Music Making History:

Abstract: European-American racism has used African America as a screen on which to project repressed emotion, particularly sex and aggression. One aspect of this projection is that whites are attracted to black music as a means of expressing aspects of themselves they cannot adequately express through music from European roots. Thus 20th century expressive culture in the United States has been dominated by an evolving socio-cultural system in which blacks create musical forms and whites imitate them. It happened first with jazz, and then with rock and roll. The sexual revolution and the recent floresence of blacks in television and movies suggests that white America has had some success in using black American expressive forms to cure its affective ills. The emergence of rap, from African America, and minimalism, from European America, indicates that this system is at a point where it is ready to leave Western expressive culture behind as history moves to the next millenium.

• 1. Introduction: Music in Society and Culture
  
• 2. Improvisation and Composition in Cultural Style
  
• 3. Society, Style, and Culture in North America
  
• 3.1 The Cultural Psychodynamics of Racism
  
• 3.2 The Artist and Negative European Identity
  
• 3.3 Africa in America
  
• 4. Music in the Making of History: Blues Train to the Future
  
• 4.1 The Blues: "Trouble In Mind"
  
• 4.2 Jazz: "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing"
  
• 4.3 Rock: "Roll Over Beethoven"
  
• 4.4 Rap: "U Can't Touch This"
  
• 4.5 The Pattern So Far: "Freedom Over Me"
  
• 5. Conclusion: Stepping Out on a New Savanna
  
• Notes
  
• References

Introduction: Music in Society and Culture

After emancipation . . . all those people who had been slaves, they needed the music more than ever now; it was like they were trying to find out in this music what they were supposed to do with this freedom: playing the music and listening to it -- waiting for it to express what they needed to learn, once they had learned it wasn't just white people the music had to reach to, nor even to their own people, but straight out to life and to what a man does with his life when it finally is his.
--Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle

I went to the depot and set my suitcase down
The blues overtake me and tears come rolling down
--Blind Lemon Jefferson, Easy Rider Blues

When I am elected President of the United States, my first executive order will be to change the name of the White House! To the Blues House.
--Dizzy Gillespie, 1964 presidential campaign

And although modern science and technology are the same whether in New York, Paris, London, Accra, Cairo, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, Peking, or São Paulo, jazz is the only true international medium of communication current in the world today, capable of speaking creatively, with equal intensity and relevance, to the people in all those places.

2. Improvisation and Composition in Cultural Style

Even the greatest Western music, on the order of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven, was spiritual rather than physical. The mind-body split that defined Western culture was in its music as well. When you felt transported by Mozart of Brahms, it wasn't your body that was transported. The sensation often described is a body yearning to follow where its spirit has gone . . . The classical dance that grew from this music had a stiff, straight back and moved in almost geometrical lines. The folk dances of the West were also physically contained, with linear gestures. The feet might move with wonderful flurries and intricate precision, but the hips and spine were kept rigid. (Ventura, 1987b, p. 86)

The liveliest dances of Beethoven's last quartets no longer incite the feet to dance. Instead, the "heart inside dances." Beethoven found a new way of uncoupling the motoric output from the expression of essentic form by allowing inner forms to dance without corresponding motor outputs. . . . In his music the meaning of essentic form appears no longer as a communication directed at motoric outward expression. (Clynes, 1977, p. 85)

Society, Psyche, and Culture in North America

3.1 The Cultural Psychodynamics of Racism

3.2 Tertium Quid: The Artist and Negative European Identity

3.3 Africa in America

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

4. Music in the Making of History: Blues Train to the Future

Now we are ready to enter into the heart of my argument, which is that the psycho-cultural blues train outlined in the previous section has been a driving force in twentieth-century American culture. When I say "driving force" I mean explicitly to assert that it has brought about change in the world, change not only in music, but in the persons and societies conditioned by the music.

The job of examining this blues train and understanding how how its systems interact in American culture began with Blues People , by Amiri Baraka, then writing as LeRoi Jones (1963), and has been followed by Charles Keil (1966, pp. 43 ff.) and Nelson George (1988). They have uncovered a pattern of interaction between African-American and European-American musical culture which goes like this:

1. ) African-Americans create a musical style.
   
2. ) European-Americans adopt the style for their own use.
   
3. ) The most adventurous African-Americans abandon the style and propose a new one.
   

This has happened successively with minstrelsy, ragtime, traditional and swing jazz, rock and roll, and perhaps most recently with hip hop.

The first step is no more mysterious than any other manifestation of human creativity, though, as we have no recordings before this century, most of the initial cultural crossing is invisible to us. By now there should be no mystery about the second step. Whites adopt the style because it has stylistic resources they admire, allowing them to express aspects of their experience which are not easily accommodated by musical forms deriving from Europe. Or, since we want to avoid thinking in terms of music as expressing a pre-existing human essence, the African-American style shapes a cultural style more adequate to their biological nature than does the prevailing repertoire of European forms.

