This is an experimental story that dwells in the connections between academic jazz programs and the global cruise industry, the ideological and affective attachments people maintain between these two institutions in the twenty-first century, and what is at stake in their naming and contemplation.3 Using disruptively prosed rhythms and modular form, it attempts a worlding of everyday cruise life and the soundings, mobilities, and affective geographies of early-career musicians living at sea, profoundly unmoored from the places and networks in which jazz is typically thought to flourish.Narrating this story means disrupting the silence of jazz studies on a political economy that has implicated generations of university-trained musicians ever since the turn of the 1970s, which witnessed the coterminous rise of college jazz education in the United States and multinational, corporatized cruise tourism.4 From the former emerged a musical workforce particularly suited for the latter's burgeoning demand for entertainment: technically and stylistically versatile, trained to both improvise and sight-read, and otherwise poised to enter an increasingly precarious terrestrial gig economy, many of these hybrid musicians pay their dues—and their bills—not on the road, but in international waters.Studying the flow of bodies, sounds, and capital between jazz schools and cruise ships, writing through the currents that animate them, moreover, mediates an epistemological gap between jazz studies and ethnomusicology that has swallowed the existence of oceanic music scenes.5 For instance, while Eitan Y. Wilf argues that the academy has overwritten “the disappearance of vibrant extracurricular commercial jazz scenes” in the last half century, proposing that “jazz programs are the reconfigured jazz scenes of the past,” this conceptualization posits a landlocked, closed system in which the music's institutionalization has (for better or worse) supplanted the informal, “earn as you learn” apprenticeship system of the jazz tradition.6 Yet, as Wilf himself points out, and as the above epigraph by famed jazz educator David Baker suggests, Berklee School of Music, Indiana University, and other jazz performance programs have long emphasized the importance of vocational preparedness, helping to place students into myriad occupations in which “jazz is part of what they do.”Although ships help fulfill an institutional desire to remain relevant as occupational guarantors, they simultaneously present universities with an ideological conflict of interest that requires them to keep cruise work at arm's length. As Dale Chapman has argued, jazz is entangled with neoliberalism, notably through a shared investment in the idea of “manageable risk.”7 Whereas jazz cultures valorize the entrepreneurial, creative, self-regulating individual, what ethnomusicologist David Cashman terms the “corporately imposed” structure of cruise work-life ultimately collapses the ideal western neoliberal subject into a highly regulated, constantly surveilled worker.8 Ships have historically presented a locus of opportunity for jazz musicians, as the steady pay and accumulated savings they offer are precisely what many need to offset the economic insecurity of working in terrestrial music scenes. Even so, the quiet tucking away of cruise ship job postings and audition dates into university spaces,9 combined with the reluctance of jazz studies to critically trace the oceanic vectors of countless practitioners (and some scholars, too!), indicates to me two things. First, the cruise industry's corporatized mediations of musical performance represent—for some—an unprestigious, inauthentic deviation from the ideal jazz subject's trajectory into an urban metropole. Second, if cruise work is indeed incommensurate with the neoliberal value systems of institutionalized music programs, then it has also surely suffered from a dearth of consideration by researchers.Yet universities have historically formed ideal recruiting grounds for the cruise industry. At the intersection of tourism studies and ethnomusicology, David Cashman and Philip Heyward's “cruisicology” usefully illuminates a connection between jazz and cruising dating as far back as the 1920s, when “increasing interest in jazz encouraged American [cruise] lines . . . to employ jazz orchestras (often college ensembles on summer vacation) during the high tourism season.”10 Further reinforcing the link between North American jazz education and cruise vocation is their demographic study, which shows contemporary cruise musicians to be overwhelmingly from the global North, white, cismale, and possessing a “high level of formal education.” Indeed, for them, cruise work fills a liminal “niche between tertiary music studies and terrestrial music industry employment.”11It should be noted, however, that their study is limited to cruise ship showbands. Showbands are small, five- to nine-piece instrumental ensembles that are tasked with