Why does LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) hate Hard bop?

[Face of the Bass]

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."

[Pete C]

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.

That's good, because if you felt otherwise it might jeopardize your standing in the post-colonialist academic left.

[Face of the Bass]

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.

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.

[AllenLowe]

I would say, given his 9/11 poem, that he never really abandoned his anti-semitism. And it is appropriate to raise the specter of the Nazis in any instance of anti-semitism; the poem that Joel Fass mentioned earlier was read by Leslie Campbell during the Oceanhill Brownsville fight, and basically expressed viciously anti-semitic sentiments.

Anti-semitism is just too easy for anyone who thinks, it's ok, we can forgive a little if the big picture is more acceptable. This is crap. We don't accept small bits of racism, or Rush Limbaugh's hate speech toward women,

In this context check out the interview that Ishmael Reed did with Ralph Ellison years ago, Reed keeps trying to get Ellison to say that there's some fundamental peculiarities with the Jews, and Ellison won't bite. He knows that ignorance is ignorance.

These are the kind of things, btw, that have made it so difficult to debate about Israel; so much indigenous dislike of Jews regularly seeps in and contaminates the debate.

Edited March 4, 2012 by AllenLowe

[Face of the Bass]

"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.

[AllenLowe]

Zionism is a movement of National Liberation. But you can pick your own allies.

And here's that little poem I mentioned earlier:

Hey Jew boy with that yamaka on your head

You pale faced Jew boy I wish you were dead . . .

Jew boy you took my religion and adopted it for you

But you know that black people were the original hebrews

When the UN made Israel a free, independent state

Little four and five-year-old boys threw had grenades

They hated the black Arabs with all their might

And you, Jew boy, said it was alright

And then you came to America the land of the free

Took over the school system to perpetuate white supremacy

Cause you know, Jew boy, there's only one reason you made it

You had a clean white face colorless and faded.

Edited March 4, 2012 by AllenLowe

[Larry Kart]

I'm really surprised that none of Jones' more passionate detractors have accused being to "radical poetry" what Hard Bop was to jazz...

Not sure if the first "casualty of war" is truth or humor...

Is there a word or two missing in your first sentence above? I can't quite make out what you mean (clearly it's about Jones' relation to "radical poetry," but what?) and think I might have something to say on the subject. Seriously. I was pretty much immersed in that particular world at that time and have tried to keep up.

[JSngry]

Yes - it should have read I'm really surprised that none of Jones' more passionate detractors have accused him of being to "radical poetry" what Hard Bop was to jazz...that is to say, an initially bracing "call home" only to devolve into simplistic ideological pandering. I know it's not all that linear, but the notion that Baraka = Hard Bop would be a wickedly funny one for somebody so inclined.

[Pete C]

Fuck off. The next time you come up with an original thought, trying writing a post longer than one sentence.

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?

[JSngry]

3) Jim, I think you are getting bogged down in relativist thinking. It's like saying, well, the Nazis and the Jews didn't get along either.....

I really don't see any possible way that Black America will become The New Nazis. Ever. Not even with a secretly-Muslim black president!

Until that comes to the table as an even remotely viable possibility, I say let's keep it in the ballpark as to how to react to it. There will always be hateful & hurtful language used to express feelings of frustrations and resentments. Sometimes it will be calculated rhetoric, sometimes frenzied rant, sometimes a cry of pain, and sometimes some dumbass talking some ignorant idiocy. Bringing out the Silencers to censure the language does nothing to further the dialogue about why this would be happening, and denies the opportunity to distinguish between disingenuous manipulation, misdirection of legitimate frustration, out and out vile gutter-hate, and, oh by the way, possible self-examination as to why these motherfuckers be so damn ANGRY all the time.

I don't care who you are, no matter where you go, there's going to be somebody who'd rather you not be there (I was adopted at the age of 4 days, so I guess that notion has been with me pretty much all my life at some level), and reflexively shutting them up (or trying to) won't change anything. Nor will "circling the wagons" with your "tribe" especially when your "tribe" contains about as many people with whom you'd just as soon keep away from as not (another less I learned from being adopted).

The only true freedom is Inner Freedom, and like I suggested earlier (and as a result was told to get fucked...gee, that doesn't exactly dispel the paranoia about there being Silencers in the shadows, does it?) the path to Inner Freedom might not always be peaceful or quiet.

Edited March 4, 2012 by JSngry

[JSngry]

Add -lest there be any suspicion amongst any potential Silencers, I in no way meant "tribe" above to be Jewish-specific. We all have our "tribes". Lord knows I've had mine...

[Larry Kart]

Yes - it should have read I'm really surprised that none of Jones' more passionate detractors have accused him of being to "radical poetry" what Hard Bop was to jazz...that is to say, an initially bracing "call home" only to devolve into simplistic ideological pandering. I know it's not all that linear, but the notion that Baraka = Hard Bop would be a wickedly funny one for somebody so inclined.

