cultures. However, I would suggest that the phenomenon is or can be so
generalized that one could have it without associating it with specific mythologies, though in fact that happens in
traditional cultures. For example, if you take certain African rhythms including those found in the Caribbean and
Latin America, they will be associated with specific deities. But modern people not a part of those cultures will
not have such associations and will just experience them as pure aesthetic phenomena with whatever
psychological effects they have. Back in the '70s I when I was engaged in learning African drumming for a time,
people went into trances, spoke in tongues, etc., not having any background in the cultures or religious beliefs
involved. I remember learning who Yemanya was, but it didn't matter a great deal, because our teacher was so
macho, our hymn to this goddess, once it got going beyond the specific song form that generated it, was as
militaristic and overweening as he treated all his women, but this was a question of personality so even this
association is purely accidental.
So, the non-verbal nature of music, I think, makes it different from the composition of poetry interfused with
mythological, symbolic, ideological content.
I've seen Ra live in performance and heard him on record, and I don't think so much is missing from not seeing
the performance (by this I don't mean being in the physical presence of the musicians per se, but the Afro-
Egyptian-interplanetary scenario), as it might be for a musical or opera. Those few compositions that have lyrics
make a difference, and of course the titles set the stage: "There Are Other Worlds", "Space is the Place", "Outer
Spaceways Incorporated", "Astro-Black", "Discipline", "Ancient Ethiopia", etc.
I think you are on the right track about modern mysticisms as ahistorical , poaching and free-associating on
already given material.
Here I think it would be important to take a look at mysticisms as outsider ideologies, esp. in the case of
African-Americans, among which religion plays such an unfortunately dominant role. These individualistic
mysticisms differentiate the individual from both the ethnic community and the larger society. There is also an
historical trajectory involved, which began with the ideological introduction of African slaves into western
civilization. The paradox in this case as in others is that the European monsters who enslaved the world could
only do so on the basis of slightly superior technology while attempting to brainwash their victims with
Christianity rather than with Enlightenment philosophy or scientific rationalism. And here is one of the central
contradictions of modernity in itself: the inability to locate oneself coherently in one's world, whose
contradictions engender irresolvable, vacillating ideological dualisms.
Christmas is a royal pain in the ass.
Sun, 08 Dec 2002 13:19:03 -0500