supporting an itinerant cast of entertainers, who come and go amid the vessel's year-round operations. Performing everything from cabaret and musical theater revues to top-forty medleys, ballroom dance sets, and variety schtick at the discretion of their onboard supervisors, usually with little or no rehearsal time, the showband position requires a level of sight-reading and stylistic versatility attributed (but certainly not exclusive to) institutionally trained musicians. Thus, it is no coincidence that the overrepresentation of educated, western jazzmen12 in these ensembles, playing a largely mid-century American repertoire, mirrors not only the historically male-dominated world of seafaring, but the very origins of jazz education—which, as Tracy McMullen reminds us, has always been staked in the vocational training of and for white men.13 In this light, Cashman and Heyward's catchall terming of “cruisicology” elides, in favor of an Anglophone demographic, what is actually a globalized industry workforce of entertainers, cover bands, and live DJs, the majority of which are composed of musicians from the Philippines, the circum-Caribbean, and eastern Europe. While my own ethnographic work begins to mind this gap—(re)interfacing with these musicians after their livelihoods and everyday rhythms have been shattered and reassembled by the pandemic—here I close their stories off from the scope of this article. They remain in the shadows, opaque,14 as I narrow my focus on the cruise showband, articulating the connection between terrestrial jazz cultures and a small sliver of the global cruise industry.Such are the topical stakes of this story—but its method has yet to be framed. Building on McMullen's compelling interrogation of “what we [actually] teach when we teach jazz in college,” I argue that the affective linkages between schools and ships are of crucial import to critical studies of contemporary jazz practice and education, precisely because showband workers are not hired to perform the bebop and post-bop musics in which they were trained—and which university programs reify as “jazz” itself.15 Put differently, it follows that the absenting of this narrow and exclusionary canon from oceanic music scenes leaves some kind of remnant to be studied. The central impulse of my work, then, pursues these affective traces—the “lessons” of jazz—by asking how they sound and feel within a salaried, corporatized life that not only runs counter to jazz's neoliberal dialectics of freedom and precarity but is further troubled by its privileged, hypervisible position in the stratified subaltern of cruise ship labor. Questioning a particular intersection of neoliberal jazz ideologies and neocolonial16 industry practices, this impulse vibrates through an idiosyncratic archive of feeling17 that I understand to be animated by darkness.For me, darkness names a genre of dysphoric feeling located in the attachments and gaps between terrestrial and oceanic music scenes. Darkness is bounded on one side by negativity, and as such, it remains imbricated within racialized notions of light and dark that, being the epistemological legacy of Enlightenment humanism, Christian orthodoxy, and settler colonialism, undergird the systems of anti-Blackness shaping jazz's history and its ongoing struggle for justice. Yet, darkness cannot be wholly determined by a knowledge system that insists upon pathologizing skin and melanin. It's ambivalent, anxious, corruptible, unsettling, impossible. It runs through my chest. It inverts hope but moves toward liberation imperfectly, poorly. Or it fails to move. It's the night sky seen far from land, looking into its clear and unpolluted Blackness18 while sitting atop a pleasure vessel that pumps toxin, inexorably, into our oceans. It escapes my descriptors.To borrow some words, then: darkness is “multiple, situated, contested,”19 speaking to a condition of oppositionality that bends with time, memory, and power.20 Sianne Ngai's notion of “ugly feelings” helps me to understand darkness as emergent from “ambivalent situations of suspended [or obstructed] agency” that, despite the everyday blockages in which they dwell, sometimes render potent (but highly imperfect) sites of political and aesthetic mobilization.21 Consider, for instance, how Cashman—himself a former cruise worker—characterizes so-called “dark” showband musicians as harboring “feelings of general negativity, helplessness in the face of perceived harassment by onboard management and home office, and depression in the face of mediocre musical performance standards,” despite “hav[ing] comparatively good privileges” and often incurring a reputation among other crew “as lazy, unhelpful, and angry.”22 Entitlement, cynicism, hopelessness, indignation, sullenness: these feelings constitute (but could never totalize) some of the affective, embodied sites from which the everyday of cruise work-life can be built. Thus, I understand darkness as not only