However, the white adaptation often seems anemic and lifeless--"white-bread" is the colloquial term--and, because it is generally more commercially successful, this is a source of resentment. And so, the theory goes, blacks propose another style in an effort to reclaim the music, to construct and affirm a unique ethnic identity. This part of the analysis is inadequate. The resentment is real, and it certainly is part of the motivation for stylistic innovation; African America has a strong need to protect the integrity of the expressive language it uses to construct public affirmation of its values. But too much emphasis on resentment and cultural possessiveness tends to deny black music a life of its own, to see it as primarily reacting against white borrowing [20]. Thus, when Baraka talks about the bop style of jazz as being a reaction to white swing music (Jones, pp. 181 ff., Baraka, 1990, p. 66-67) he misses the fact that jazz has a developmental imperative rooted in its own dynamics (Benzon, 1993b, cf. Keil, p. 45). The fact is, as Stanley Crouch (1990b, 71-72) has noted, Baraka's resentment of whites leads him to devalue the music he ostensibly defends, reducing it to a defensive reflex and thereby denying the fecundity of its ultimately African roots and demeaning the freedom and dignity it achieves.

When one style of music becomes thoroughly known, the best musicians seek the challenge of creating a new style and a significant portion of the audience will be happy to follow them, for boredom afflicts us all. This is one kind of process when the new style is more sophisticated than the old, as was the case when jazz moved from traditional to swing, and then from swing to bop (Benzon, 1993b). Just why living systems of all kinds evolve toward more sophistication and complexity is not well understood, but that it happens is obvious (cf. Benzon and Hays, 1990a; cf. Csikszentmihalyi, 1993). However, we also see evolution from one state to another with no increase in complexity. Much of the stylistic change in music is of this kind. Independently of the imperatives of ethnic identity, such stylistic change would occur through a combination of boredom and the free flow of cultural ideas made possible population movement and by the various twentieth-century media.

As for the weakening of the music at the hands of white adaptors, there is nothing surprising in this. However much white audiences and musicians may admire black music, they are have a different cultural background. When creating their own music they will borrow as much as they can and suit it to what their background will permit them. As John Rockwell has noted (1983, p. 167) this is a free choice, not something imposed on the white public by nefarious music moguls (cf. Ressner, 1990). And, in the last analysis, we have to acknowledge that some white adaptors--Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, the Beatles come to mind--have made music that need apologize to no one.

4.1 The Blues: "Trouble In Mind"

European Americans readily acknowledged the expressive gifts of their African slaves (Chase, 1966, pp. 76 ff.) In the eighteenth century the Rev. John Davies of Virginia wrote a letter to John Wesley in which he observed that "the Negroes, above all of the human species I ever knew, have the nicest ear for music. They have a kind of ecstatic delight in psalmody" (Chase, p. 80). African Americans provided a rich variety of music for themselves, and at the behest of their white masters. For our purposes it is enough to acknowledge that this music, black and white--spirituals, work songs, dance tunes, "coon" songs, etc. (for historical sketches see Collier, 1978, 3-55, Chase, 1966, pp. 232-323, Southern, 1983)--existed and that whites enjoyed and used it. But one genre requires special attention, that is the blues.

The blues did not come directly from Africa, but it certainly has African elements (Oliver, 1970). Just when it crystallized as a specific form is not certain, though the late nineteenth century is a good guess (Collier, 1978, p, 37; Palmer, 1981; Southern, 1983, pp. 330 ff.). More important than when and where is the matter of why: Why was the blues born? In Blues People Baraka suggested that the blues evolved when African Americans took their new-found freedom and confronted a society which had no place for them as free men and women (Jones, 1963, p. 55):

With the old paternalistic society of the South went the simple role of the Negro in the Western world. Now the Negro was asked to throw himself into what was certainly still an alien environment and to deal with that environment in the same manner as his newly found white "brother" had been doing for centuries....The post-slave society had no place for the black American, and if there were to be any area of the society where the Negro might have an integral function, that area would have to be one that he created for himself.

While the older musical forms, the dances, hymns and spirituals, the work songs, and so forth, continued, a new musical form was needed to meet and fulfill the expressive demands presented by the new social and moral situation confronted by most African-Americans. That form became known as the blues, and the blues came to be the foundation of much of African-American secular music up to rap and hip-hop. The blues is to African-American music what the sonnet is to English poetry, a basic form, to be mastered by all with aspirations to excellence, which has been put to the most various expressive uses [21].

Thus, while often sorrowful, sadness is not the defining essence of the blues (Murray, 1976, pp. 57 ff.). The blues is more abstract and general than a particular emotional tone. Blues music is often joyful, ironic, confrontational, witty, and worldly wise. It is also a highly individual form of expression, both in lyrical content and in performance presentation; a solo performer told about his or her own experience (Jones, 1963, pp. 65-76; Levine, 1977, pp. 222-223). In the more technical terms of musical device and structure, the blues is a set of expressive conventions and strategies--12-bar AAB form, I IV I V I harmony, call-and-response, the blues scale--within which African Americans have articulated a full view of life as generations of musicians improvise extensions, emendations, expostulations, emancipations, and ecstatically lubricious transubstantiations. As Dizzy Gillespie so often observed, before there was the universe, there was the blues.

While most early blues performers appear to have been male, in the second and third decades of the twentieth century a blues known as the classic blues emerged as a distinct genre, mostly performed by female vocalists, of which Bessie Smith became the best known. W. C. Handy, known as the Father of the Blues, collected and arranged many of these songs, with the "Memphis Blues", "St. Louis Blues" and "Beale Street Blues" among his best-known. The blues has developed many forms throughout the twentieth century, varying between regions, adopting electric instruments after World War II (Keil, 1966), and functioning as a cultural well from which other musical forms could draw inspiration and ideas. One of these forms became know as jazz, which began consolidating in the teens.

