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Monday, May 11, 2015

Auto-Compliment via Charlie Gillett:

‘R & B Cults’ and the 

Transformative Role of Indie Snobbery.

“At first the number of white people interested in this music was not enough to have much effect on the sales of popular music. This portion of the audience probably consisted at first of college and a few high school students who cultivated an ‘R & B cult’ as most of their equivalents earlier (and even then) cultivated a jazz cult.

By a happy coincidence we happen to have some observations of remarkable insight made by the sociologist David Riesman on the popular music audience of this period, which illustrate the character of the specialist audience. In an article, ‘Listening to Popular Music’, Riesman noted that two groups could be identified: the majority audience, which accepted the range of choices offered by the music industry and made its selections from this range without considering anything outside it; and the minority audience, which he described with details which are relevant here.

‘The minority group is small. It comprises the more active listeners, who are less interested in melody or tone than in arrangement or technical virtuosity. It has developed elaborate, even overelaborate, standards of music listening; hence its music listening is combined with much animated discussion of technical points and perhaps occasional references to trade journals such as ‘Metronome’ and ‘Downbeat’. The group tends to dislike name bands, most vocalists (except Negro blues singers) and radio commercials.

The rebelliousness of this minority group might be indicated in some of the following attitudes toward popular music: an insistence on rigorous standards of judgement and taste in a relativist culture,; a preference for the uncommercialized, unadvertised small bands rather than name bands; the development of a private language and then a flight from it when the private language (the same is true of other aspects of private style) is taken over by the majority group; a profound resentment of the commercialization of radio and musicians. Dissident attitudes toward competition and cooperation in our culture might be represented in feelings about improvisation and small ‘combos’; an appreciation for idiosyncrasy of performance goes together with a dislike of ‘star’ performers and an insistence that the improvisation be a group-generated phenomenon.

There are still other ways in which the minority may use popular music to polarize itself from the majority group, and thereby from American popular culture generally: a sympathetic attitude or even preference for Negro musicians; an equalitarian attitude toward the roles, in both love and work, of the two sexes; a more international outlook, with or without awareness, for example, of French interest in American jazz; an identification with disadvantaged groups, not only Negroes, from which jazz springs, with or without a romantic cult of proletarianism; a dislike of romantic pseudo-sexuality in music, even without any articulate awareness of being exploited; similarly a reaction against the stylized body image and limitations of physical self-expression which ‘sweet’ music and its lyrics are felt as conveying; a feeling that music is too important to serve as a backdrop for dancing, small talk, studying, and the like; a diffuse resentment of the image of the teenager presented by the mass media.’

[…]

Riesman’s observation that no matter what the majority chooses, there will be a minority choosing something different explains how popular music continues to change, no matter how good – or bad – the dominant types of music are at any particular period. And because the minority audience defines itself as being radical within the music audience, its taste is likely to favor, consciously or unconsciously, music with some element of social comment or criticism in it.

During the early fifties, young people like those described by Riesman turned in increasing numbers to rhythm and blues music, and to radio stations that broadcast it. If the first listeners were those with relatively sophisticated standards for judging music, those that came later included many whose taste was more instinctive, who liked the dance beat or the thrilling effect of a hard-blown saxophone, people who may have found the rough voices of the singers a bit quaint and appealing as novelties.

It was this second group of listeners who provided the inspiration and audience for Alan Freed, who , with Bill Haley, played a crucial role in popularizing rhythm and blues under the name ‘rock n’ roll’.”

- Charlie Gillett, ‘The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock ‘n Roll’ (Dell, 1972), pp. 19 – 21


Serving Suggestions:

John Lee Hooker – This Is Hip
Frankie Lee Sims – She Likes To Boogie Real Low
TV Slim – Flat Foot Sam
Guitar Junior – Roll Roll Roll
Icky Renrut – The Rooster
Bunker Hill – The Girl Can't Dance

Labels: auto-critique, books, Charlie Gillett, R & B Cults

Posted by: Ben / 10:41 PM