conditioning the cultural and musical negotiations of cruising jazz workers but texturizing how those negotiations are articulated, experienced, and perhaps recovered.23 Should we accept McMullen's charge (and I do) that academic jazz programs are complicit in the passing down of heteropatriarchy, misogyny, and white supremacy, it follows that those ideologies emerge from affective, embodied stances and repertoires that permeate but also exceed the realm of sonic practice, making it possible to trace the lessons of jazz through feelings, not activities—not realized sounds, but longings, impasses, and atmospheres. As Vilde Aaslid astutely puts it, then, darkness “resonates disturbingly”24 with the lessons of jazz. At the same time, it registers how the present is unbearable25 and moves toward change by insistently feeling those worlded particularities we are eager to abandon.More than a theoretical abstraction, though, darkness also lingers in the tonal register—the feeling—of this story. Following cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich, I use the “intentionally imprecise” keyword of feeling to circumvent hard epistemic boundaries separating affect and emotion.26 Though it is helpful to mark Deleuzian affect as a precognitive, preagentive force shaping relationality between bodies (human and nonhuman) in the present, counterposing it with emotion, a knowable subjective state emergent from that present, there is a useful messiness in feeling that bridges the embodied, the atmospheric, and the barely processed, taking on an accessible “vernacular quality that lends itself to exploring feelings as something we come to know through experience and popular usage.”27 Rather than theorizing the top-down effects of large-scale paradigms, I favor Cvetkovich's tendency to ask questions like “How does [capitalism] feel?” Such questions use subjective intensities as a launchpad for critical aesthetic experimentation.28Below, the remnants of ten contracted assignments at sea emerge from dormancy as I remember my own oscillating positionalities within the cruise world: as a conservatory-trained jazz bassist, an American national, and an ethnic Chinese man, operating (often simultaneously) as crew member, bandmate, manager, recruiter, employer, liaison, compatriot, commiserator, bystander, insider, and outsider to the dark subculture of oceanic music work. Reading and listening to an obscure series of viral, animated videos called Ship of Darkness, as well as their circulation within “Dark Showband Musicians” (henceforth DSM), an insular social media group to which I have access as a former cruise worker and booking agent, the methodological boundaries distinguishing media analysis, ethnographic interlocution, and self-inquiry become blurred. To provide narrative clarity while ensuring anonymity, I use decapitalized italics throughout to stylize posts from DSM and bold initials when referring to my fellow travelers. Within this story, I do not engage in a thesis-driven attempt to nail down what Kathleen Stewart calls the “predetermined effects of abstractable logics and structures” to better explicate jazz and tourism in terms of neoliberalism, neocolonial capitalism, white privilege, heterosexism, and toxic masculinity. While these destructive, irredeemable systems certainly permeate the worlds I remember, I invite you, reader, to instead question how an imperfectly processed “register of the lived affects” of cruise life complicates the fixity of these systems, troubling our understandings of what the “real” lessons of jazz are. It begins with a question:How do you feel? Cruising is loud, unsettling, impossible. The writer David Foster Wallace, having sampled a Celebrity Cruises vacation for Harper's, produced a response (above) that feels intolerably bright. “Trying to summon up a kind of hypnotic sensuous collage,” he invokes a barrage of excess, each associative leap tightening the noose around the garish, late-capital postmodernity of “Americans’ ultimate fantasy vacation.” Luxuriating alongside his fellow majority-white, North American guests, Wallace detects the psychoexistential underbelly of it all: the pristine, freshly painted ship celebrates the “Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea,” and its guests sunbathe atop an “enormous primordial engine of death,” scrubbed to crisp clean perfection by a multinational assemblage of workers who make their home deep in the bowels of the vessel.30 The stark lines of race, class, and nation, playing across a desolate matrix of exploitation and decadence, retrace familiar images of hedonistic white comfort served up by underpaid, overworked bodies from the global South. “With their Parasite-like layering of workers and pleasure seekers,” journalist Tim Murphy writes, cruise ships “are like massive floating models of extreme inequality, of what a society looks like when its leaders cut the ‘social’ out of the social contract.”31Murphy's mid-pandemic hit piece, “The Cruise Industry Is Donald Trump Personified: Decadent, Exploitative, and Totally Full of Shit,” found immediate resonance with DSM, an insular, 3,000-member-strong Facebook group devoted to maintaining “a place for cruise ship musicians to network, share, argue, bicker, shit stir and say stupid stuff.” The title is quickly corrected: the cruise industry is Trump boatified, one member points out. some excellent journalism, writes another. kind of scared to share it on my actual page in case this'll blacklist me for when the motherfuckers start back up. It starts in your feet.A quintessential phenomenology of cruising dwells there, in the vibrations and shudders of the vessel as mooring lines slurp back up inside and azipods activate and the whole operation leaves port, accelerating, inexorably drawn toward some other happy place.The shaking travels up through you, and with it the realization that everything on a cruise ship is bolted, buckled down to something—and, if only you were too, perhaps you'd be one with the vessel.But you're not. You're seafaring mitochondria.Guests embark, but the workers unmoor.For months after returning from my last contract, I would intermittently experience an electric jolt. A jerking kick awake, suddenly off-kilter, though I'm sitting at the kitchen table with my mother in a landlocked town. My legs are somehow back at sea. Sometimes, I'll demonstrate this phenomenon to friends to get a laugh. We might be out drinking, and I'll grip the counters of the bar comically, feet struggling to find purchase.Really, though, I'm trying to articulate that something at sea changed me. I thought it possible to explicate the dark flashes of its everyday; to convey the sense that I'm being pulled somewhere, not sailing toward a destination; to remember how “a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities.”32I have to fracture that time into a hundred pieces. P had a prodigious touch on the drums. His brushwork regularly coaxed microtimbres out of the skins and cymbals that lesser drummers might never find. His dynamic range was tremendous, ranging from a pianissimo that danced on the border of silence to a thunderous forte that commanded myself and the rest of the band to play with fire. These were press rolls that sucked up kinetic energy and exploded it back outward tenfold; shuffles that extracted whoops and hollers from the dancers; an exquisitely orchestrated bachata, mambo, son; a beat on the ride cymbal so generously wide at every tempo; every twist and turn of the chart unambiguously, yet artfully, set up; every rubato, accelerando and dramatic beat watchfully lifted, as if telepathically, from the fly-on33 performers we backed. They never needed to say or rehash anything.It was all so inspirational that I sometimes forgot we were making music on a cruise ship.Miraculously, P was also humble, even where I was unabashedly elitist. We're soundchecking a fly-on entertainer whose charts are a ruined mess. The last bassist to play the show had scribbled all over the simplistically arranged part to Rednex's “Cotton Eye Joe,” inscribing over every last quarter note: A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-D-D-D-D-E-E-E-E-A-A-A-A . . . Through the smudges of half-erased lead, a palimpsest peeks out at me: its archive tells of a thousand soundcheck purgatories, ground to a halt by some struggling musician eking their way through the music bar by bar. I show P the chart and ask him if he can believe what he's seeing. He can.The entertainer stops us mid-take. There's a sense that he's pleasantly surprised by the sounds of a functioning band. So, it's hard not to read a note of backhanded condescension as he goes down the line, asking each member of the ensemble where they went to school because this, surely, is one of the best cruise bands he's had the fortune of rehearsing. And we all play our part. Berklee. Donetsk Academy. Conservatorio Nacional Superior de Música. Indiana. Moscow Conservatory. North Texas.P straightens up a little. “Street school,”34 he tells the entertainer, with not a little pride in his voice. The above image, memed and captioned this needs to be the new banner, engendered a spate of comments in DSM: there's also the choice of not working on shipshurting for work or not, cruise ships are a wonderful source of income and inspiration. cost of seamans book, medical and used tux . . . $1000. cost of one drink in the crew bar . . . $1.50. value of getting to play your instrument for a living, travel the globe for free and make tons of new friends . . . priceless.all you f*** talking about how great it is to play your Ax at sea better have a friend snap a picture of your brains all over the cabin walls when you kill yourself after 5 years of working on those ships. there are better ways to play your instrument for a living. I'm doing it on land right now and I thank God every day for having the balls to be a man and leave the easy life of mediocrity behind to make something of myself. after you've accomplished your travel goals get out before its too late. If DSM has a textual/ideological nexus, then it's located in the underground viral animations dubbed Ship of Darkness. Composed in the early aughts by a former Carnival Cruise Line worker, and since passed reverently from hard drive to hard drive, inbox to inbox, it is, as one member argues, a cult classic: the chicken that laid the egg that this group hatched from.Its absurdist, crudely drawn take on cruise work-life, amplifying the gap between musicians’ grievances and the larger inequalities to which they bear witness, operates in DSM as a fount of obscure inside jokes, shitposts, and memes, which former and current cruise musicians use to shore up the group's edgy, politically incorrect subculture. Reveling in the pessimism, elitism, naivete, misogyny, casual racism, homophobia, toxic masculinity, and overall moral bankruptcy of its cast, Ship of Darkness configures a farcical, alienating piece of entertainment that seeks to offend.But the videos also belong to the “silly archive” of animated media, a corpus that Jack Halberstam values for its unlikely critical potential. Corrupted by the forces named above, Ship of Darkness is certainly not a text that “can make us better people or liberate us,” but it could—by animating an oceanic world too banal to contemplate soberly, too bizarre to reproduce faithfully, and too toxic to depict with verisimilitude—render “strange and anticapitalist logics of being and acting and knowing.”35The one- to two-minute episodes center Eddie, a bespectacled, trombone-wielding everyman. He's a first-time cruise worker who has taken up the job to pay off his mother's medical bills. In the first installment, Eddie enters a tiny crew cabin and meets Parker, a veteran showband saxophonist (ostensibly named after bebop innovator Charlie Parker) who asserts dominance over the cramped space, unleashing a vulgar barrage of excess: PARKER: Relax. Put your shit down. We don't work until 10:30 . . . [accelerating] OK, top bunk you, second and fourth drawers you, left side of closet you. You got the right side of the shitter counter, right side of the shower, second shelf here this part of the fridge here my VCR my Mac my beer my soap my cereal my books, my shit. First ship, right? Well, don't bother unpacking until [musical director] Dex decides not to send you home.Leaving the newcomer to process, Parker departs with a final warning: PARKER: Oh, and if I catch you whacking off in the room, you are fucking dead.As Eddie soon discovers, the Ship of Darkness showband is a hodgepodge crew, tasked with backing jaded, Lenny Bruce-wannabe comics, cheery cruise directors spouting the daily news, and pandering fly-ons. Their only moment in the spotlight comes in the form of a hilariously offbrand explosion of sound. Parodying the overblown complexity of the jazz academy, an angular fanfare—featuring MIDI keyboard timbres, planing triads, and quartal harmonies—gives way to a furiously distorted death metal breakbeat: CRUISE DIRECTOR: Well, that's all the time we have left, folks, for the Welcome Aboard show. And be sure to have a Funtastic36 week with us onboard Circus Cruise Lines, the most biggest cruise line on Earth. We're going to leave you tonight with some music by Dexter Jones and his Funtastic Circus Orchestra:The curtains close around the band. They are playing for no one. For the crew, there are no days of the week: only ports and time zones.Miami. Cape Town. Cozumel. Civitavecchia. Phuket. Philipsburg. Piraeus. Bridgetown.Depending on the company, you might stop by one of the industry's pleasure colonies.Great Stirrup Cay. CocoCay. Labadee. Half Moon.Sea days are lived slowly, in viscous spacetime.Hour forward tonight. Hour back.On an eastward-bound transatlantic crossing, it's six nights of grueling, back-to-back hour forwards37 that leave the affective matrix below deck reeling with exhaustion and frustration.In port, sometimes it all gets reset. There's a reason to get up early, charge all your devices, pack a bag, and wait for the all-clear for crew shore leave. (Guests come first.)Sometimes you're trying to find the “real” out in port.But most of the time, you're taking a break from ship air, ship water, the hard feel of ship carpet and tile underneath the feet. It starts in your feet.You're sleuthing out the best Wi-Fi connections and ordering a cocktail at eleven in the morning and refreshing the ongoing narrative of your Best Social Media Life, drawing on the empty calories of Facebook and Instagram likes. A lot of the bandwidth goes toward your people at home: partners, parents, children, friends. Sometimes you take the time to squabble, but sometimes it's gentler, too. You let them know it was just payday and that you can send them something and that everything's fine, but how are they doing? Sometimes you forget to pay off a credit card bill or a