Thanks, Jim. Actually, I would read it only half that way, the second half (but with some trimmings to take account of Baraka's twists and turns as he moved from one ideology to another). Basically, in Jones' first incarnation as a poet (more or less), I think of him (and thought of him at the time) as being roughly parallel to a valuable, individual second-wave figure of the nascent jazz avant garde -- say, a Marion Brown (if in fact Brown was in the second wave of the avant garde chronologically and in terms of influence; if Brown doesn't fit, there are others who would). That is, Jones the poet was significantly beholden to the so-called Black Mountain poets (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, etc.) and their generally somewhat younger (but still older than Jones) New York-area offshoots -- Joel Oppenheimer, Gilbert Sorrentino -- plus, of course, Jones' friend, the marvelous Frank O'Hara.

If so, then his eventual shift to the sort of self-conciously jingle-jangle poem and/or voice that Allen Lowe quoted from above ("Hey Jew boy with that yamaka on your head/ You pale faced Jew boy I wish you were dead"), and the other different, deliberately "artless" manners (that is, manners that would proclaim to his audiences that Jones was now not into being artful in ways that implicitly separated him from his community as he perceived it) would be as though Marion Brown eventually and self-consciously began to play like a latter-day Earl Bostic (actually, I like a fair amount of Bostic) and walk the bar like Big Jay McNeely. Of course, IIRC, Jones in his writings about music eventually did take just that stance toward the jazz avant garde, saying that it had broken faith with the "street," that is with "The People" and their needs -- this a la the Socialist Realism reaction to the Soviet artistic avant garde in the late '20s and early '30s in Russia, a chunk of history with which Jones was quite familiar.

[Pete C]

We all have our "tribes".

Unfortunately.

the sort of self-conciously jingle-jangle poem and/or voice that Allen Lowe quoted from above ("Hey Jew boy with that yamaka on your head/ You pale faced Jew boy I wish you were dead"),

Is that a Baraka poem or is it the poem by a young African American girl that the Julius Lester uproar was about?

[AllenLowe]

that was a poem by a young African American kid that Leslie Campbell read on WBAI during the Oceanhill Brownsville dispute. And in fairness I should add, bad as that poem was, the American Federation of Teachers under Albert Shanker did its best to fan the flames; Nat Hentoff did some amazing journalism during that controversy and discovered that the teachers union did some falsification, as in counterfeit leaflets that they claimed were done by the Black opposition, and which were completely fake.

and btw, any thread that has two of my favorite poets in it, Frank Ohara and Charles Olson, can't be all bad.

Edited March 4, 2012 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

Yes - it should have read I'm really surprised that none of Jones' more passionate detractors have accused him of being to "radical poetry" what Hard Bop was to jazz...that is to say, an initially bracing "call home" only to devolve into simplistic ideological pandering. I know it's not all that linear, but the notion that Baraka = Hard Bop would be a wickedly funny one for somebody so inclined.

Thanks, Jim. Actually, I would read it only half that way, the second half (but with some trimmings to take account of Baraka's twists and turns as he moved from one ideology to another). Basically, in Jones' first incarnation as a poet (more or less), I think of him (and thought of him at the time) as being roughly parallel to a valuable, individual second-wave figure of the nascent jazz avant garde -- say, a Marion Brown (if in fact Brown was in the second wave of the avant garde chronologically and in terms of influence; if Brown doesn't fit, there are others who would). That is, Jones the poet was significantly beholden to the so-called Black Mountain poets (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, etc.) and their generally somewhat younger (but still older than Jones) New York-area offshoots -- Joel Oppenheimer, Gilbert Sorrentino -- plus, of course, Jones' friend, the marvelous Frank O'Hara.

If so, then his eventual shift to the sort of self-conciously jingle-jangle poem and/or voice that Allen Lowe quoted from above ("Hey Jew boy with that yamaka on your head/ You pale faced Jew boy I wish you were dead"), and the other different, deliberately "artless" manners (that is, manners that would proclaim to his audiences that Jones was now not into being artful in ways that implicitly separated him from his community as he perceived it) would be as though Marion Brown eventually and self-consciously began to play like a latter-day Earl Bostic (actually, I like a fair amount of Bostic) and walk the bar like Big Jay McNeely. Of course, IIRC, Jones in his writings about music eventually did take just that stance toward the jazz avant garde, saying that it had broken faith with the "street," that is with "The People" and their needs -- this a la the Socialist Realism reaction to the Soviet artistic avant garde in the late '20s and early '30s in Russia, a chunk of history with which Jones was quite familiar.

Makes sense to me. I was just looking for an humorous/ironic way to posit Barka as Hard Bop, given the original subject matter of the thread.

And...Marion Brown turning into Earl Bostic...geez, that would be the REAL New Hard Bop!