4.2 Jazz: "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing"

If the blues is one tributary feeding into the jazz delta, then ragtime is the other. Straddling the turn of the century, ragtime was primarily a piano player's music and was strongly influenced by dance forms and the military march (Collier, 1978, p. 51). Scott Joplin was the best known exponent of the music, and his aspirations went far beyond what he was able to realize in his lifetime--his opera, Treemonisha , wouldn't receive a full performance until 1972, fifty-five years after Joplin's death in 1917 (Collier, 1978, p. 51-53, Schonberg, 1981, pp. 160-163). Just when jazz finally emerged as a distinct style is uncertain. But it was going strong by the mid-teens.

New Orleans, or traditional jazz, is relatively simple in its devices, but, catalyzed by Louis Armstrong, it quickly evolved into the more sophisticated styling of swing. Jazz became the popular music of the second quarter of the century, naming first the Jazz Age of the twenties, and then the Swing Era of the thirties. Americans of all ages and ethnicity danced to the beat of the African diaspora. Jazz also traveled to Europe, where it was treated with aesthetic and intellectual seriousness it did not enjoy at home. In time, jazz conquered the rest of the world (cf. Wiora, 1965, pp. 158-159).

Jazz attracted the attention of classical musicians (Ansermet 1919) who began to incorporate some of its devices into their music as they had drawn on various European folk traditions (Bernstein, 1993, pp. 49-64, Hodier, 1956, pp. 245-263, Schuller, 1990). By this time the classical tradition had taken its central techniques to their limits and many composers were casting about for new inspiration, new scales, different compositional devices, and more rhythm (Benzon, 1993b; Kramer, 1988; Wiora, 1965, p. 194-195). At the same time, European artists such as Pablo Picasso were responding to African sculpture (Arnason, n.d., pp. 120-122; Clifford, 1988, pp. 196-200; Ogren, 1989, p. 146: Soyinka, 1987, p. 769) and Sigmund Freud was diagnosing the emotional ills of Western culture. Europeans were ready for a change and jazz give it to them.

Popular though jazz was, it did not receive universal approval (Ulanov, 1952. pp. 107-108, Ogren, 1989, pp. 103-104, 156 ff.; Stowe, 1994, pp. 30 ff.). In particular, it was denounced for its sexuality. For example, a group of New York citizens formed a commission that complained about "slow jazz, which tempo in itself is the cause of most of the sensual and freakish dancing" (Collier, 1983, p. 121). In 1926 the city of New York passed the first in a series of regulations intended to restrict opportunities for live jazz performance, though the regulations were never stated in those terms (Chivigny, 1991). At one point, Duke Ellington was moved publicly to deny that jazz was responsible for a rash of sex crimes [22]. This disapproval, of course, did not keep whites from listening to the music nor from playing it; white teens and young adults followed the black and white swing bands (Stowe, 1994, pp. 43) and white players swelled the ranks beginning in the early twenties (Collier, 1978, pp. 123 ff.; Peretti, 1992) [23].

The net effect was an influx of African-American musical ideas into Tin Pan Alley and Broadway--for awhile black musicians and dancers thrived on Broadway (Douglas, 1995; Rose, 1989, pp. 46-80; Stearns and Stearns, 1994; Watkins, 1994). White swing bands, from Benny Goodman to Sammy Kaye conquered popular music, with the great black bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford and others playing to a more restricted house (Stowe, 1994). Inevitably, the white bands played sweeter and less expressively than the black. European America admired and desired the particular expressive vitality of jazz, but there were limits to how deeply it could accommodate itself to that expressiveness. Meanwhile the most adventurous jazz musicians--including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk--invented bop during the early forties. Jazz is a music which slipped the yoke of racist oppression and, in bop, created a style which elevated improvisation to the same level of sophistication European classical music had achieved (Benzon, 1993b). Bop was Art with a capital "A". As A. B. Spellman (1970, p. 193) observed, "The bebop era was the first time that the black ego was expressed in America with self-assurance."

Bop artists went beyond their immediate tradition and explicitly searched other musics for techniques and inspiration. In the late forties Dizzy Gillespie (1979, pp. 317 ff.) hired a Cuban drummer, Chano Pozo. Since the drums had not been banned in Cuba, African rhythm survived there intact; when Gillespie brought Pozo to his band, he thus reestablished contact with African rhythm. Art Blakey traveled to Africa in 1948 and 1949 and brought African techniques and, later on, drummers back to America (Brown, 1988; Weinstein, 1992, pp. 50-51). In 1956 Dizzy Gillespie became the first jazz musician to go on a world tour sponsored by the U. S. State Department (Gillespie, 1979, pp. 411-427). His band was organized by the same Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. who would later become a vice president of Mercury Records and win fame and fortune as the producer of Michael Jackson's most successful albums (Ostransky, 1988). In the sixties Elvin Jones continued investigating African polyrhythms and studied Indian rhythms as well (cf. Feather, 1966, p. 169); he moved the drummer from an accompanying role to one of full collaboration with the horn-playing soloists. John Coltrane investigated Indian music to expand the possibilities of melodic improvisation in jazz. Jazz musician have have continued to search the globe for musical ideas.

