Face of the Bass

Sorry, I thought I remembered your extremist anti-choice stance of some years ago as coming from an R.C. perspective (the same era as your support for the Iraq war). Ah, no more extremist than your anti-theism.

I was making a compressed statement about the assumptions and agendas underlying all aesthetics. Were you familiar with Baraka's work in your earlier right-wing Roman Catholic extremist incarnation, and if so, how did you view it then? I have never in my life been a "Roman Catholic extremist." Despite a childhood's worth of indoctrination, I've never been a devout Christian of any kind. I first became aware of Amiri Baraka's poetry in the 1990s, when I was studying poetry as an undergraduate at George Washington University. I was ambivalent on his work at that time. Like everybody else paying attention, I followed the 2002 controversy over Somebody Blew Up America and thought his conspiratorial musings were embarrassing, although I don't recall thinking it was anti-Semitic. Not long after that, around 2003 or so, I read Blues People and loved it, and started reading his jazz criticism. I was also vaguely familiar with the Dutchman though had not read it or seen it performed. It is only in the last year or so that I've thought about him seriously, after coming across a book of his selected poems at a used book store in Georgetown. In the last week I've read Home (the essay Cuba Libre is fantastic), and in the last two days I've started reading his autobiography. The first chapter, on his childhood, is very well written. IMO anyone who calls him a mediocre writer, regardless of their political orientation, doesn't know what the fuck they are talking about. What I most admire about Jones is that he is very mercurial...it's all out there in the public record at this point. Allen can continue posting anti-Jewish poems he wrote in the 1960s to his heart's content, but those don't necessarily describe at all where he is at now. The man has been a public intellectual for the last 50 years...his journey is far more fascinating than all the nice, refined boring poetry that usually gets championed by the literary classes.

"Another important aspect of the anti-Semite tag is my opposition to Zionism. In my view...Zionism is a form of racism. It is a political ideology that hides behind the Jewish religion and the Jewish people, while performing its negative tasks for imperialism. A favorite game of Zionists is to drop the label "anti-Semitic" on anyone who opposes Zionism or upholds the Palestinians' right of self determination....For here is a people with the murders of millions of their brothers and sisters still fresh in their memories who now function as imperialist watchdogs in the Middle East." --Amiri Baraka, in 1980, over 30 years ago.

That's good, because if you felt otherwise it might jeopardize your standing in the post-colonialist academic left. Fuck off. The next time you come up with an original thought, trying writing a post longer than one sentence.

Also, anybody who wants to figure out what's in Baraka's mercurial soul when it comes to Jews had best read his 1980 essay, "Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite."

I'm reading his autobiography right now...the first chapter is brilliant. In the spirit of some above, I say fuck anybody who says fuck him. So yeah, fuck off. My understanding is that Baraka later repudiated the anti-Semitism found in his black Nationalist period, after he became a Communist. In my book he's one of the best American writers of the last half-century, when you take in his whole output, from the Beat period to the Dutchman and the Slave to Cuba Libre and the Home essays to his autobiography and of course, his writings on jazz. Other writers could only dream of being so versatile and influential in so many areas. Also, dismissing the historical animosities that have existed between African Americans and Jews by comparing them to Nazis and Jews is repulsive. But again, that's just me, and as the spirit of this thread now says, fuck everybody who disagrees with me.

Do you consider it a good poem? Not really. It's obviously more intended as spoken word than as written literature...I think parts of it are good and parts of it are bad.

The whole poem? Or just those words? Yes, but it works both ways. Anti-Semitic people sometimes try to take cover by claiming they are only anti-Zionist, and at the same time pro-Israeli people sometimes try to paint people who have legitimate disagreements with Israeli policy (or with Zionism in general) as anti-Semites. It may be a fine line between the two that gets abused on all sides all the time, but it does exist.

I don't think Amiri Baraka is anti-Semitic. I think he's anti-Zionist and also a conspiracy nut, and in this particular case (the belief that 4,000 Israelis were told to stay home that day) those two things combined to cause him to write something very stupid.

1. Anita O'Day 2. Billie Holiday 3. Patricia Barber

Coincidentally enough, this week I've been reading a book of Baraka's essays from the 1960s, Home. The more I read of his work the more I like him. What I like is that he's rough around the edges, somewhat unpredictable, with an amazing grasp for language but always a little bit off from what you might expect. Some of the essays are forgettable but a few of them burn with a ferocity that is rarely found in American literature. I also love the way he tears into the black middle classes and other black writers of that time, especially James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. I also don't really have any problem with "Somebody Blew Up America." I think the charges of anti-Semitism are vastly overstated. I think he's incorrect to dabble in 9/11 conspiracy theories but that doesn't bother me so much. Most of the stuff chronicled in the Controversies section of his Wikipedia page strikes me as much ado about not very much. But that's just me.

I just want all that research and passion that he put into the topic to come through more clearly in his writing, which is why I wish he had allowed for greater editorial intervention. I get that he has strong opinions on his writing, but as a writer and editor myself I find myself trying to "clean up" parts of the book as I'm reading it, which makes it more difficult for me to really immerse myself in the writing.

Here is a video of Baraka reading the infamous "Somebody Blew Up America" with Rob Brown on saxophone.

From what I've read so far it has the makings of a very good biography. I just wish it had had more editorial intervention to cut out the neologisms and some of the extraneous material that gets in the way of the flow of the narrative. But the research is top notch and much of the writing is very good.

