An excerpt from Johann Hari’s book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, relaxed, free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.” Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected” in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”
His agents reported back to him that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.”
Most of this excerpt, though, is about the persecution of Billie Holiday. I didn’t know anything about the history of Billie Holiday at all, I’m embarrassed to confess — she was just that talented woman who sang amazingly haunting songs — but now I learn what a hard life she had, how she was discriminated against all of her life, and died hard in the uncaring hands of a bigoted police. It was just her genius was so great that she managed to get a little bit of notice outside the shell of oppression.
I’ve got Hari’s book sitting on my table at home — I’ve been too bogged down in the semester to get to it. I think I’m going to have to read it for sure now.
Stay woke, PZ. Good stuff.
Isn’t Johann Hari a disgraced quote miner and plagiarist like Jonah Lehrer?
(http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/9/7/kdgwxcbsned1rknh0h3zdvqrebxa3x)
And, like Lehrer was caught and issued an insultingly disingenuous apology: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-a-personal-apology-2354679.html
Nobody had any problem with drugs when it was rich, influential white guys taking them. Beddowes, Coleridge, Yeats, Bentham – all were pretty fond of the nitrous oxide. Freud famously recommended cocaine as a cure-all for everything (that’s SO 80’s!) In the victorian era, a huge percentage of the population that could afford it were smashed on laudanum, mostly women who were being given it to pacify them. My favorite surrealists, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Jarry, and Breton – variously experimented with (and some died from) opium. Marijuana wasn’t that big of a problem until – like you say – jazz musicians (and to a lesser degree, hispanic zoot suiters) started using it. Post WWII there was a huge amount of heroin and morphine use. William Burroughs was the vocal tip of an iceberg of morphine. Being a stoner was generally a rich person’s problem, so it was OK. The underlying fears white america had about jazz corrupting the youth (the jazz drug was morphine, not marijuana) metastasized when the production filled the available vacuum and drugs moved down-market.
The right wing’s original hatred of Rock’n’roll was also racist; suddenly you had white kids dancing and getting their freak on to music that was basically badly played blues.
Yep, the war on drugs: it’s an extension of Jim Crow.
Addendum (One thing I didn’t know until recently was that the reason Absinthe had such a wicked reputation was because of some of its proponentsists habit of dissolving pea-sized balls of opium into it along with the sugar. The stereotype absinthe dandy, per Oldham in Dracula, was not fucked up on the absinthe – although strong alcohol and opiates are a seriously whacked combination – he was tripping on opium) A lot of romantic poets were into that mix but it’s OK because they were British and white and whatnot. (Coleridge’s ‘In Xanadu…’ sounds to me like a retrieved bit of a nitrous trip…)
From your link, he DID offer not only an apology, but an AMENDS:
Damn </blockquote> fail FAIL. :(
I’m sure this was informed by his experiences of nocturnal jungle environments.
I’m trying to imagine a situation where a musicologist might write something like this and expect to be taken seriously, but I can’t do it.
Marcus Ranum:
It really wasn’t so sudden. Well, okay, it is on the geological timescales of change which are “sudden” to conservatives assholes…. But white folks in fairly significant numbers were grooving on black popular music since the beginning of the twentieth century. A lot of that started in bars and clubs, mostly in bigger cities, but radios and records helped to spread it fairly quickly from there. Still, that’s about 50 years we’re talking about, where it was a fairly widespread phenomenon (not just in the US), so it was hardly news to them. The racists ranting about younger generations, after WWII let’s say, had spent their whole lives surrounded by it, so they were at best telling a story about how insulated they kept themselves, if not a revisionist history.
But yeah, all of that shit is blatantly fucking racist.
Also, “badly played blues” is … not really an accurate way to describe early rock and roll.
Also, “badly played blues” is … not really an accurate way to describe early rock and roll.
“stripped down” ?? “simplified”?
I remember hearing a bit on the radio some years back that did pretty much a James Burke’s Connections on the 1950s explosion of Rock and Roll.
Basically, the end of WWII resulted in both a lot of ex-soldiers with money in their pockets, and a lot of factories being re-tooled to provide consumer goods based on the military technological advances over the previous several years. The result of that was that the price of television sets dropped like a rock, and lots of people could afford one now.
The result of that was that the big broadcast networks, like Columbia Broadcasting (a.k.a. CBS) started moving wholesale from radio to television, taking their signed acts with them. This had two effective results: there was a lot of available (and relatively cheap) radio bandwidth for smaller stations that had previously been squeezed out by the big networks, and there was a lot of call for new acts that weren’t already under contract for the smaller stations to use.
And into this stepped people like Elvis Presley, a nice upstanding white boy who, by getting in on the ground floor as radio was looking for new acts, managed to introduce what had previously been ‘black music’ to a whole crowd of people who couldn’t afford to go to fancy clubs but could afford a radio….
Marcus, one or two words wouldn’t do. There are general differences in rhythm, timbre, instrumentation, form, melody, harmony, lyrical content, tempo, and so forth. And that’s basically all there is that could be different, granting the fact that they’re fairly subtle differences. It certainly evolved from the blues (along with other black, hispanic and european music), but that didn’t involve playing it badly or simplifying it. It’s less like it lost something and more like it changed into something else. There’s little or no improv, as well as much more rigid equal temperament compared to all of the pitch-bending and blue notes and such, so you could say those are clearly losses or simplifications in a sense (which is not always bad), but focusing on that isn’t saying much about lots of other aspects of the music.