However, this increased sophistication had a cost, for it demanded greater sophistication from the listener than swing and traditional jazz. With sophistication in short supply, the jazz audience shrank and jazz ceased to be a strong and direct force in popular music. The blues continued to evolve independently of jazz and, in the late thirties and early forties small "jump" bands developed as an offshoot of the big bands (Keil, 1966, pp. 61 ff.; Collier, 1978, 449; Ventura, 1989b, pp. 88-89). This music would become that grab-bag called rhythm and blues and it would emerge on the far side of World War II and the Korean War as the seed bed and inspiration of rock and roll.

From the beginning, jazz had a white audience (Collier, 1983, pp. 88 ff.; 1993, pp. 219 ff.), an audience it would keep throughout its history to the present day. I am unaware of any figures from jazz's early days, but the following figures concerning interest in jazz, based on a 1982 study by the U. S. Bureau of the Census, are worth examining (Horowitz, 1990, p. 5):

While the percentage of black people is larger than the percentage of white people in all categories, the number of whites is so much larger that, in absolute terms, the white jazz audience is larger than the black; the percentages for "other" are between black and white in three of four categories while the absolute numbers are smaller than either. If we consider just those who attend lived events, the category implying the most substantial commitment, we have 2,620,500 blacks and 12,901,950 whites, almost five times the number of blacks. Just when the absolute number of white jazz fans became larger than the absolute number of blacks is not known; but these 1982 figures do not reflect a dramatically new situation. Similar percentages must have existed for decades. The inspiration and major innovators are black, but the audience has been largely white for most of jazz's history.

4.3 Rock: "Roll Over Beethoven"

Simultaneously the mid-fifties gave us the civil rights movement and the birth of rock and roll. Both shocked mainstream America. The civil rights movement produced protest music which, in the sixties, would merge with rock to become a generalized music of political and cultural protest. It also provided a paradigm for political action which inspired the anti-war protests of the sixties.

As for rock and roll, its roots are in the rhythm and blues of musicians like Big Boy Crudup, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Bo Diddley with musicians like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bill Haley taking it into the white world (Ennis, 1992; Guralnick, 1994; Palmer, 1990; Puterbaugh, 1990; Ventura, 1987b, pp. 89 ff.). And there it was soundly denounced by older whites for its lawless sensuality (Martin and Segrave, 1993; Schipper, 1990); considerable political effort, including Congressional hearings, was marshaled in an effort to rid America of this nasty music. Once again the morals of America's youth were being undermined by sexy music--writing in 1987 (pp. 68-81), the conservative scholar Allan Bloom gives a reasoned, if not reasonable, account of this rejection of rock and roll.

Unlike the swing era, however, this time music became a generational issue (Ennis, 1992, pp. 283-312; Hobsbawm, 1994, pp. 324-327; Palmer, p. 46). In the twenties, thirties, and forties, young and old alike, black or white, danced to much the same music. But rock and roll split the European-American world into youths and elders. Those who reached adulthood by the beginning of the fifties did not, by and large, dance to rock and roll, which thus became a music for adolescents (see Early, 1989, pp. 99 ff.). And as those adolescents grew older, and their younger siblings moved into puberty, rock and roll became the expressive catalyst for a generation of cultural and political protest. By the mid-sixties, many of the best and brightest sons and daughters of the European-American middle class were joining the civil rights movement, protesting the war in Vietnam, chanting and meditating, taking hallucinogenic drugs, proclaiming and acting on sexual freedom, growing concerned about the environment, revising gender roles, and, in general, trying to create what became journalistically known as the counter-culture. All of this activity was reflected in the lyrics of rock and roll and energized by its beat. White middle-class youth had adopted black rhythm as the expressive catalyst for their assault on the culture they had inherited. They danced to a different drummer and dreamed of forming a new society grounded in those rhythms.

Rock and roll developed and became polymorphous, with many of the most important performers coming from England (Ennis, 1992; Gilmore, 1990). In various ways, the Beatles harmonically and melodically, Bob Dylan lyrically, and Jimi Hendrix with his outrageous jivometric guitar virtuosity, rock achieved a level of musical and lyrical sophistication comparable to the best of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and of swing-era jazz. In the mid-fifties Bo Diddley had introduced what came to be known as the Bo Diddley beat into rock and roll; that beat was a standard West African rhythm which made its way here via the Caribbean. Other musicians mated rock with every conceivable musical style (Pond, 1990). One strain, heavy metal, substituted anger for the sexuality which rock had inherited from African America.

Meanwhile, the civil rights movement developed a more militant side and black cultural nationalism proliferated and became more visible to white America. As African-American cultural nationalism became national news, the musicians continued to produce new music. Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Stevie Wonder and Co. gave us soul; George Clinton funk; and Ray Charles did everything. The electric urban blues of musicians such as B.B. King flourished and was recognized and adopted by European Americans. Jazz musicians confronted the same limitations of harmonic structures which classical composers encountered early in century and developed an avant-garde that espoused jazz free of all rules and structures (see Benzon, 1993b; Collier, 1978, 454-478; Litweiler, 1954). In some of this music, anger came to replace sexuality at the music's expressive core. At the same time, the foundations were laid for "classicizing" jazz. In the late sixties Rahsaan Roland Kirk began performing the whole history of jazz, from traditional New Orleans, through bop, to free jazz (Barkan, 1974), while the avant-garde Art Ensemble of Chicago made reference to that entire history, though not actually performing in those various styles (Rockwell, 1983, pp. 164-175). This effort would bear fruit in the eighties when a whole new generation of jazz musicians, led by the New Orleans trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis, would embrace older, more conservative, jazz styles as their primary expressive vehicle, consciously proclaiming that jazz has a history which performers must keep current through the playing of all its styles, not just the most recent ones.