[Larry Kart]

Speaking of the evolution of Jones/Baraka, I should quote the first stanza of the poem I quoted from before, "For Ted Postell, Dead Black Poet":

You told, you told me

a thousand years ago. And the white man thing

you screamed on me, all true, and the walk

across from dead Trujillo, who grinned at us

into yr dead room. Only the wine bottles lived

and sparkled and sailed easily for completion. You

screamed and slobbered on me, to hear you. And I

didn't. Shacked up with a fat jew girl. Talking about

Shakespeare, I didn't hear

you brother. Pussy Eater, you said, and another nigger

said the same, and the blood flowed down my face, and Lear

laughed at his new fool. I wallowed in your intestines,

brother, stole, and changed, your poems. And rode was rode

by the cows and intelligent snakes of the age. While they

killed you, while they ran you down third avenue, "talking

through your mouth." And I didn't understand. You had your hand

clapped tightly on your lips. Your eyes rolled rolled up

Sanpaku dying. "The jews are talking

through my mouth." And I was horrified so niggerish and

unheroic was your death. And jews talked through my mouth,

and I used your wine fume soul. I laughed among the beasts

and meateaters. I strode with them, played with them, thought myself

one with them, and jews were talking through

my mouth. I had not the sense to stop them.

A thousand years ago you told me. Horrified beyond breathing. Stiff

with terror at the kikish evil pulling at your lips. I should have screamed

for you. brother. I should have climbed to the tops of the buildings and

screamed and dropped niggerbombs on their heads. For my dead. For my

dead brother. Who told me. A thousand years ago.

Very much a cry from the heart for the most part, and IMO all the better as a poem and as a human statement for that. But the way the "jews" enter into (even bodily invade) things here -- "And jews talked through my mouth," this coupled with Jones' own equivocal relationship with Postell ("I stole, and changed, your poems"), plus Postell's disparagement of Jones as a Pussy Eater (and of "a fat jew girl" to boot, and one who also might have been menstruating at the time ("and the blood flowed down my face) -- paints a not unfamiliar picture of the Jews as intimate invader-corruptor, and/or as an invader-corruptor through intimacy. Can't let them get too close to you. In that vein (so to speak), see Ezra Pound's reference in one of the Cantos to the alleged and quite alarmingly invasive "intra-vaginal warmth" of the Jewish family.

[Larry Kart]

Sorry -- I got the provenance of that poem Allen quoted wrong. But Baraka did eventually write a good many poems that IMO were self-consciously "artless" and would-be "street" in tone of voice.

[JSngry]

The "Pussy Eater" thing...you do know that that's got nothing at all to do with Jews, don't you, not in and of itself. The appropriateness of cunnilingus was the subject of some of the more prolonged (and at times unintentionally hilarious) debates I ever had back in the day, when my jazz was going in search of itself. Termites!

The rest of it, yeah, there's issues there, to be sure. But substitute "jews" with "white" and you've got any number of variants on various rants (poetic and otherwise), I've heard over the years from local-ish Southern Black Poets, for whom having any sort of "Jewish Power Structure" to confront was not as much a reality as it would have been for Barka at that time & place. Landlords, academics, intellectuals, literati, etc.

All of which is just to say that the gut instinct is to take it at least somewhat personally. I mean, how can you not?

I don't know that the gut instinct always produces the most constructive ultimate outcome, though.

It's like wanting to get off the merry-go-round but never getting off the damn horse.

Edited March 4, 2012 by JSngry

[Pete C]

A few years ago at the Chicago Jazz Festival Baraka and his wife went to sit in the VIP section. A security guard, a young African American woman, went to check their credentials, which they didn't have, and told them they couldn't sit there. Howard Mandel, who was nearby, went over to her and lectured her about who Baraka was, how important he was to her people, and that she should know her history and show him respect. She wasn't impressed, and got her supervisor. Ultimately they were allowed to stay in the VIP section. Still, I found it amusing watching this white guy lecturing this black woman on what history she should know, not to mention the assumption that by dint of who he was he was automatically entitled to preferred seating (though I'm sure he would have gotten the credentials if he had asked).

[Pete C]

When one is finished with examples of Baraka's antisemitism, one can move on to his sexism...

[JSngry]

Why stop at Baraka?

[AllenLowe]

well, ironically or not, I had one conversation with Baraka - years ago he did the liner notes to Bob Neloms LP Pretty Music. Baraka called me for some info on Bob. He was very cordial, but I was, I will admit, taken aback at how little history he knew relative to some of the things we were discussing (older pianists like Nat Cole, Errol Garner, etc).

[Pete C]

Why stop at Baraka?

We shouldn't, but in this thread he deserves our undivided attention.

[Shawn]

I gotta say, the more snippets of his writing I see the less I like him.

[JSngry]

Hmmm...doesn't seem like hashing/rehashing all this out is the best use of my undivided attention...there's no sex to be had, no music to be made, nor good food to be eaten.