Music Musings & the Young Hegelians: Recap
Bauer attempts to explain this ambivalence of Christianity thus: the nearer that religious
consciousness approaches to truth, the more it alienates itself therefrom. Why? Because, qua
religious, it takes the truth that is only to be attained to in self-consciousness away from self-
consciousness and places it against self-consciousness, as though it were something alien to it. What
is opposed to self-consciousness as alien is not only formally separate from self-consciousness (in
that it stands outside it, is in heaven or comprises the content of some long past or far in the future
events), but also this formal separation is backed up by an essential and real separation from all that
goes to make up human nature. When religion has reached the point that man makes up its content,
then the climax of this opposition has been reached.
— David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx
While it was not my original intent to link these two themes (not that I was unaware of the connection), the
fortuitous conjunction of two separate discussions needs to be pursued further. Originally, in another dicussion
group Greg defended José Crisóstomo de Souza's defense of liberation theology against my assault. I wanted to
show that I was thinking ahead to the next step, and that my understanding of such matters is more sophisticated
than other people might realize; and then that discussion naturally linked to my other project on music,
mysticism, and society, which in my view takes into consideration a much more advanced state of affairs than
that represented by the would-be organic intellectuals of backward Catholic peasants and urban workers. I
suspect that my framework is still not well understood, and so with time more and more of its implicit features
will have to be made more explicit.
I still have at least one more segment of the Sun Ra saga to write up, in which I hope to tie everything up. I've
also just finished Ben Watson's book on negative dialectics and Frank Zappa, and I've got a few words to say
about that as well.
But now I want to recap some of my most important points, which I believe are harbingers of the next stage we
need to confront. First, though, I want to point out the significance of the viewpoint David McClellan attributes
to Bruno Bauer. Hegel perpetuates the sneaky German idealist/Romantic equivocation as to the ontological
status of religious ideas (a Schelling scholar on the Catholic philosophy circuit once agreed with me that this is a
German thing); to wit, that the rational philosophical content of Christianity presented by speculative philosophy
is a translation of its representational form, and that the two are basically equivalent. This relationship of
Concept to vorstellung accords with Hegel's politics and the role he envisions for the German intelligentsia in a
liberalizing but still quasi-organic society. I maintain that this strategy broke under the political strains following
Hegel's death and was definitively shattered in 1840 with the succession of Wilhelm IV—whathisname. Now
I'm lacking sufficient information in English-language sources to verify McClellan's assertions about Bauer, but
the formulation quoted here is of the utmost importance. That is, there comes a critical moment when the
religious consciousness, at which the quest for self-consciousness (leading a subterranean existence) reaches the
limit of its development, and can now only function as the greatest obstacle opposing the leap to true self-
consciousness. This is an extremely radical statement and undermines all previous equivocations.
I also think it applies to our historical moment and the bankruptcy of the mystical views of the African-
American musicians I've been writing about. I'll bet the farm that no one has developed the analytical framework
that I have. As it happens, when my Australian friend Greg Harrison was working on his dissertation on Hegel's
master-slave dialectic and the evolution of African-American music, I was the only person he could find in the
(anglophone) world who substantively intellectually supported his work. This happened thanks to the Internet—
the most revolutionary communication development of our time—and academia was completely useless in this
endeavor. (Greg eventually made a research tour of the USA.) See "The Dialectics and Aesthetics of Freedom:
Hegel, Slavery and 19th Century African American Music", PhD dissertation by Greg Harrison, selections, with
an introduction by R. Dumain.
My own personal interest in the application of Hegel did not lie in the master-slave dialectic; eventually I
glommed onto aesthetics, but I only injected this last element into our discussion as Greg completed his work.
His work basically covers the 19th and early 20th century. However, from the beginning, he did bring up the
question to me: what happened to self-consciousness after the 1960s? The implication, at least for me, is, what
went wrong in the 1980s?
Now to recapitulate the central themes of my recent music musings:
(1) avant-gardes, counter-publics, and Hegel's end-of-art thesis
(2) individual mysticisms in secular milieu (jazz as myth and religion)
(3) the transformations of outsider culture in the USA since the 1970s
(4) the limitations of the perspectives of mysticism as well as the implicit sociologism of
postmodernism and Cultural Studies
(5) the exhaustion of cultural strategies and the Owl of Minerva
(6) Black music in the USA in relation to popular and fringe cultures
(7) Individual ideologies in relation to subcultures, ethnic minorities, and mainstream society, and to
tradition and modernity
(8) the sublation of religion to art to culture, and the contradictions of modernity
(9) the importance of aesthetic form vs. the politicization of culture: The judgment of the aesthetic
form is predicated on how it actually functions to express, unleash, and expand human capacities.
(10) art as praxis and not merely ideology
(11) The mystification committed by the metaphysical alternative goes hand in hand with the
mystification of the social reality it is trying to influence. Hence the former is still a utopian
anticipation of a possible future development and cannot possibly effect a direct pragmatic result. . .
. the abstract metaphysical character not only of a mysticism but of a view of the material social
world, as well as the relationship between them . . . . ideas are that incapable of penetrating
concrete, objective reality and so they are doubly mystified. This means also that the content of the
ideologies in question imported from slave and feudal societies of thousands of years past are that
much more amenable to ahistorical retooling so that it looks like wise men always say the same
thing irrespective of time and place while in fact they are always trapped within the historical
limitations of the scientific and technical knowledge, as well as the social organization and the
conceptions of social relations built on it, of the time. And modern mystics who think outside of the
notion of historical progress are always caught within the grip of reactionary positions and they
always preempt the development of critical thought. Hence their utopian anticipations of the future
in metaphysical form can go either way. Once they reach a critical point whatever potential they had
turns sour and this becomes an obstacle to further development.
(12) two underlying generalizations of my studies:
(a) Oppositional mystical/metaphysical positions are anticipations of developments to