On the whole, my sense is that this crossing of African- and European-American music was more extensive in its effects than that of the swing era. That it helped drive a wedge between the so-called baby boomers and their elders is the surest sign of this. And the broader cultural exploration catalyzed by rock and roll was more extensive than that of swing. Neither oriental religion nor drug use were new; nineteenth century European musicians, poets, and intellectuals experimented with opium and hashish and knew Hindu literature, philosophy, and mystical practice. But the sixties and seventies saw members of various Eastern religious sects soliciting contributions in every airport and hallucinogenic drug use became common recreation. None of this is directly African American, but African America provided the music which became the dominant and most widely shared expressive vehicle for all this activity. Blacks showed how to slip the yoke of repression and young whites proceeded to sew wild oats in every field they could find.

Finally, hidden in the background, the computer came of age. Computer courses began appearing in colleges during the middle sixties. I can remember my freshman year at the all-male Johns Hopkins when one of my classmates generated considerable interest with a female nude printed by a computer in a pattern X's and O's; that was 1965. Over the years some students would become captivated by computers and become hackers, living for computing the way their Dionysian counterparts lived for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Hacking developed into a counter culture of its own (cf. Levy, 1984, Turkle, 1984). Yet, it shared a theme with the more publicized world of the flower-bedecked hippies: mind-expansion. The hippies sought mind expansion in drugs and meditation; the hackers sought it in doing vastly clever things with computers, even attempting to make the machines think Personal computers and video games were invented in the late seventies and some of the hackers went into big business, and some of those had counter-cultural dreams of changing the world through computers. During the middle eighties computers would meet reggae and rock and roll in the world of science fiction, yielding cyberpunk [24]. And yet, as we'll see in the next section, African rhythm remained just around the corner.

4.4 Rap: "U Can't Touch This"

As the United States rolled into the late seventies African America proposed a new music: rap, or hip-hop (George, 1988, 1992; Costello and Wallace, 1990; Gilroy, pp. 1993, pp. 33-34, 103-110; Rose, 1994; Samuels, 1991). In the late seventies black performers such as Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie became so successful in modifying their music to more effectively cross over to white audiences that a vacuum began to develop in popular music, which no longer satisfied the expressive needs of the black audience. Rap emerged to fill that vacuum. While rap, like all genres, has its antecedents, e.g. the tight rhythms of James Brown, the verbal games and poems of the street corner, it has features which make it a new point of musical departure:

• It employs a technique of musical collage which depends on an extant library of recordings.
  
• It is the most insistently rhythmic of the black genres, reducing melody and harmony to a minimal, and mostly background, role.
  
• It also has the most elaborate lyrics.
  
• It often substitutes anger for the sensuality which had been basic to earlier forms.
  

The joint effect of these factors is that rap does not follow directly from the blues and gospel base which had been the cradle of African-American basic musical expression throughout this century--a point we will return to later. Rather, rap looks to verbal combat, oral narrative, and rhythm as its points of departure.

On the first point, rappers use fragments of extant recordings to create a background for the foreground rapping. This began in a multiple turn-table technique in which one performer created a background of fragments from various sources while creating a strong rhythmic pulse through scratching a record with a turntable needle. With the advent of digital recording technology this evolved into an elaborate and sophisticated technique of digital collage. That makes it the first musical genre the existence of which depends on modern recording technology. It is one thing to make full use of recording technology to facilitate creating music which, in principle, could have been made otherwise; that has been going on in popular music at least since the Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the mid-sixties. Synthesizers and multitracking are enormously convenient; but, for the most part, music made with this technology could have been made more conventionally by different means. But the rappers take fragments from various different recordings and electronically combine them into a background which thus becomes a kind of archeological record of, mostly pop, mostly--though not exclusively--black, music. Technology has become intrinsic to rap's creation, not just a means of preserving and distributing the music.

Ironically, this most technological of musics is also relentlessly rhythmic. The rapper weaves his, or in some cases her, words over the hi-tech background which is not only highly rhythmic but, at times, is even anti-melodic and anti-harmonic because the combined fragments are not in the same key. The resulting tonal clash works against even the fragmented melodies and harmonies to emphasize the rhythm. No other form of black American music is so insistently rhythmic as rap. Jazz rhythm may be more complex and sophisticated, but jazz also has considerable melodic and harmonic play. Rap has little beyond the rhythm--and the words. If, in the contemporary symbolic universe, the computer stands for disembodied mind, then rap rhythm violently links that mind to back the rhythmic body.

