It Didn't Jes Grew: The Social and Aesthetic Significance of African American Music

Abstract

Our music is our Mother Tongue, our meta-language that we use for the fullest expression of self. In the preface to Paul Garon's seminal text on surrealism and Black music, Blues & the Poetic Spirit, Franklin Rosemont notes that . . . American black music originated in the culture of the slaves who were systematically deprived of the more refined instruments of human expression. Slaves were forbidden to learn to read or write, and they had no opportunity for plastic expression. Even their musical efforts were severely circumscribed; slaveholders who feared the use of drums and other instruments as means of communication between slave assemblies, and hence as tools of insurrection, banned such instruments from the plantations. Thus the spoken word, the chant, and dancing were the only vehicles of creative expression left to the slaves. The sublimative energies that in different conditions would doubtless have gone into writing, painting, sculpture, etc. were necessarily concentrated in the naked word and the naked gesture - in the field hollers, work-songs, and their accompanying rhythmic movements - in which gestated the embryo that would eventually emerge as the blues. Black music developed out of, and later side by side with, this vigorous oral poetry combined with dancing, both nourished in the tropical tempest of black magic and the overwhelming desire for freedom. The extreme repressive context of its origins, and its consequent subsumption into itself of the whole gamut of creative impulses, together give the blues its unique intensity and distinctive poetic resonance. As a living and fertile body of creative expression blues and jazz retain today their boundless integrity and provocative flare. Their role in shaping the modern sensibility is already large and shows every sign of expanding. It should be emphasized, since so many critics pretend not to notice it, that all authentic blues and jazz share a poetically subversive core, an explosive essence of irreconcilable revolt against the shameful limits of an unlivable destiny. Notwithstanding the whimpering objections of a few timid skeptics, this revolt cannot be assimilated into the abject mainstream of American bourgeois/Christian culture except by way of dilution and/or outright falsification. The dark truth of Afro-American music remains unquestionably oppositional. Its implacable Luciferian pride - that is, its aggressive and uncompromising assertion of the omnipotence of desire and the imagination in the face of all resistances - forever provides a stumbling-block for those who would like to exploit it as a mere commercial diversion, a mere form of entertainment, a mere ruse to keep the cash register ringing. Born in passionate revolt against the unlivable, blues and jazz demand nothing less than a new life. (7-8) Within the above stated context, this paper will address language as both a basic means of communication and as a tool for artistic expression; the foundational aesthetics of African American music, which I refer to as GBM (Great Black Music); and the state and significance of the four major genres of GBM in the contemporary setting - Gospel, or religious music; Blues; Jazz; and Black Pop or RB after all, we are a mixture of races. So the biological is the least important of the three elements of Blackness. Culture and consciousness are the critical elements. Culture roots the individual in a group, a community of people who share behavior, attitudes, ethos, and ideals. …