There are so many moving parts in this prompt, let\u2019s start with love.<\/p>\n
As a working definition of this term and to elaborate on my (eventually explained) opinion, in order to truly love someone or something, you must also give them their deserved respect and celebrate all parts of them. Their flaws, their successes, their weaknesses and strengths – you must truly cherish their femes and forms from A to Z to definitively love someone or something. That\u2019s simply the nature of love – it is all encompassing and earnest from top to bottom.<\/p>\n
As a whole, Parisians in the 1920s did not have an ounce of love for Black artists. They were, however, entirely obsessed with their culture.<\/p>\n
We see this in history and in the music that was made. Let\u2019s take into consideration some of the facts of the time; that Africa was genuinely referred to as \u201cthe Dark Continent\u201d, or that people were stopped from playing Jazz too quickly, deeming it a \u201cpublic disturbance\u201d. We can also shift our gaze to the scores and librettos of several composers, where Darius Milhaud composed the infamous La Cr\u00e9ation du monde, a piece with insultingly simplistic rhythms and harmonies meant to jab at African culture. Or consider Poulenc\u2019s Rhapsodie N\u00e8gre, with a blatantly racist text \u201cwritten\u201d by the \u201cesteemed author\u201d Makoko Kangorourou – or at least that is Poulenc\u2019s story on how he obtained the \u201cbook of poetry\u201d.
\nIs this respectful? Is this a celebration? Absolutely not. This is diminutive and racist – a product of Parisian artists finding themselves obsessing over a \u201cnew\u201d and \u201cexotic\u201d culture from which they can extract what they will, parodize how they want, and claim everything was of their own creation. This is not love, this is a perturbed infatuation. Simply put.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for us – people today have yet to drop this habit. We as a society still take hold of items from other cultures and pervert them to our own liking, claiming that we are fans when in reality we are just consumers of media. Korean Pop, Anime, Gospels and Spirituals, Cultural Tattoos, Food and Drink; all things from an endless list that we have commodified and bastardized for our own consumerist desires.
\nWe are down a dangerous rabbit hole, but there are ways to climb out. Actually love people like we say we do – engage with their culture, learn their traditions, lean in with respect and actively celebrate their history and beauty. Leave no tolerance for hatred and make steps for systemic change.<\/p>\n
At the very least, stop pretending to be in love when you\u2019re not. It\u2019s ok just to have a crush.<\/p>\n
Works Cited;
\nBernard Gendron, \u201cNegrophilia,\u201d in Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 103-116.
\nJeffrey Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 71-103.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are so many moving parts in this prompt, let\u2019s start with love. As a working definition of this term and to elaborate on my (eventually explained) opinion, in order to truly love someone or something, you must also give them their deserved respect and celebrate all parts of them. Their flaws, their successes, their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1497"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1501,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1497\/revisions\/1501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}