Such a move has deep roots in African-American culture. For example, after the Titanic sank, blacks began reciting a poem about that sinking in which a black boilerman, Shine, escapes despite attempts to keep him on board by offering him money and the sexual favors of a white woman, the captain's daughter (Jackson, 1974). In the popular mind, the Titanic was a symbol of technology triumphant; it was supposed to be unsinkable. Shine triumphed over that hubris and, in rejecting sex, countered white notions of black sexuality (cf. Jackson, p. 36). Charles Keil (1966, p. 175-176) discusses this "nonmachine tradition" in his analysis of the concept of soul, a tradition which led many jazz musicians to form an ideological resistance to the electrical instrumentation of rock and roll. It is almost as though the rhythmic insistence were necessary to reclaim rap from the dangers of its intrinsic technological commitment.

Then, we have the words; among other things, they boast, and they finger the whiteman as a source of evil. Rap has more words than any other form of American music, except, perhaps, for the talking blues. Those words are manipulated as much for rhythmic effect as for what they say. Those words have, more than anything else, brought African-American verbal virtuosity (see Abrahams, 1970, Jackson, 1974) to mass public awareness--note that the Titanic poem mentioned above is in this tradition and is thus a precursor to rap. Between the words and the rhythm, rap is the most relentlessly and consciously Black, as in Not-White, form African America has produced. It is also the angriest. We have noted that avant-garde jazz musicians and heavy metal rockers created music steeped in anger. Avant-garde jazz has never had a large audience, while the heavy-metal audience is almost exclusively white, as are its musicians. Rap is the first mass-audience black form based on anger, giving it an ambivalent relationship to heavy-metal rock, one of its sources of musical samples (Costello and Wallace, 67-68, George, 1992, p. 130). It is not clear what to make of this fact.

The mainstream media has, of course, focused on this anger as expressed in the genre of "gangsta" rap, objecting that it is sexist, racist, and excessively violent. Once again, as in the case of jazz and rock in prior generations, the nation's moral health is said to be imperiled, in this case by the misogyny, anti-white attitudes, and all-around violence of the gangstas. Whatever merits this line of criticism has, we should note that the misogyny was not invented by the gangstas. It is widespread in American society, certainly in those conservative circles most offended by rap (hooks, 1994, p. 116). Further, such criticism is focused too exclusively on only one segment of the hip-hop market and is oblivious to the fact there are oppositional forces within the hip-hop world. Thus, for example, female rappers will put out music explicitly criticizing and challenging sexist lyrics (Rose, 1994, pp. 146-182). The anti-white attitudes are no more defensible than is white racism, but one has a sense that much of the criticism and dismay has as much to do with an ethnocentric inability to understand how black people could possibly resent white society as with any consistent moral reasoning. Beyond this we can note that the general anger has been with us all along. Expressing it is, no doubt, a positive step. But, to the extent that that anger is motivated by a desire for an expressive culture which is Black beyond any possibility of White co-optation, that anger runs up against the relentless social psychodynamics of racism.

For, as relentlessly black as rap has been, since the mid-eighties its largest audience has been white, and male (Samuels, 1991, cf. Harrington, 1992, pp. 376-382). One is reminded of Gerald Early's (1989, p. 138) remark about a passage from Norman Mailer's account of the Ali-Forman bout in Zaire where Mailer "expresses a very simple and very old idea here, namely, that the black male is metaphorically the white male's unconsciousness personified." The hidden psycho-social logic of racism has operated so that the anger black rappers express on their own behalf, and against whites, matches the anger white males feel--perhaps about themselves, or their elders, or both-- but are not so willing to express. The anger which drove the rapper to create something which is, among other things, ethnically his, allows whites to feel their own anger though the rappers' performance while getting the vicarious thrill of an imaginary trip to the archetypal exotic Black Jungle Ghetto much as, half a century ago, their grandparents went to the Cotton Club to view erotic stage shows danced to hot jazz.

Yet, rap has not so far spawned a significant group of white rappers. Whites do perform it, but the majority of the performers, for both the white and black audience, remain black. Thus rap is not following the pattern set, first in the swing era, then rock an roll, when the large white audience was served by white performers who imitated black models.

This suggests that the psycho-cultural dynamic of musical expression is undergoing a fundamental change. If, following Baraka, we think of the blues as an "expressive contract" between free blacks and white American society, then hip hop may represent a new aesthetic contract. The old contract was in force up until the Reagan presidential administration in the 1980s. This contract was based on a fundamental hope for the future and a belief in the possibility of social justice. All of the secular music of African-America was produced under the terms of this contract, as were the white imitations and reconstructions of black music. One aspect of this contract was that there would be little criticism or even mention of white racism in song lyrics. But, as hope began to falter in the 1980s, a new expressive contract became necessary. Hip hop has emerged as the vehicle of that contract and pointed commentary on white racism is now an explicit part of America's expressive culture at the broadest level.

Meanwhile, the European-American division of the culture produced an art music which both had a large following and was not oriented toward nineteenth century classical music. Called minimal, presumably because it had little or no harmonic movement, the music of musicians such as Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich was strongly influenced by various non-Western musics, including, jazz, Indian, West African, and Balinese gamelan (Rockwell, 1983, pp. 109-122, Glass, 1987, Page, 1992, pp. 66-83, 118-121). With its roots in the sixties, this music emerged to full public view in the eighties. While other music in the European tradition had taken elements from African-American, and other non-Western musics, and put them to classical use, this assimilation had never been very deep. At its core, such music remained European in outlook. The minimalists absorbed non-Western lessons so deeply into their music that it must be considered a new departure from its founding expressive tradition just as hip hop is a departure from its founding tradition. Where classical music had a narrative intent Philip Glass talks of the fundamentally meditative nature of his music. It achieves this aim through cyclic repetition of melodic fragments (cf. Sprenkle, 1986). Though this repetition the minimalists are restoring rhythmic complexity to the European tradition, thereby moving that tradition beyond the bounds of Western culture.

Thus, at the beginning of the nineties the North American crossing of Africa and Europe leaves us, on the one hand, with rap, which is a rhythmically intense point of departure from/within its African-American tradition of basic expression, and, on the other hand, with minimalism, a rhythmically intense point of departure from/within its European-American tradition of art music. There are hints that the classical world is loosening up; Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg has recently observed that "The rules are less strict now, so we can appreciate the music more" (Roca, 1992, p. 6). Meanwhile, serious young men in Armani suits have been leading a strong jazz classicist movement based on styles from swing through bop to sixties modal jazz and the jazz avant-garde has been raiding popular dance forms for rhythmic foundations on which to improvise spiky towers of sound. Aging rockers from the sixties continue to record and to tour while rock critics have been writing obituaries for a decade. Clearly, it is time for another spin of the evolutionary dice and Africa and Europe prepare to cross into the next millennium.

4.5 The Pattern So Far: "Freedom Over Me"

The critical question is, of course: is this process moving in some direction or is it just drifting in cultural space? One aspect of this question concerns the evolution of musical culture; the other aspect is whether or not there has been any change in the underlying psycho-social dynamic. Is the psychological pressure of racism easing up? And, if so, can we reasonably attribute some of that change to the social dynamics of expressive culture?

In the first phase of this musical evolution, jazz and swing, white America simply picked up on the music black America created and proceeded to develop its own version. At its best the white version has had lasting value; but, on the whole, it is in the black music that we find the most compelling players and performances. In the second phase, rock and roll, white America again picked up on black music, this time rhythm and blues. Rock and roll precipitated a generational split and, developing more richly than white swing had done, became the central expressive medium for a generation of social, political, and cultural protest and experimentation. Black music provided a catalytic vehicle for a generation of white Americans, moving them away from the Europe-dominated mainstream; it provided for occasions of muscular bonding, to recall William McNeill's (1995) phrase, which could solidify social networks among those seeking alternatives to middle-class American business-as-usual.

Beyond the music, the black protest of the civil rights movement provided an immediate precedent, example, and training ground for white anti-war protest; it was a source of social legitimacy and tactical example. I want to go out on still another speculative limb and argue that the civil rights movement owes a debt to jazz. I suggest that the political protests of the fifties and sixties are, in part, an indirect effect of the first phase, the jazz phase, of this overall expressive evolution; the musical expression of the 20s, 30s, and 40s had effects in society which help enable the political expression of the 50s and 60s. Bop is important here, for with the creation of bop, African America created a rich and powerful art music, one which operated on very different principles from European classical music. That cultural achievement catalyzed a self-assurance without which the civil rights movement would have been difficult, if not impossible.

Organized political protest cannot be fueled by anger and outrage alone; it requires communal cohesion guided by a sense of dignity and of real possibility. The achievements of bop musicians contributed to that sense and that possibility (cf. Kofsky, 1970, Hobsbawm, 1993, pp. 229-247). To be sure, the civil rights movement got much of its leadership from the church, which is so central to African-American society (Lincoln and Mamiya, 1990)--a centrality which is being viciously high-lighted by the racist burnings of black churches which have been occurring as I prepare this essay in the summer of 1996. But, as we saw above, the link between secular black music and the church is a close and intimate one, albeit often strained. Whatever the direct contribution of bop, and later, jazz musicians to the civil rights movement, the indirect effect--working through those who heard the music, and even those who only talked to those who heard the music--was surely significant. As Frank Kofsky (Kofsky, 1970, pp. 56 ff.) pointed out, when Charlie Parker played "Now's the Time" he was talking politics. How many of those who sang "We Shall Overcome" got to that point by listening to Parker tell them the time was ripe?

Then we need to consider the white counter-culture of the sixties. Its music, rock and roll, was directly influenced by rhythm and blues, which in turn evolved from earlier swing and blues. But the possibility of going beyond mere adolescent friskiness required the political climate of the civil rights movement, itself indebted to the spirit of jazz self-assertion. Thus black expressive energy influenced the counter culture both directly through rhythm and blues and indirectly through the civil rights movement.

With the emergence of hip hop the cultural dance takes a new turn. The black music which rock and roll took as its starting point followed naturally from the music which proceeded it. But rap represents a new point of African-American departure. Its anger is of its own time, but its expressive confidence, its willingness to break with the past, is a legacy of bop's assuredness and power. Similarly, bop is behind the minimalist wing of classical composition, providing paradigm and inspiration as an art music based on principles radically different from European art music. Rap anger and minimalist meditation inform the furthest extensions of the stylistic interaction between Africa and Europe. Only time will tell whether these are the catalytic engines of new cultural forms steaming across a new savanna of human possibility.

