Baraka's bohemian blues

African American Review, Summer-Fall, 2003 by John Gennari

Baraka was developing this new black critical voice for the new black music while still immersed in a white-dominated jazz writer's milieu. Years later, Baraka would underline his disgust with the reactionary racial politics of the Reagan era by looking back fondly on his jazz writing experience in the late 1950s/early 1960s:

   Many of the white critics of the period,
   like Martin Williams, Larry Gushee,
   Frank Kofsky, Nat Hentoff, Frank
   Driggs, Ross Russell, were ready and
   able to go beyond surface interviews,
   gee-whiz-ism, and commercial puff
   pieces, to deal with intriguing aspects
   of the music technically, historically,
   aesthetically, and socially. The Jazz
   Review had a great deal of input from
   the musicians themselves. Metronome
   took up some of the burning social
   questions related to the music and its
   principal players. And there were
   quite a few black writers who left their
   mark on the development of an all-around
   American critical standard,
   such as Larry Neal, A. B. Spellman,
   James T. Stewart, and, a little later, Ron
   Welburn and Holly West. (Amiri and
   Amina Baraka, The Music 259)

That Baraka would continue to praise certain white critics even after his turn to black cultural nationalism must be borne in mind when considering Baraka's 1963 Down Beat essay "Jazz and the White Critic." Often read retrospectively as a proto-nationalist call for racial exclusion, the essay in it own time was instead a challenge to jazz writers of all backgrounds to reckon with the lived experience of black Americans and to consider how this experience had been embedded in the notes, tones, and rhythms of the music. Identifying class privilege as the key stumbling block, Baraka dissected the middlebrow attitudes he thought had prevented the white jazz writers the 1930s and '40s from understanding the fundamental emotional and psychological motivations of the black jazz musician.

By the time he published Blues People in 1963, Baraka's work had come to embody a racialized version of existential hip. In this book, Baraka's recuperation of African culture as the core of African American identity was a brief for racial solidarity that anticipated the black nationalist agenda. But it was also a modernist gesture redolent of the mass-culture critique formulate by 1950s' left intellectuals. In popular works like David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, and Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuader, (1957), and in influential little magazine fare like the Partisan Review's 195 symposium "Our Country and Our Culture," Dwight McDonald's "Masscult & Midcult," and Norman Mailer's "The White Negro," leading social critics anguished over soul-deadening conformity, mindless materialism, and cultural sterility in postwar America. It seemed to these critics that America's triumph in World War II and emergence as a military and economic superpower had delivered nothing better than prefabricated ranch houses, packaged food, tailfins, specious advertising, and lifeless corporate bureaucracies. Baraka's voracious reading in the 1950s--he admits to stealing books from the Partisan Review offices when Hettie worked there--exposed him to these laments. Writing in 1959 of Ellison's Invisible Man, Baraka suggested that, while the book superficially addressed a "Negro theme," it was actually more concerned with the "horrifying portrait of a man faced with the loss of his identity through the weird swinishness of American society." Blues People, a racially inflected modern American jeremiad, abounds in references to "vague, featureless Americans," "the sinister vapidity of American culture," and the "shoddy cornucopia of popular American culture." In an echoing of Mailer's "The White Negro"--but without that essay's stereotyped equation of black culture with lack of inhibition and sexual prowess--Baraka insisted in Blues People that "Negroness ... is the only strength left to American culture." (3)