It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
Duke Ellington, memorably stating his view on the problem of art’s relationship to entertainment. Clive James argues that it is not an idle lyric but an assertion of aesthetic philosophy made at the time when jazz began to mirror other arts of the 20th century in declaring that anything enjoyable was unserious. The contrast here, then, is between what swings –what can be danced to and whistled and enjoyed by most- and what requires cerebral engagement of a more seated sort: say, late Coltrane (a favorite of mine who comes in for much criticism in this essay). Ellington and James favor the former.
The latter, an obsession with formal considerations and technical problems in the visual, musical, and literary worlds, is the result of artists turning away from audiences and towards one another, or worse: towards critics and academia. That this inward-orientation, this preoccupation with art about art and concerned mainly with other art, has weakened the arts is obvious enough; what audience pays to be ignored? Who wants to watch artists discuss themselves, once the novelty of the formal invention wears off? I once used a simple test in evaluating any work: if an essay is packaged with it, pasted on the wall alongside or as a program before the performance, to explain why it’s not meaningless, the work ought to have been an essay and is in its present form meaningless. If an essay is needed to convey the point, convey the point in an essay! It’s cheaper and easier and better for the audience.
Hundreds of objections to this stance come immediately to mind, however: how low ought to be our denominator in judging intelligibility? How much erudition, education, sophistication, or even simple intelligence can we say is required before we say the piece is insufficiently apprehensible? In other words: whose capacity to dance sets the limit on what we can swing to?
The problem is highlighted by James’ bizarre attack on Coltrane:
“Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop, a fact which steadily confirms the listener’s impression that there was no reason for it to start. In other words, there is no real momentum, only velocity…supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration… nothing is more quickly copied than virtuosity, and Coltrane had a hundred clones.”
I adore James, but I could scarcely imagine anyone being more confused about the aesthetic interests of an artist than he is about Coltrane’s. Indeed, this is a perfect demonstration of an unfortunate fact: when someone draws a line in art’s history and says that beyond that point art loses its way, it is in nine cases out of ten merely a declaration of the speaker’s failure to understand. It is comparable to the derided declamation of the aging that this or that technology or style of dress is undermining social mores: it represents the point in history at which the speaker jumped off the train.
Art makes wrong turns; much of modern art (and much more of so-called ‘postmodern art’) is wretched, but most of art has always been wretched; it is just that now most bad art is forgotten. The consensus editorial filtering that takes place over time reduces the chaff of previous eras and makes it seem as though our own is populated by self-involved hucksters selling gimmickry as profundity. Hence the amusingly constant concern on the part of the elderly of every generation that nothing is as good as it was in the old days.
Ellington’s assertion is debatable, but it’s important too. I wish more artists would keep it in mind, even if just to override it after some internal struggle. But when I was eleven years old listening to Coltane’s Ole, nothing seemed emptily virtuosic or cacophonous about it to me; it had as much swing as anything I’d ever heard, and still seems to. Art’s progress requires that we learn to dance to novel rhythms, and I hope not to mistake unfamiliar music for swingless noise. (But I’m sure I will).
(Update: Topherchris feels that I have the swing whether or not it means a thing).
(via mills)
The point of your summation of James’ argument echoes exactly (a redundancy, there [pointing out a redundancy as such is a further…]) a point David Foster Wallace makes in his Charlie Rose interview, which I rewatched yesterday.
He says, basically, that the postmodernists were the first generation of artists who had been heavily soaked by the academy in theory; and that after marinading in the thought, turned the thought inward, onto their own work. He goes on to say that since he went to a fairly realistic-minded writing program, he thought that the faculty was down on his work because he was a more technically inventive writer. Of course, he admits, the faculty was down on his work for no other reason than that it was not very good. He confused a difference in critical apparatus with a difference in aesthetic apparatus.
Avoiding this confusion, I think, is key to the way you put James’ argument. If a piece of music passes the ‘swing criterion,’ then at least there seems to be a kind of objective correlate for the work’s supposed high value. Lacking this, it’s more difficult to tell if a piece—say, a Anthony Braxton piece—is any good. And let me tell you, I know that Miles’ late-70s band with Michael Henderson, John McLaughlin, and Jack DeJohnette was fucking awesome. Braxton’s output during the same period? I can’t say that I listen to it with much relish. My habits don’t attenuate the worth of Braxton’s music, but I have a feeling that it’s a lot of hooey.