Beyond the music, what has been so far achieved? Is there any evidence that European America is being cured of its psychosocial ills? Racism is still strong, and the projective psychodynamic which drives it still functions. However, that dynamic may be weakening; at least some whites have learned their lessons well and racist attitudes seem to be on the wane (Sniderman and Piazza, p. 1993). There is reason to believe that the sexual revolution has not been mere hype (Efron, 1985, pp. 7 ff.). For example, unmarried couples can now cohabitate openly and freely, something unthinkable in the Father Knows Best era and before. Attitudes have changed as well. In an interview with Peter Whitmer (1987, p. 127), the avant-garde novelist William S. Burroughs remarked:

[Skeptics about the 60s] don't seem to realize that forty years ago, four-letter words did not appear on printed pages; that when I was in my twenties and thirties [he was born in 1914], the idea that a Mexican or a black or a queer was anything but a second-class citizen was simply absurd. These were tremendous changes. Then, of course, the end of censorship.

Certainly there is much more writing and talk about sexuality. Much of it is superficial, such as that on television talk shows. But the talk exists, and that in itself is progress. In particular there is a great deal of talk about the ugly consequences of misguided sexuality--e.g. child abuse. Such talk, which deeply questions the integrity of family dynamics, would have been impossible fifty or a hundred years ago. Before we can change our behavior and our hearts, we must be able to talk, from the heart, about that behavior. These changes in behavior and attitude have such strenuous opposition that we cannot confidently predict the future. Yet, if the talk continues, behavior may continue changing as well and the inheritors of the Western cultural legacy may create a more emotionally satisfying culture, one which need no longer need to use racism as a way of dealing with emotional conflict.

We need also to consider the revised appearance of African Americans on television and in the movies (Gates, 1989, Harrington, 1992, pp. 353-376). The 1977 miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley's book, became the most highly rated program in network history. Blacks are no longer confined to subservient, marginal and low life roles--maids, butlers, hookers, and hustlers--a circumstance indicating greater white willingness to see blacks as people, not merely as projective screens. Denzel Washington's portrayal of Don Pedro in Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is a particularly striking example of color-blind casting. Bill Cosby took a black brush to the American Dream and created the most popular television show of the eighties [25]. Spike Lee catalyzed a sepia revolution in cinema, creating mythically compelling depictions of black street-life and rage (Do the Right Thing ), the incendiary subject of inter-racial sex (Jungle Fever ) and the polymorphic life of Malcolm X. Fears that Do the Right Thing would provoke riots (George, 1992, p. 35, Lee, 1991, p. 15) proved to be white projective paranoia, and, while some films did provoke largely black-on-black violence (George, 1992, pp. 152-156), that was different in kind and considerably less lethal than the rise in lynchings following the 1915 release of the thoroughly racist Birth of a Nation (Du Bois, 1940, pp. 729-730). African-American expressive genius is thus moving into a visual arena where one cannot pretend the blackness away--as one might pretend it away while listing to a record or the radio (for a chronology of expressive progress since 1971, see George, 1992, pp. 9-40).

To be sure, this cultural progress tragically parallels social conditions which, for many African Americans, are worse than they were twenty or thirty years ago (Hacker, 1992; Kondracke, 1989; Vann Woodward, 1989). But we should not allow the one face of this disparity to blind us to the other. The cultural progress is real, and so is the social regress. History works in mysterious ways and, if we are to influence its path into the future, we must take full note of its complexity, contradiction, and paradox [26].

5. Conclusion: Stepping Out on a New Savanna

Freedom cannot be given, dignity cannot be granted; but a deeper understanding of another way of life--perhaps even a profound respect for cultural differences--is possible. In the world of today and tomorrow it is necessary for survival. No nation on earth has yet achieved a lasting and productive cultural pluralism . . . The problem of the Negro in America is inextricably meshed with the problem of America in the world; and, as many confused prophets before me have noted, anything can happen, ranging from catastrophe to a golden age.

Notes

• Rank 1, Basic Expression: traditional jazz, most blues, rhythm and blues, most rock, rap.
  
• Rank 2, Entertainment: swing-era jazz; fusion; some blues; the polystylistic Ray Charles; some rock, including the Beatles starting with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band , Bob Dylan, the Jimi Hendrix of Electric Ladyland , Frank Zappa, the Greatful Dead, the Talking Heads; the Broadway musical; singers such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand.
  
• Rank 3, Art: European classical; bop, and modal jazz.
  
• Rank 4, Beyond art, candidates: such jazz as the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the World Saxophone Quartet; minimalist classical.
  

References

This essay was written out of the conviction that the twentieth century owes as much to Daniel Louis Armstrong--aka Satchmo, Pops--as it does to Albert Einstein. I would like to dedicate it to Pops, to Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Birks Gillespie, ambassadors from the United States of the Blues, and to Dave Dysert, who taught me jazz fundamentals. I am grateful to Ade Knowles and Druis Beasley Knowles for over a decade of fine music making, friendship, and conversation on these issues. Art Efron has been an example of a thinker who has been driven to make emotionally tough arguments out of a sense of decency and truth. Bruce Jackson taught me the importance of African-American narrative tradition and was the first to encourage me to put my trumpeter's mouth in my writer's fingers and say what I know about black music and American culture. David Porush back-stopped my judgment of Beethoven and made insightful comments about rap and technology. David Hays, Paul Levinson, Martha Mills, and Fabrice Ziolkowski gave the manuscript a critical reading. I remain chief repository of factual error, interpretive misjudgment, and signifying monkey-shines.