Hipster Cull

There are certain kinds of human activiy, such as a facility for lightening calculation, which are very unevenly distributed by nature: to all intents and purposes either you have them or you have not.  But the gift of expressing oneself through music is not among these.  As Johnny St Cyr said: 'You see, the average working man is very musical.'  Naturally the gap between the best jazz musicians and the worst is immense, and there are very few of the best; but until it was turned into a self-conscious art-music which requires preliminary expertise, jazz was better suited than any other twentieth-century art to give artistic expression to the ordinary man, and especially (in the blues) the ordinary woman.  Everyone has something to say, as the makers of films with non-professional actors discovered.  Jazz, which grew up by completely adapting its technique to what ordinary people had to say, even to the point of allowing musical illiterates and those with a rather poor technique to make valid artistic creations required less preliminary selection among its musicians than any other art...


The jazz musician was therefore, and still is to a large extent, nearer to the ordinary randomly chosen citizen than most other potential artists than any other art in our century; in extreme cases, such as New Orleans, on virtually the whole of the population...The frontiers of jazz have been open towards the world of the non-musician.  This has been one of the causes of its strength and vigour.  If it becomes increasingly like the other orthodox arts it is likely that these frontiers will be closed, their passage being allowed only to selected entrants.  If this happens, the character of jazz will change fundamentally, though one would not like to guess in what way

Eric Hobsbawm, The Jazz Scene 192-193

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How is everyone else digging "self conscious art music?"

Anyone out there trying to forget the I?  Anyone feeling anti-art feelings in their crazy experimental freedom?  Maybe anti-cultural is a better word...

Is "This Music"--"Crazy Experimental Freedom" as it were--a home for the "musically illiterate" and "those with a rather poor technique?"  Can one regularly and diligently play music for 20 years and still be "musically illiterate?"  How about of "a rather poor technique?"

Has our beloved improvised music become like the other orthodox arts with "passage allowed to selected entrants?" It's a pity Hobsbawm doesn't more clearly annunciate into what the "selected" are entering.  The middle class?  The Conan O'Brien band?

It's an odd balance--the ol' antagonism of performance art poseurs (musically illiterate, no facility on the instrument, no interest in getting any in the loosest conservatory sense of the word) and corporate boppers (masters degrees, hyper virtuosity, financially rewarded by the cultural machinery.)

Since Hobsbawm wrote this, it seems as if corporate boppers and performance art poseurs have united into a single entity in an effort to increase efficiencies in their gate keeping efforts--just as non-musician run and operated music recording, publishing and distribution companies tend to snowball into gigantic lumps of aesthetic uselessness in the name of increased revenue for a disproportionate few--and to great effect.

It could very well be that Zef has supplanted jazz as a music for the people.  I recently learned of Die Antwoord via Unshimi Wam.  Finding this (the video above) followed not long after.  As super extra ordinary as Ninja and YoLandi are, they are ordinary people, making valid artistic creations of exceptional strength and vigor--check those Dark Side of the Moon shorts!

Is the same true for Jazz?