You could say those are clearly losses or simplifications in a sense
I take your point. I was approaching it from the standpoint that a whole lot of early rock’n’roll was played by people who were only able to play one or two chords (e.g.: Louie Louie) and were doing what they could with a more complicated musical style than they could play. The British rock scene was heavily blues-based (again, simplified considerably) John Mayall could play, I’ll say that. But The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and etc… learned as they were making it up. You’ve got guys like Jimmy Page who learned playing Skiffle, which is simplified blues. Etc.
There’s not much to argue about. “Influenced by” covers a lot of territory including “created out of” or “fused with.”
The point is that conservative America reacted to rock’n’roll as “black music” regardless of whatever degree it was. Just like they reacted to jazz. When I was growing up I remember my grandfather asking me if I was “still listening to that colored music?” (he was referring to Led Zeppelin!) it was definitely “a thing” in the great depression generation.
That’s certainly true. Meanwhile, people like Ellington, Parker, Coltrane, Davis, and on and on…. they were doing incredibly complicated stuff, basically just leaving behind the earlier swing and blues music which was much simpler and more audience-friendly. That audience-friendly stuff, resembling traditional marches and hymns and ballads and so on, is what white people appropriated and sold to themselves.
Of course, those playing more “modern” jazz were influenced by a lot of late-Romantics who had gotten there (or somewhere in the neighborhood) before the turn of the century, but most “ordinary” people (not musicians like me) didn’t appreciate what they had done for a long time, if they do even now.
Then, much, much later, people thought (or still do think) psychedelic rockers and prog-rockers and the rest have done something revolutionary, when it’s really a poor man’s version of stuff that wasn’t even radical well over a century before.
It’s like when people talk about “new atheists.” We all know that shit isn’t even remotely new. What they actually mean by it is something very different, and when you dig under the surface a bit, you see how it means something much uglier.
Oh yes, I know what you mean. Ignorance. Lots and lots of ignorance, piled on top of more ignorance. That’s what it looks like.
Marcus Ranum @ 3:
All those peoples, and you leave out Thomas De Quincey, author of the very first (confessional) book on drug addiction.
Usernames! @5
Pretending you don’t know how to journalist and promising to study very hard at it in the future isn’t really making amends. Hari deserves a livelihood like anyone, but he shouldn’t have one as a journalist. Not only did he plagiarise and fabulise for years, but he used a sock-puppet to harass people and build up his own image on Wikipedia, again, for years. He only apologised after he was caught, denied it, and then was caught doing it more.
This kind of behavior is unethical in the extreme, and shouldn’t be swept under the rug because his politics are in line with one’s own. It will be interesting to look into his new work to see if he’s up to his old tricks again. The subject Hari has written about is one that should be examined at length, and if it were someone I trusted to accurately report the facts, I would be excited to read it. As it stands, if Johann Hari reported that water is wet, I’d have to go check for myself.
Some sources:
https://deterritorialsupportgroup.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/hari-karihackery/
http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0003736.html
http://virtualstoa.net/2004/08/18/109284265472546644/
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/16/johann-hari-debacle
Rinn and other neocons attacking a brave journalist – Hari was only grassed up because the fucking neocons came after him. He was exposing the neocons for what they are, so…boom…he suddenly gets exposed for plagiarism.
It happens to other heroes who attack the New White Supremacist Atheists and their neocon enablers like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz. CJ Werleman bravely exposes these neocons, and then, yep, you guessed it, he gets exposed as a plagiarist.
We need to stand up to the fucking neocons and their fucking enablers.
Caine @#14 – All those peoples, and you leave out Thomas De Quincey
I had no idea! (runs off to do research) Thanks for the info.
#3 Marcus Ranum — Absinthe had a dangerous chemical in it and was made illegal in France for that and unrelated reasons. The chemical can now be removed and it is once again legal in France. Long ago in Spain I once had a couple of small glasses of the old stuff and was I wrecked.
If you know French, you might check out some of their songs–chansons réalistes–from the 20’s and 30’s like “Le Tango Supéfiant” by Marie DuBois or “La Coco” by Fréhel.
One Black American woman, Josephine Baker, was able to leave the U.S. and have a brilliant career in France. When she tried to tour in the U.S. she was discriminated against. I believe she is the only American woman to have received the French Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration, for her help to the resistance during WWII. A tale of two countries.
#16, melanie
He was still brave enough to take other people’s material and pass it off as his own. And doing this for several years, and being paid for it. And setting up sockpuppet accounts on wikipedia to try and make himself look more important and attack his critics.
Sure, he’s done good things before and since, but lets not try and ignore the fact that he was a duplicitous asshole.
We need the people standing up to them to stop shitting on their own integrity. It really isn’t rocket science.
@ Marcus Ranum #4
I was under the impression that it was flavoured with wormwood, which contains psilocybin; but it turns out that this is bullshit, and neither wormwood nor absinthe have any hallucinogenic effects. Wormwood certainly doesn’t contain psilocybin.
15 years ago it really looked like America had turned over a new leaf—Japan’s popular culture was starting to hit it big in the U.S. and there didn’t seem to be the same sort of racist reaction that was seen in the 60s to “black” music.
The subsequent few years were…instructive. : – (
I’m sorry, can someone tell me why we’re supposed to hate Maajid Nawaz?
Also, since we are on great confessional books on cocaine (and much else):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel_with_Cocaine