All That Jazz

Theodor Adorno, D. H. Lawrence, 

and Sebastian Horsley: they fucking hate jazz

 

'Jazz is the false liquidation of art [...] the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment ...' [1]  

 

 

I.

 

Sebastian Horsley famously didn't like jazz and refused to believe that other people liked it either; "once they're in Ronnie Scott's, they're asleep like everybody else" [2]. 

 

Of course, Horsley is not alone in hating jazz and certainly not the first person to express his contempt for the genre. One recalls that Adorno, for example, wrote a number of essays that expressed his negative evaluation of jazz as an art form and dismissed the claims made on its behalf by exponents and admirers. 

 

In brief, for Adorno, jazz was not only formulaic and banal, but it also lacked moral-aesthetic truth value and was essentially alienating and dehumanising (and not in a good way). Mostly, however, he despised it for being popular; a commodity born of modern mass society and the music industry. 

 

Although Adorno lived until 1969 - and despite the fact that jazz became increasingly complex and avant-garde, deviating significantly from its own origins as an upbeat genre to which the Bright Young Things of the so-called Jazz Age could dance the night away - he never revised his opinion of it.   

 

 

II. 

Another famous critic of jazz and popular modern culture in general - including the cinema and the radio - was the English writer D. H. Lawrence, who, in many ways, anticipated what Adorno would say, albeit using less openly Marxist terminology [3].

For although Lawrence was from a working-class background and frequently expressed concern with how he might appeal to as wide a readership as possible, he often used the word popular negatively to denote cultural forms that, in his view, lacked the spiritual and intellectual value that he believed genuine art possessed. 

 

As he grew older, Lawrence became increasingly critical of popular culture and the "bulk of our popular amusements" [4], including gramophone records; famously breaking one on Frieda's head in a notorious incident of domestic violence after she played it over and over, driving him into a rage with its dreary jazz trombone and crude sexual innuendo [5].

 

Does this make Lawrence and Adorno reactionary cultural elitists? Maybe. At the very least, we can agree that their views are out of tune with more informed opinion on the subject of jazz and popular culture - although Horsley would certainly have been sympathetic.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Adorno wrote that "Jazz is the false liquidation of art" in his 1967 essay 'Perennial Fashion - Jazz'. It can be found in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (Routlege, 1990).

      He described jazz as the "mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment" in his much earlier text, 'On the Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening' (1938), which can be found in his book The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Routledge, 1991).     

 

[2] For Sebastian's highly amusing take on punk, jazz, and Notting Hill contra Soho, click here.   

[3] See Gemma Moss, ‘Popular Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 145-159. 

      As Moss rightly notes, Lawrence and Adorno were both living in a period when European culture was becoming increasingly Americanised and transforming into commercial mass culture with its standardised models of entertainment generating mechanical responses in the audience. In other words, both Lawrence and Adorno believed that popular art forms - such as jazz - create a public who become used to a limited range of emotions and ideas.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 244. 

 

[5] The record - 'Empty Bed Blues (Columbia, 1928) - was by the African-American singer Bessie Smith, with Charlie Green on trombone and Porter Grainger on piano. Smith was extremely popular during the Jazz Age and is now regarded not only as one of the greatest singers of her era, but a major influence on many other blues singers and jazz vocalists. 

      For an interesting essay on Lawrence and Bessie Smith, see Fiona Becket, 'A Brand New Grind: D. H. Lawrence, Manliness and the Blues', in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies - click here to access as an online pdf. 

      Readers who wish to listen to the track can do so by clicking here.