Exactly, saying Euram and Afram doesn't change anything...it's just putting different labels on the exact same categories. It does nothing to challenge the categories themselves.

So does that mean that, for instance, when describing the Khoikhoi people of Southern Africa we should call them "Hottentots" when referring to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries? Language is about power, most precisely the power to define. If we were to follow your proposed rule then we would have to define subjugated peoples by the words picked by the people that were oppressing them.

The refusal of the university press he had a contract with to accept those coinages was among the chief reasons he left them and decided to publish to book himself. Pullman would say (indeed, IIRC, has said) that his desire to change common usage (or at least make it clear where he himself stands politically on this topic) was essential to the whole project. He does, after all, again IIRC, see prevailing racial assumptions-attitudes, etc. impinging directly and perniciously on Powell's life throughout, and no doubt feels that it would be morally wrong for him to step back from the present-day consequences-implications of that view, as though that socio-political "story" effectively ended with Powell's death. Rather, he wants to make those connections to the present unavoidable. Yeah, that was a disastrous error, I'd say. When reading, all the use of afram or euram does is require me to make the necessary substitution. It's a bit like saying "the n-word" instead of "nigger," as Louis C.K. has pointed out in a brilliant sketch.

His racialist views are part of what makes him a great writer.

Baraka is one of my favorite writers. The fact that he and I disagree on some aspects of music doesn't impact that at all. If I wanted someone who always agreed with me, I'd just dictate my opinions into a tape recorder and then play it back while driving.

Why do people consider this to be one of Mosaic's best sets? Isn't most of this music available elsewhere? My problem is that I've come to learn that I'm just not a big Count Basie fan. I tried to be, but I'm just not. And that's the way it is. Oh well.

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Man, if only people would get this worked up about things that actually matter in this world. What a difference it would make.

Not necessarily.

That would disqualify pretty much every kind of African American music there is, including hip hop, funk, soul jazz, free jazz and on and on and on.

Sure it does. In 1963, Cecil & Ornette had already been around long enough to have made an impact past being "novelties", Albert Ayler's name was beginning to get out there (and his music heard a little), Trane & Elvin were really beginning to get in gear, lots of things that had been fermenting were starting to come to the surface, none of which had too much to do with putting on a suit & tie, running the changes with a "bluesy" virtuosity, and saying "We sincerely hope you do enjoy". And that's just in the music... You gotta remember, Baraka was a "radical", musically and socially. His patience for the status quo was next to nil, and having real, viable options at hand just made it more so. No, I don't think the timing explains it. Sorry. If Blues People had been written in 1959 I think he would have been just as dismissive of the genre. Even before the free jazz era, Baraka was looking for musical rebels, and the hard boppers definitely weren't that. Sorry, but read his 1959 essay about his homeboy Wayne Shorter in Black Music. or, in the same book, his near-ecstatic review of the Monk/Rouse/Warren/Dunlop group. For that matter, read the book in chronological, rather than as-published, order. From 1959 to 1967, the "militancy" makes almost exponential leaps, as it did in the real world. Now, you can say that neither Monk nor Shorter were ever typical "hard bop", and that is correct. But that also goes to the point that Jones' discomfort was not so much with the music of Hard Bop as it was the relative lack of truly original thinking in most of that music, not the basic stylistic elements of it. And that lack was much more glaring in 1963 than it was in 1959. The jazz "landscape" in 1963 was quite different than it was in 1959. Hell, in 1959, Cecil was still playing "tunes" for the most part, Ornette had just come to New York, and Trane had just begun to look at modal playing (and that thanks to Miles - Trane was still very much into changes and all their permutations). If you were going to look for "rebels" in the jazz world of 1959, it would have been in the general milieu of Hard Bop (or else in a few other places that were not relevant to LeRoi Jones' world). Where else and what else where the hip players playing? But in 1963...whole 'nother world. Fundamentally, profoundly different. And truthfully, I don't even know if LeRoi Jones even writes Blues People in 1959. I don't know if his mind is even in that place yet. Think about that! I think the ideas for Blues People had been percolating for him for some time. And his earlier championing of Monk certainly says nothing about hard bop, because Monk is not hard bop, never was hard bop, and if anything probably has more in common with Cecil than with most hard bop pianists. I mean, if we are talking about hard bop, then the big names in the late 1950s are Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Jimmy Smith, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and so forth. Not Monk. Not Shorter. There's no denying that Baraka's politics changed in the early 1960s (and changed radically) from affiliation with the Beats to an emerging Black Nationalism, but that journey is not one away from hard bop, because it was never associated with hard bop to begin with. Oh, I don't think anyone's questioning the wisdom of reading what he has to say. I'd merely suggest that he has very, very 'strong opinions' (it's a long time since I read the book so I'm working off vague memory). And, in my experience, people who promote one cause by denigrating another tend to be working from an ideology which they then make the facts fit. Given the turbulent times he was living in, that's hardly unexpected. We don't live in those times (though many of the issues remain unresolved) and can thus be a bit more detached about things he felt the need to man the barricades over. It's just a case of reading the past with caution and an awareness of wider context. I respect Richard Wagner intellectually - doesn't mean I accept a lot of what he argued in his polemics. The other thing to remember about Baraka is that he was very mercurial at times. Something he might denounce one day he might feel differently about another day. He's a very restless writer (which is part of what makes him a great writer, I think), but it also means that the statements he makes one year he might refute a few years later. Just something to keep in mind. It would be interesting to know what Baraka thinks about hard bop today.