come, formulated at a time and staking out a territory before they can be concretely
realized in society and developed in theoretical form. In Hegelian fashion, that which is
needed but cannot become concrete must live as abstraction.
(b) When the historical moment is due for the sublation of mystical/metaphysical
abstractions into scientific/cultural form, and this fails to happen, then a regression
takes place, and the dark side of mysticism—intimately connected with fascism—
comes out into the light, the concealed weaknesses of a cultural strategy become
manifest, and the cultural strategy goes bankrupt.
Compiled & edited by Ralph Dumain 3 February 2004
©2004 Ralph Dumain. All rights reserved.
Black Studies, Music, America vs Europe
Ishmael Reed, William Blake, and the '60s According to Shamoon Zamir
Home Page | Site Map | What's New | Coming Attractions | Book News
Bibliography | Mini-Bibliographies | Study Guides
My Writings | Other Authors' Texts | Philosophical Quotations
Images & Sounds | External Links
CONTACT Ralph Dumain
Sign Registry View Registry
Uploaded 3 February 2004

Abstract added 8 February 2004
©2004 Ralph Dumain

Jazz and Ralph Dumain

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jazz and Ralph Dumain

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

3/3/2019 Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": "The Jazz Avant-Garde, Mysticism & Society: Meaning, Method &

Method & the Young Hegelians"

The Jazz Avant-Garde, Mysticism, and Society:

Wed, 20 Nov 2002 14:49:52 -0500

"Secrecy and Publicity: Reactivating the Avant-Garde" by Sven Lutticken

"There are no foxes in atheistholes."

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 01:12:24 -0500

American culture—past, present, future!

Hold that thought. Now back to music.

"If you find earth

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 01:46:33 -0500

"Music that makes us cry

Here is an initial list of subtopics on my agenda:

(5) Funk: positives and negatives.

(6) What went wrong with fusion?

(7) What happened to the avant-garde?

(10) Why did Sun Ra disapprove of funk?

(13) The diversity of creators vs. the narrowness of consumers.

(16) Why the Owl of Minerva grooves no more.

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 18:15:46 -0500

Adorno After Sun Ra

Fri, 29 Nov 2002 11:46:40 -0500

Sat, 30 Nov 2002 16:14:42 -0500

30 Nov 2002 23:06:32 -0500

Adorno After Sun Ra

"What do you do when you know that you know

My argument against Gourgouris' position will include the following points:

Part 3 will pick up with point 3 (above).

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 02:06:51 -0500

Adorno After Sun Ra

"Have you heard the news from Neptune, Neptune, Neptune?"

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 12:28:14 -0500

Adorno After Sun Ra

SUN RA AND HIS AUDIENCE, A PERSONAL MEMOIR

Stayed tuned for part 5: the end of an era.

—END OF PART FOUR—

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 01:03:22 -0500

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 12:39:36 -0500

Speaking of abuses of Adorno, wait till I review this gem:

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 01:47:44 -0500

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:16:16 -0500

Implicit in my analyses are two basic propositions:

(1) Oppositional mystical/metaphysical positions are anticipations of developments to come,

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:54:49 -0500

The mass production of music in the late '70s is documented in:

Thu, 05 Dec 2002 03:11:23 -0500

"Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps." — William Blake

One of your statements is profound:

You go on to make another noteworthy statement:

Your tentative conclusions are most interesting:

At 11:56 AM 12/05/2002 +0800, Greg Schofield wrote:

Sat, 07 Dec 2002 01:58:16 -0500

Sun, 08 Dec 2002 19:45:21 -0500

Sun, 08 Dec 2002 10:12:11 -0500

Christmas is a royal pain in the ass.

Sun, 08 Dec 2002 13:19:03 -0500

about that as well.

Now to recapitulate the central themes of my recent music musings:

(1) avant-gardes, counter-publics, and Hegel's end-of-art thesis

(2) individual mysticisms in secular milieu (jazz as myth and religion)

(5) the exhaustion of cultural strategies and the Owl of Minerva

(10) art as praxis and not merely ideology

(12) two underlying generalizations of my studies:

(a) Oppositional mystical/metaphysical positions are anticipations of developments to