student loan installment and stay on Skype all day where the connection is good.Sunglasses and earbuds block out the bright excesses of the port: buskers, tour advertisers, hired bands, all performing a kind of enticement for the guests that encroaches on this fleeting privacy that packs of crew seek out amid busy spaces. This searching is done in factions because missing an all-aboard time, even by minutes, can mean termination. In pursuit of solitude, you hold one another accountable while chasing rapidly disintegrating port time, crammed into restaurant booths, shoulders touching, but each in their own noise-cancelled space. B sneaks a picture every time we do this ritual and tags me on social media, capturing me as I really am: tuned out, trying to be somewhere I'm not.Back on the vessel, sound is the great regulator. Port time ends with the rumble of engines; in crew quarters down toward the bottom, the sound rattles every loose screw in the built-in furniture and drowns out the television and comes at you from the floor up. On the first night of every new voyage, we play for the captain's toast.In the theater, champagne circulates among the guests. Raising a glass, the captain delivers a reassuring message, which is always the same: company to company, voyage to voyage.Our vessel is a United Nations at sea.We come from sixty-five different nations and work together as one.In fact, the real UN could learn a thing or two from us!Wherever you come from, and wherever you go, this microcosm of global peace is here for you.“The cruise lines are quick to tout their ‘floating United Nations’ as a sort of happy social experiment,” writes journalist Kristoffer A. Garin.38 But the “remarkable diversity” of seafaring crew has its history in industry efforts to hyperminoritize workers, thereby diminishing their ability to unionize and protest. Garin cites a 1981 strike on Carnival's Mardi Gras and Carnivale, led by Honduran and Jamaican crew, as an urgent rupture in “life belowdecks on the Fun Ships, with its long hours, low pay and racial slurs from the all-white officer corps, [with] a life lived in cramped quarters and at the mercy of the captain and no recourse to impartial authorities ashore.”39 The uprising failed after newly minted Carnival CEO Micky Arison sent “ex-paratrooper” mercenaries to forcibly disperse the strikers, sending them into the hands of US immigration officers to be deported. In the aftermath, Carnival mandated that no more than 15 percent of its crew aboard any ship ought to be from the same nation.A modern-day Babel. Diversity: served “judiciously mixed.”40 And so, they toast:Cheers! ¡Salud! Prost! Gān bēi!The captains with better comedic timing sometimes take a beat and add a horrible punchline—cin cin for the Eskimos!—which never fails to extract a roar of laughter from the audience.The hundreds of glasses never touch. Where I try to remember a shimmering mass of clinking sociality, there's only a silent moment as everyone sips, shoulders touching, yet alone. An uninhibited American cruiser is rapidly approaching me after one of our sets. As the rest of the band packs up, he presses a tightly folded square of money into my palm and tells me, my one hand trapped between his two, that he'd once shot boys that looked like me in Vietnam.Stunned, I watch him walk away as if the illicit exchange never happened, before unfolding the tip: a single one-dollar bill. I am unraveled. last night's guest ent[ertainer] showed up for his ray charles tribute show in black-face. what the possible actual screaming fuck The fly-on guest entertainers come in all kinds: comics, jugglers, magicians, vocal impersonators . . . F happens to be an instrumentalist, a glittery, middle-aged dad with a glittery vest and glittery electric violin. He was an accomplished jazz artist, recorded with lots of folks, and wouldn't let anyone forget it.In his eyes we were failures, terrestrial castaways that had missed their shot. He'd make it known during soundchecks, screaming at every missed repeat, stopping the whole operation to demonstrate that it goes—like—this, every stomp—of—his—foot infusing the stage with a vibrating contempt.He'd squabble with the theater and AV workers endlessly; if one technician preferred to mitigate stage noise by turning the guitar amplifiers down and to the side, like little stage monitors, F would insist on turning them up and back out. Because that's how it's done on land.That spring, we cultivated a public resentment toward F every time he stepped foot onboard for another string of shows. We seethed quietly behind him, looking away as he tossed off left-hand pizzicato. See what I did there? He seemed to be asking, shooting conspiratorial glances at his audiences. We hated the way he'd find the onboard jazz quartet and swoop in, pop-up banners, merch, and CDs in tow. Mind if I sit in? He was telling, not asking. He didn't care that hijacking their sets would tank the quartet's own CD sales—an