Lying up a Nation : Race and Black Music

Rating:
Summary: An interesting enterprise that falls kind of short
Review: This is an essential book to approach Bl ack music today. It starts from Dubois's and Ellison's idea that the American nation, American culture and particularly American music were built from the constant and irrepresssible interplay of what the Blacks have brought to America and what the Whites have invested from their European origins. The two racial lines are absolutely entertwined and cannot be seen but as a common construction. The Blacks were submitted to extreme conditions of loss with slavery, but in fact they found in that situation the energy to resist and to remain sane, and that was essentially music. Ralph Ellison goes as far as saying that the future can only exist in democratic diversity, hence the continuation of this rwofold historical cooperation, in spite of all segregation and racism. Can we go further than that ? Radano tries to do so by going back to history and finding out what Black music was as soon as the 17th century. He finds a great silence in testimonies from the time, and yet enough to know that music went on. This great silence was the main characteristic of the pre-revolutionary 18th century. Then in the antebellum period Black music starts being recognized but most of the time as a disease infecting the social body. Here Radano is short because he harps on the negative testimonies and ideas, deeply racist and segregative. He does not understand the position of the Enligtenment philosophers like Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, Buffon and many others, positions that will lead to the abolition of slavery by the French Revolution in the whole of French West Indies and Louisiana (from the Gulf Coast to Quebec and Maine). He then will not be able to explain the positive involvement of many Euro-Americans in the fight against slavery that was seen as an evil leading to war by many, among others Chateaubriand who extensively travelled in the US and expressed his fear of the division and war within the United States as soon as 1824 in his « Mémoires d'Outre Tombe ». That enables Radano to downplay the forces against slavery that went as far as fighting to the finish and to the death, the Civil War being a perfect example of this sacrifice. After the war Radano sees the emergence of Black music and the tremendous impact it had on American music as a whole, as Dvorak saw it very clearly, but he harps on negative attitudes and testimonies and not on the tremendous movement of exchange and collaboration with some white intellectuals and artists, always seeing the negative side of it : appropriation, using this emergence for one's own profit, and at times even a complete blindness of what this music brought that Radano calls rhythm. But his totally closed up approach (closed up on the United States and the Black community, makes him not see the real value of the French Catholic Church that tolerated Vodun and encouraged religious practice and original enterprises. He does not open his study to the emergence of rhythm through percussions and other means in European music from the Gregorian tradition onwards, not seeing the constant exchange between popular and religious and « elite » music, rhythm and the use of percussions coming from the popular side of European music. That prevents him from identifying the real heritage of the Blacks in the US, which is the double rhythmic line of their music that will produce the syncopation. He sees the parallel between the emergence of rhythm and the great success it had among what he calls the white populace in the industrial and urban context of their development. But he cannot connect the two has a perfect case of one invention becoming a universal heritage of humanity and he never gets to that universal globalized level that we cannot neglect in our vision any more. This emergence of double syncopated rhythm is the best expression of the fast rhythm of life in cities and the fast rhythm of work in factories with fordism and taylorism. The last remark is about the style and the thinking process, that he calls « jazz thinking ». It is syncretic at all levels and under the influence of virtual Internet forum discussions. If you do not like this ellipsoidal thinking, forget it. If you don't like the anachronic vision of historical facts, forget it. It is difficult to see Rousseau being quoted in the 19th century, out of context, though his impact was essential for the French Revolution in the 18th century, period in which he is not even quoted, for one example. Radano locks himself up in a vision of the American society as being cut in two racial homogeneous groups, the Blacks and the Whites, and cannot see the contradictions running free in both communities, in the economic field of the US, in the world even. He never reaches the globalized universal level needed today and actually does not go beyond Dubois and Ellison that he even criticizes as not radical enough in their racial approach. An essential book to understand this particular brand of Black nationalism that sets apart the Black community as such even if they consider the Blacks were essential actors in the construction of the American nation and American culture. Black nationalist ideology that pretends against all possible facts and testimonies that the Blacks were practically the only dynamic group in the construction of the American nation.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU