{"id":10970,"date":"2020-09-22T13:26:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-22T20:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=10970"},"modified":"2020-09-27T14:48:36","modified_gmt":"2020-09-27T21:48:36","slug":"loving-music-loathing-bullshit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2020\/09\/22\/loving-music-loathing-bullshit\/","title":{"rendered":"Loving Music &#038; Loathing Bullshit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/arts-letters\/articles\/stanley-crouch-appreciation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">from Tablet<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Great Stanley Crouch<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>An American immigrant jazz buff expresses his gratitude to a supremely gifted critic who loved the music and loathed bullshit<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BY <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/contributors\/tony-badran\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TONY BADRAN<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Q&amp;A: Stanley Crouch\" width=\"1080\" height=\"810\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tv0ingTSKYo?feature=oembed\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>If I had to name the one writer who was most pivotal for me and for my full assimilation in America, it would undoubtedly be Stanley Crouch, the famed jazz and cultural critic who\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/09\/16\/obituaries\/stanley-crouch-dead.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">died<\/a>\u00a0last Wednesday in New York at age 74. At this moment in American life, where anything and everything that identifies us and binds us as Americans is under direct assault, Crouch is perhaps more essential than ever, and his passing all the more devastating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perhaps even more than Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison, Crouch tied it all together for me. He had a terrific ear for the music I love, and his uncompromising pugnacious style spoke to me directly. For someone who came to America from a sectarian Third World society, his commentary on the Balkanization of America was penetrating and, as we\u2019re seeing today, scarily pertinent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Crouch had no patience for the self-pitying race politics of grievance and authenticity. He saw it as a hustle and had nothing but contempt for its toxic sales pitch. He arrived at this conviction the hard way, as he explains in the prologue to his fabulous&nbsp;<em>Considering Genius<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The tribal appeal is always great and there is nothing more tempting to the most gullible members of a minority group than suddenly hearing that, merely by being born, one is not innately inferior to the majority but part of an unacknowledged elite. I was not so sophisticated that I could avoid the pull of those ideas and found myself reading all kinds of books about Africa, and African customs and religion. \u2026 I would have been pulled all the way into the maw of subthought, from which it might have taken longer to emerge if Jayne Cortez hadn\u2019t introduced me to Ralph Ellison\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Shadow and Act<\/em>. \u2026 Unlike those younger black people who were busy jettisoning their heritage as Americans and Western people\u2014both of which brought the built-in option of criticism\u2014Ellison took the place of his ethnic group and himself as firm parts of American life and a fresh development in Western culture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>This affirmation of Americanness in the face of all tribal impulses, \u201cethnic narcissism,\u201d and Balkanization, reflects the influence of Ellison and Murray, and their realization, in Crouch\u2019s words, that \u201cAmerica is a land of synthesis.\u201d In&nbsp;<em>The Omni-Americans<\/em>, Murray builds on Constance Rourke\u2019s description of the composite nature of the American character\u2014\u201cpart Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro.\u201d Blackness, in other words, is a foundational element of the American national character, meaning that all Americans are culturally part Black, whether they like it or not, and that appeals to racial or cultural purity\u2014by anyone, regardless of skin color or claimed ancestry\u2014are sheer nonsense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like America, its vernacular aesthetic expression, jazz, is also a composite, an experiment in hybridity. And like America, the Black element in jazz is foundational\u2014not something that needs special pleading or diversity coaches to promote inclusion. Crouch was uncompromising on this point. He fought vigorously against any attempt to remove from its definition the core elements of jazz, which were the contribution of Black artists\u2014blues and swing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/arts-letters\/articles\/stanley-crouch-appreciation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click to continue reading at Tablet<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from Tablet The Great Stanley Crouch An American immigrant jazz buff expresses his gratitude to a supremely gifted critic who loved the music and loathed bullshit BY TONY BADRAN If I had to name the one writer who was most pivotal for me and for my full assimilation in America, it would undoubtedly be Stanley [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10970\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}